Iain Sinclair

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.

Silent, heavy doors open on a line of dense and minatory charcoal drawings, linked like coal trucks, and arranged on the floor in a provisional order – I visited before the all-encompassing Leon Kossoff show, London Landscapes, opened last month (it closes on 6 July). Tolerated afternoon light insinuated from a west-facing window, to be swallowed in that privileged and subtle...

Coming ashore at Gravesend like Pocahontas, the dying Native American princess, and wobbling up the raked walkway in a stiff breeze, I had to duck to avoid the menacing swoop of a tethered crow. This was a malignant spirit, in an evil wind, in a defeated place loud with absence. Naturally, on such a day and at such an hour, I was on the lookout for symbols and portents. The funeral rites of Lady Thatcher, the great leader celestially upgraded from her complimentary suite at the Ritz, began as our ferry, the Duchess M, butted out, cross-current, from the container stacks of Tilbury Riverside.