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Spike | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com 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”. 480 More Spike email RSS Facebook Twitter A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
Spike | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com As for these liminal areas, he’s already looking ahead. “One day, when the research and development has moved elsewhere, the abandoned colony will be turned over to the heritage industry. Wild nature … will be promoted and paraded.” How apt this convergence of Sinclair’s journey with London – to have returned to the beginning. [This article was originally written for the UK architectural magazine Building Design] � BUY Iain Sinclair books online from and 481 More Spike email RSS Facebook Twitter A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
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