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phous nowheres, these liminal territories at the edge of
the city is, I think, a nightmare prospect.”
This, as London Orbital makes clear, is precisely
what the city has always done with its undesirables
and madmen. Sinclair – an altogether different kind of
asylum seeker, but nonetheless wandering around, not
knowing entirely where he is – says that he was amazed
to find the French philosopher Michel Foucault’s
hypothesis about the optimum distance that asylums
should be placed away from the city – 20 miles – so
palpably confirmed.
“I was dazzled by the Holloway Sanitarium [now
Virginia Park] – the ultimate heritage- asylum conversion,”
he tells me. “The thing that disturbed me [about
other asylum conversions] was the absence of memory
– all traces of what had been there before had been cannily
erased, including the name.”
So should architects be learning more about the
history of a site? “They should be made to go into the
landscape to the site and then move outwards from it
for a considerable distance and then to come in on it.
Especially the big-name architects who are the worse
perpetrators,” he says with a little glee. “They shouldn’t
just place something that is simply site-specific to the
person commissioning the building.”
As you might expect of Sinclair, he’s unearthed some
pretty fascinating nuggets. For example, the story of
how the War Cabinet was deceived into giving approval
BUY Iain Sinclair books online from and
for Heathrow airport: “Emergency wartime powers
were used to establish, by a network of dubious commercial
deals, a major airport that was only 15 miles
from the centre of London.” And finding the grave of
Hawksmoor in a field just off the motorway was, he
says, “quite a shock – this sense of the centre drifting
out as it becomes forgotten”.
Were there any new buildings that he particularly
admired? “I was very struck by the Siebel building by
Runnymede Bridge in Egham. It just appeared out of
nowhere between visits. It didn’t bristle with surveillance
– most buildings were incredibly paranoid. It
seemed transcendently strange – there was nobody
around. It was sinisterly benign.”
Sinclair’s poetic retains that characteristic samizdat
quality of goods smuggled past the PR checkpoints,
his prose always crackling with connectivity. Here
he is on the Xerox building: “Uxbridge is made from
Xs. Lines of cancelled typescript. Fields planted with
barbed wire.”
One of the many treats of Sinclair’s excellent Lights
Out For The Territory (of which London Orbital is
a kind of sequel), is his visit to Jeffrey Archer and
his penthouse at Alembic House. I wondered if he’d
thought of returning to him at his new residence in
Belmarsh prison in Thamesmead, south-east London?
He laughs at the idea, but admits slightly wearily that
“perhaps we’ve had a little too much of him already”.
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