Iain Sinclair

I became aware that most of my fellow passengers, waiting for the DLR connection at Shadwell, were mutants. They looked like regular Docklands folk – neat, shiny shoes, considered hair – but there was always one element out of place. The girl in the pristine white coat had sprouted a pair of crow’s wings. The programmer with the burnt-out red eyes was carrying an expensive leather satchel and a plastic light sabre. Morning-after party girls with rescued maquillage had spiders’ webs across their faces and horns spouting from freshly airfixed heads.

This​ was a 42-year marriage of convenience between forgiving but frequently exasperated business partners and poetry rivals. It was launched with a seize-the-day telegram, after a one-night, earth-shuddering, world-tilting performance in a jazzed-up garage. Before moving on to occasional meetings and decades of dutiful, near conjugal correspondence from all parts of the globe. Before...

Not many guests arrive at Shangri-La, the cloud-shrouded lamasery/hotel that occupies the paying mid-section (levels 35-52) of the London Bridge intervention known as the Shard, by way of a 149 bus out of Haggerston. This on the day of a seasonal Underground strike that has to be explained to bemused knots of grounded tourists as they squeeze through a complexity of automated barriers, encumbered by caravans of luggage.

They dig and the earth is sweet. The Hackney Hole is eight square metres, straight down through the lawn of a decommissioned rectory. This secret garden is separated from St Augustine’s Tower by a high wall of darkly weathered brick. The proud stub of the square tower is all that remains of Hackney’s oldest ecclesiastical building, a 16th-century revision of the 13th-century church founded by the Knights of St John. The Hole is a statement and it is properly capitalised. The labourers, a self-confessed art collective, work the Hole by hand, with pick and shovel, turn and turn about.

While trying to ignore my seventieth birthday I was offered an unexpected gift, which was also a challenge: the chance to nominate seventy films that would be shown in orthodox and unorthodox venues across London. I didn’t want to play the listing game of best or worst or personal favourite. And it didn’t work, in Dillinger fashion, to isolate one film for every year of my life; the big clusters came in the 1960s and there were plenty of desert epochs during which I saw practically nothing. I scanned my published books, in reverse order, and assembled a catalogue of films referenced. I wrote brief notes on all of them, realising that there were unexpected connections and overlaps.