Ghost Milk

In the autumn of 2008, Hackney Council banned the poet, travel writer and “psycho-geographer” Iain Sinclair from launching his new book, Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire, in Stoke Newington Library. Nobody at the Town Hall had read a word of it but then the book was really beside the point. “So sorry,” the librarian told him apologetically. “The launch is off. You dissed the Olympics.” It transpired that local officials had taken umbrage at one of Sinclair’s essays in the London Review of Books, an excoriation of the Olympic project taking shape in their backyard. According to council records obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, the mayor, Jules Pipe, felt that “we should not host an event on council premises” that would promote “an opinion which contradicts our aims and values as an organisation – in this case the 2012 Games and legacy”. Even to question the value of the Games, in other words, put you beyond the pale.

Somehow I doubt Stoke Newington Library will host an event for Sinclair’s latest book, Ghost Milk, which drips with hostility towards next year’s Olympic jamboree. An eclectic collection of wanderings and reflections on the theme of grand projects, it takes him to the vast building sites of Stratford in east London, along the banks of the Thames and across the north of England, exploring the half-forgotten wastelands of modern Britain and beyond. In Berlin he takes the S-Bahn to the end of the line. In the Grain marshes, where the Thames meets the sea, he steers a kayak across the estuary to find the London Stone, a “fossil-embossed obelisk” marooned on an isolated islet, which marks the limit of the authority of the City of London. As always, he has a wonderful eye for place. His is a world of traffic islands, minicab agencies, coach garages and graffiti; a world of frustrated hopes and broken dreams. And at the corners, almost unnoticed, nature is always breaking through. “They have bright new fences. And surveillance cameras,” one of his friends says after visiting the Olympic site. “But it doesn’t matter. On the wrong side of the fence, Japanese knotweed is pumping up through the tarmac.”

For Sinclair, the 2012 Olympics are a moral, financial and architectural obscenity and a symbol of everything that went wrong under New Labour. He sees them not as a sporting celebration but as a vast exercise in security, surveillance and rampant commercialism; wherever he goes, he sees cameras, fences, restrictions. The book’s abiding symbol is the fence surrounding the Olympic Park, guarded by an “invading regiment” of Gurkhas. When someone asks what the title Ghost Milk means, Sinclair replies, gnomically but entirely characteristically: “CGI smears on the blue fence.” Farther west, he visits the Westfield shopping mall, a “funny-money retail cathedral”, a “Panopticon prison”, a “Ballard theme park from the time of Concrete Island” (there is a JG Ballard reference every few pages). And when the book takes him to Yorkshire, he seeks out the Earth Centre at Conisborough, a classic Blairite grand project, designed to regenerate a declining, jobless, post-industrial area, which opened its doors in 1999 and closed five years later. Now the site stands empty, supervised by a solitary security guard.

All of these things are easy targets; too easy, perhaps. As Sinclair wanders aimlessly across the country, even the sympathetic reader begins to weary of the relentless negativity of his tone and the overwrought cadences of his prose. I never thought I could feel sorry for the Olympic organisers until I read this book. Their legacy, Sinclair says, will be nothing but “lasting shame”; they are the heirs not only of the communists who ran the Beijing Olympics, but of the people who directed the Berlin Olympics in 1936 and the Mexico Olympics in 1968, when hundreds of protesters were killed by the so-called Olympic Battalion. But this, surely, is going much too far. The Olympic organisers may well be incompetent, mendacious and greedy – or, indeed, none of those things – but they are not fascists or murderers. Next year’s jamboree might well be the “scam of scams” but it might also prove a successful festival of sport that gives a great deal of pleasure to millions of ordinary people, something Sinclair never seems to consider.

Indeed, the more the book goes on, the more Sinclair’s doom and gloom begin to grate. In Stratford, he says, “the shadow of old Berlin is unavoidable”. He writes that “drones operated by the American military for spying and assassination in Iraq and Afghanistan” will soon police British shopping malls, turning them into “war zones”. He even claims that “you can buy a postcard of the Houses of Parliament, but you are no longer permitted to take a photograph”. But this is nonsense. Passing the Palace of Westminster just the other day, I saw hundreds of tourists ­taking pictures. Nobody carted them off to prison.

One of the great ironies of Sinclair’s book is that although he attacks New Labour, quite rightly, for lacking a sense of history, his own leaves a lot to be desired. He waxes lyrical about the Festival of Britain but it does not seem to occur to him that modern London is partly formed from the detritus of other grand projects, from the grand boulevard of Regent Street to the great Victorian railway stations. He thinks that developers and government first colluded in the redevelopment of London in the 1970s, when in fact it had been going on for decades. He also thinks that local government corruption was a “Thatcherite legacy”, when it was arguably much more serious (think of T Dan Smith and John Poulson) before she came to power. And throughout the book there simmers a kind of misanthropy, even snobbery: a contempt for the kind of people, working-class and middle-class alike, that Fabian types have mocked for decades, sneering at their neat suburban homes and modest material ambitions. These are the people who actually enjoy shopping at Westfield, not because they are corporate drones or have been brainwashed or define themselves purely by consumerism but simply because they fancy buying some new clothes or a better television or even the latest book by Iain Sinclair. No doubt many of them are looking forward to the Olympics, too.

Dominic Sandbrook is author of ‘State of Emergency: The Way We Were: Britain, 1970-1974’ (Penguin)

Ghost Milk: Calling Time on the Grand Project, by Iain Sinclair, Hamish Hamilton, RRP£20, 432 pages