Iain Sinclair’s Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire, a documentary fiction, appeared earlier this year.
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Vol. 22 No. 11 · 1 June 2000
pages 17-20 | 5710 words
If I Turn and Run
Iain Sinclair
- 45 by Bill Drummond
Little, Brown, 361 pp, £12.99, March 2000, ISBN 0 316 85385 2
- Crucify Me Again by Mark Manning
Codex, 190 pp, £8.95, May 2000, ISBN 0 18 995814 6
Here they come, marching north out of Spitalfields, stride for stride in hallucinatory ordinariness, the celebrated living sculptures, Gilbert and George. It’s an English spring afternoon and they have dressed for it in country formal outfits: stout boots, long, brown chequerboard coats with too many buttons, furry headwarmers that flap down over their ears. They look worried – like posh herdsmen who have lost their reindeer. At Shoreditch Church, they dress to the left and march west under the railway bridge. It’s not difficult to guess where they’re making for: their new gallery, Jay Jopling’s White Cube2 in Hoxton Square. You don’t really need to go inside the sugar-frosted box to see what’s happening. You can get it from the street. This is top dollar, scratchcard art. Either it works in one hit or forget it. If it doesn’t jab you in the eye as you drive past in your cab, keep going. The names involved in this pitch are so hot, you might as well frame them and leave it at that. Now the cultural ambulance-chasers know where Hoxton is, they won’t leave it alone. This is here and this is it. The back-story is more complicated.
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[*] Atkins and Sinclair have worked together on a number of projects.
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Letters
Vol. 22 No. 12 · 22 June 2000
From Andrew Cowan
According to Iain Sinclair (LRB, 1 June), Bill Drummond bought a Richard Long print because the title – A Smell of Sulphur in the Wind – brought back 'the taste of Corby and the steel mills, air you could cut like a cake'. In fact, being a New Town, the steelworks were built to the east, so the prevailing winds carried the stench away to rural Weldon and Oundle. In Corby the smells were of cut grass and creosote, wet pavements, washing on the line, chip shops – the smells of any provincial town, miles from Sinclair's imagining.
Andrew Cowan
Norwich
Vol. 22 No. 13 · 6 July 2000
From Justin Horton
The Corby wind situation may be more complicated than either Iain Sinclair or Andrew Cowan believe (Letters, 22 June). My stepfather, brought up in Corby, tells me that while the prevailing wind did indeed take the smell in the direction of Weldon and Oundle, anybody who hung their washing out was likely, when they came to take it in, to find it covered in a layer of orange dust.
Justin Horton
Letchworth
Vol. 22 No. 14 · 20 July 2000
From Andrew Cowan
Contrary to what Justin Horton may believe (Letters, 6 July), not every wash hung out to dry in Corby would be covered in a layer of orange dust. According to my father, a steelworker, the dust was a by-product of the blast furnaces and didn't carry much beyond a quarter-mile radius. My Grandma Calver, still living within coughing distance of the steel site, confirms she was one of those who suffered. My Grandma Cowan, two hundred yards further on, was not. Prevailing winds played no part in this.
Andrew Cowan
Norwich
