Iain Sinclair

In the mornings, there is a clinging, overripe smell that some people say drifts in from the countryside, a folk memory of what these clipped green acres used, so recently, to be. Mulch of market gardens. Animal droppings in hot mounds. The distant rumble of construction convoys. The heron dance of elegant cloud-scraping cranes. Flocks of cyclists clustering together for safety, dipping and swerving like swallows. Hard hats and yellow tabards monkeying over the scaffolding of shrouded towers, the steel ribs of emerging stadia. Early risers, in the privilege of first-use recreation, a smudge of sun burning off the fug of pollution that hangs over a pre-Olympic city, fall into quiet conversation. Ice-cream kiss of almond blossom, bridal abundance of cherry: pink and white. Yellow pom-poms of japonica, horticultural cheerleaders. In a corner, under a high wall that gives away the previous identity of this public park as a decommissioned energy-generating plant, retired workers sway, stiffly and slowly, in t’ai chi ballets.

From the balcony, seven floors above the coast road, I watch the pepper-grey beach disdain its nuisance presences: night-fishermen, scavengers sweeping the shingle with metal detectors for small change lost in the spasms of last night’s courtship rituals. Dog valets. Tai chi soloists. Convivial drinking schools, cans raised to the world, enjoying the last cocktail party in England...

We emerge on the heights of Islington: that famous view down towards the crazy, bat-chewed spires of St Pancras. An example of architecture intended to be fabulous, but unworkable. Grey spikes on red brick. A thousand Gothic revival windows with a yellow hard hat in every one of them. There is a residual nostalgia for grunge, smack, crack, skunk, discarded rubbers, black-glassed massage parlours, begging bowls, flea-bitten dogs, muggers, shunters, fastfood banditry, snoop cameras optimising car-fine revenue in the name of that corrupt god, ecology. The area stinks: of hair in hot fat, man-sweat, spastic movement. Of non-specific fear leaking out of surveillance monitors. The urban condition: suspension of reality. A multitude of travellers avoid touch and collision. They apologise. Or argue the toss with uniformed invaders of privacy. The whole mess is underwritten, yet again, by a notional futurology. The Radiant City that is still to come, Brussels-connected, Euro-buttered.

Tom Raworth, according to Marjorie Perloff, is the ‘oldest living open-heart surgery survivor, treated in the UK in the first round of heart operations conducted there in the 1950s’. Highlight the ‘survivor’ bit. The last poet left standing in the saloon. (Think Gregory Peck in Henry King’s The Gunfighter. Grave moustache succumbing to gravity.) Many myths...

Coming off Tottenham Court Road, screens, devices, gizmos, you plunge with relief into a street of unexpected, probably miscalculated art galleries, restaurants that change their pitch every time you pass, a pair of narrow, secret alleys, twittens everybody knows, the relief of that, the pub, the slope down into Newman Passage, the opening sequence of Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom, a...