Progress, what progress?

Visitors to London’s Olympic village, currently in its final stages of construction and ring-fenced in chemical, Tory blue, will be greeted by an even greater arena than those graced by the world’s athletes this summer. The design and ambition of the new Westfield shopping centre eclipses that of its flirty TV-friendly colleagues the velodrome and the stadia, and will surely outlast them. The computer-enhanced press images of its final realisation resemble a Ballardian vision: concrete monoliths, faceless people. The very best of British Culture. Culture with a capital C. Culture as brand.

Iain Sinclair’s Ghost Milk is the author’s fifth excavation of London and its peripheries in non-fiction, but the first with a specific agent provocateur in the 2012 Olympic Games. If the book can be described as a polemic, the London games are certainly its antagonist. But to describe the book as investigative journalism would be to impoverish this magisterial work – equally grand in its scope and execution as the cultural poltergeists it aims to exorcise.

Beginning with the author’s experiences as a 1970’s day labourer on London’s docklands in the Lower Lea Valley, Sinclair crafts a complex and beguiling narrative of London’s post-industrial decline, abetted by successive attempts at ‘regeneration’ by local authorities, Mayoral candidates and Prime Ministers coveting some kind of tangible legacy that will outlast themselves:

“When did it begin, this intimate liaison between property developers and government, to reconstruct the body of London, to their mutual advantage? Dr Frankenstein with a Google Earth programme and a laser scalpel.”

The biggest white elephant, to which Sinclair frequently returns and in some sense regards as a prototype for the Olympic park, is the Millennium Dome – New Labour’s swansong for a decade of political and cultural vacuity. The only real symbolism to which the dome can lay claim, Sinclair argues, is the short-lived and long-felt property bubble whose burst coincided with the dome’s inevitable neglect and abandonment. The book’s title is apt: we live with an architecture of empty shells sustained by a culture of hollowness. A legacy of sorts, perhaps.

It is this culture of ‘the grand project’ – a potent combination of municipal vanity and political homogeneity – Sinclair sees franchised out beyond the metropolis of the capital and sold to those left behind by Thatcher’s post-social society. His record of the much publicised development of Hull’s Marina and Humberside submariun, The Deep, “a flashy Terry Farrell dockside fish-tank with as much cultural relevance as the MI6 building, that Aztec jukebox on the south side of the Thames” as a thriving investment opportunity for potential corporate suitors is as hilarious as it is poignant.

The city of stevedores burned by the Luftwaffe, ostracised by Thatcher and erased by Blair. Managed decline.

The connecting narrative is of collective amnesia and a paranoid, bathetic bureaucracy. Sinclair acerbically describes how concerns over the existence of radioactive watch dials, discarded by a government long out of office, in an area of waste ground near the Clays Lane Estate ordained for transformation into the Olympic Park, were ignored by the local council and the development firm charged with laying the foundations:

“When the contractors started boring deep holes … the nature of radioactive material is that it only becomes dangerous once it’s been disturbed … at the end of last year, they undertook tests on the run-off into the River Lea. They found levels of thorium in the water. Atkins, the engineers, considered it was possible that thorium had dispersed along the water table … It was enough to confirm the engineer’s prediction of what could happen.

“The effect being that the entire Olympic park is contaminated with thorium at water-table level. Even if figures are smudged and scare stories buried, it will be hard to fulfil Ken Livingstone’s prediction that the money can made back by flogging the land.”

The Millennium Dome is always on the horizon, overlooking real estate more fortunate, or as yet unscrutinized by Whitehall.

The book’s protagonists, if they can be called such, are the urban diasporas of England’s edge-lands. Its antagonists are harder to identify. From whence came the desire to both enshrine and erase history that now permeates our political culture? The answer is not located, as so many newspaper columnists aspire to diagnose, within a particular class or cultural locale (though it doesn’t stop the risible pseudo-intellectual David Starkey from trying).

Rather, Sinclair charts a radically polycentric course across our landscape and history. But the narrative is the same – a militarised police force charged with social cleansing, the avant garde of a concrete utopia where to buy is to be free. The nouveau-libertarians with their fetishistic fantasies of a private state who currently infect the British right-wing, with no knowledge of their own history and who seek to obliterate cultural difference: One World Week? The totality of this psychology is what gives the book much of its force and its radicality.

At its close, one is left as intellectually itinerant as those gardeners of the Hackney Wicks Allotments, whose Stalinist eviction was left uncovered by the world’s media, but to whom Sinclair’s book is dedicated as both requiem and eulogy:

“…the devastation of the ecology of the Lower Lea Valley, with the loss of allotments, unofficial orchards behind abandoned lock-keepers’ cottages, native shrubs, wildlife habitats, disturbed the balance of a substantial chunk of London. The corridor between the Thames and the orbital motorway. The folk memory of a broader and more vigorous tributary. But it was the betrayal of language that caused most pain: every pronouncement meant its opposite. Improving the image of construction. Creating a place where people want to live.”

_a.t.stones@warwick.ac.uk_