Hannah Lawrence talks to Hackney author Iain Sinclair about his 15-hour walk of the London Overground, which will form part of a film to be shown this summer at the East End Film Festival.
Walking the length of Hackney to get to Iain Sinclair’s house, a few streets down from Haggerston station, seems a fitting way to prepare for a meeting with an author for whom walking is not only a central part of his life but also of his writing.
Now, nine months after the release of his latest book London Overground, Sinclair is repeating the chronicled walk of the Overground network as a documentary alongside filmmaker friend Andrew Kötting, filmed by John Rodgers.
Walk with Iain Sinclair
The journey will form part of a film which will be shown at the East End Film Festival this summer, taking the pair on a 15-hour walk starting and ending at Haggerston station, over the Thames to Surrey Quays and Shepherd’s Bush.
Reclining on a wicker sofa in his Victorian terraced house, Sinclair tells me that the making of Rogers’ film wasn’t the primary reason to return to the route. There were several reasons that he and Kötting wanted to reenact the walk months after his book was released.
Kötting had the most dramatic reason for wanting to return. After the initial walk, on his journey back home to Hastings, he was knocked off his motorbike on Old Kent Road.
As he skidded off his mirror jarred into his leg and fell to the floor haemorrhaging blood. He lost his memory for three days.
He was taken into one of the hospitals that they had passed on the walk.
Sinclair explains that the second walk was a cathartic opportunity for Kötting to bookend his memory of the crash which began, and has now ended with, the two walks.
“Enough time had passed that he wanted an experience that would exorcise the horrors of this crash that happened at the end of the first walk that became the book.”
Symbolic strolls in prose and film
For Sinclair, the second walk was also symbolic, allowing him to put his previous novel behind him after an exhausting round of publicity events, and to start focusing on upcoming projects, namely his new work The Last London.
“Having done lots of events around the book, I was quite keen to put the project to bed by making one more circuit round, but this time in the opposite direction and at night, because neither of us had ever done a serious lengthy walk by night.”
Describing the walk Sinclair is suitably poetic: “It felt like the whole of London was a dream,” he tells me. “There’s nothing at all for great long stretches, you’re just in the dark the city’s sleeping around you.”
The hospital where Kötting was treated after his accident provided the most symbolic moment of the walk.
“The most amazing thing was that just as it was beginning to get light – at dawn – we arrived at the hospital he’d been taken to, in Denmark Hill, we went in one side into in the dark and through all the corridors and emerged the other side and dawn was just breaking.
“It was like going from night to day in passing through this hospital, and that for Andrew was like ‘ah I’ve done that experience now’ and I felt ‘okay I’ve also done this experience because I’m now moving onto a new project.’”
He eases into his chair as we begin discussing the London housing crisis and how Hackney has changed over the years.
Having lived in this house since 1968, Sinclair obviously has deep roots in Hackney, despite his Welsh upbringing.
He tells me that when he bought the house it was worth £3,000 and there were two families living in it, washing in a tin bath. “It still felt like you were emerging from a black-and-white movie.”
The changing face of Hackney
He’s conscious of how Hackney is changing and how prices are changing the face of the borough, even compared with the rest of London.
“Hackney’s a special case, Hackney’s very interesting.”
He says that compared to when he first arrived in the borough, it’s “a different life”.
He asks: “Who can move here except bankers or blokes in the city or people with some sort of private income? Whereas at that point anybody could live here, it was very democratic.”
He argues that the changing landscape and rise in gated communities and private housing have led to people being “self-sufficient rather than mixing all the time”.
He explains that London has become a collection of separate groups coexisting in the same space. He refers to the “peloton” of cyclists who stream through Hackney every morning on their way to work while “in the same landscape” there are the unseen “people who have dropped right off, living under the bridges.”
These ideas form the basis for his upcoming book, The Last London. The importance of geography and the London landscape have been a central focus of Sinclair’s work over the years.
Now, The Last London, is Sinclair’s chance to put London’s rapid evolution through a lens.
He ends by telling me: “A particular type of London that I’ve been writing about for years is changing so dramatically that it’s a new kind of city, it would be impossible to go on writing in the same way, I think you have to find a new kind of writing.”
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