EssaysIn Nicolas Roeg and Donald Cammell's 1970 film Performance - a cod- Borgesian conundrum in which a gangster and a rock star shack up in a decaying west London house until they start to resemble one another - most of the action takes place at 81 Powis Square, Notting Hill.
Scour the square for relics of the desiccated duo played by James Fox and Mick Jagger, though, and you'll discover a vertiginous fact: there is no number 81 (the exterior shots are actually of number 25). This sort of detail fascinates Iain Sinclair, whose novels and essays have long been dedicated to a London lost, found and "reforgotten", and whose new book is a vast catalogue of such vanishings: the ways the city finds to flummox its chroniclers. But where Performance confounded class, race, crime and pop culture, Sinclair seems, in this ambitious and disappointing compendium, to have mislaid some key parts of the puzzle.
Much of the book is fascinating. The pharmacist from whom Thomas De Quincey bought his first dose of laudanum in 1804 is the model for what follows: he must have been a druggist of the mind, writes the opium-eater, who could never find the shop again. The crime writer Sarah Wise supplies some of the most telling tales: of the pubs where grave-robbing "resurrection men" met in the 1820s, of the 250 homes and 700 shops lost when Swallow Street was gobbled up by Regent Street in 1821, of silkworms and mulberry trees in the backyards of Whitechapel and Spitalfields. Words are unearthed alongside objects, people and places: Marina Warner traces the history of pubs named after notorious old hags.
Of the more substantial pieces, several are compelling. The poet Marius Kociejowski essays a bravura reflection on a found manuscript by one Charlotte B, who claims to have been repeatedly abducted and debauched by the same man at the end of the 18th century. Art curator Richard Humphreys tells the story of his recently deceased cleaner, who turns out to have been born into an aristocratic family and to have led a bohemian life in the company of Francis Bacon and Dylan Thomas.
Some of the more celebrated contributors are especially engaging on absconding architecture: Will Self on the wanderings of Charing Cross Hospital, the film-maker Patrick Keiller on the "found architecture" of industrial detritus. JG Ballard hymns the soaring overpass that is the Westway: a vision of how London might have been had its infrastructure ever actually entered the 20th century.
The book's problems set in over the long (600-pages-plus) haul. There is simply too much here of Sinclair's perennial obsession with a specific (visionary, masculine, down-at-heel) culture of which he was once a part, and too many like-minded cronies make it on to the contributors' page. It's one thing to read Sinclair (again, mind you) on his former life as a second-hand book- dealer's scout - "bad magic and worse feet, that's what London was about" - and quite another to have to cope, in cold print, with the rheumy reminiscences of some of his old colleagues. At times, it feels like being stuck behind some awful monologist of a London taxi driver, ferrying you through the greyer districts of its literary history. I had that Henry Green in the back of my cab once, guv. Guv?
Most dispiriting of all is the bizarre elision of much of what has come and gone in recent decades. Not only does Sinclair scant the immigrant history of the last half century, but his is a London seemingly without any youth culture at all. Do we really need to read more dismal posthumous blather from the likes of Kray associate Tony Lambrianou, when the pages might have been given over to the 1960s underground, the influx of suburban punks, the squatters' movement, the subterranean culture of dub reggae in the 1970s or the alternative metropolis of rave in the 1990s? Does Sinclair really think that his was the last generation to invest any hope in the city or to regret its passing? Where is the vanished London dreamed of by, say, a 17-year-old girl in Hackney, a few streets away from Sinclair? Does he know, or care?
Brian Dillon is an editor of Cabinet, a quarterly of art and culture. His memoir, In the Dark Room, is out in paperback, and he is working on Tormented Hope: Nine Hypochondriac Lives
London: City of Disappearances Edited by Iain Sinclair Hamish Hamilton, 656pp. £22.50
