Iain Sinclair

There are three opposed elements: the towers, the street and the shaft. The gaping maw of the Super Sewer goes down as far as the surrounding towers climb, but it is covert, safe behind barrier walls, protected by yawning security operatives in hard hats, charged with stalling appointments. This buried London, a labyrinth of antiquated tube tunnels, abandoned stations, Crossrail advances, medieval burial pits, utilities, intersecting sewers, lost rivers, bomb shelters, escape hatches for royalty, is the most disturbing of the three layers. We feel the cuts of earth surgery, even when we have no knowledge of where they are happening. We shudder in ignorance as monstrous machines chew through clay. We feel a physical shift in the balance of things. But we have no reliable chart. The story is told before it happens. And it has to be experienced, in order to confirm its CGI fictions.

The London architecture​ you are permitted to notice, Caroline Knowles reckons, is just money on display. In Serious Money: Walking Plutocratic London, she describes the overweening spike of Renzo Piano’s Shard as ‘a glass and concrete arrangement of the Qatar sovereign wealth fund’.* The loudest crimes are hidden in plain sight. Look around, you can’t miss them. The...

For a​ retired brothel, Hotel Esperance provided an excellent breakfast. My Brussels sponsors had arranged for me to occupy the favoured chamber with its freestanding claw-footed bath, wispily draped Art Deco dryads, fishbowl lights and heavy velvet curtains. The set was screaming for a David Lynch remake of The Masque of the Red Death. Room Three, Hotel Esperance, Finistère: a beacon...

Out of​ the shuddering car and into the dance. The holy medallion is still swinging like a hanged Disneyland midget in a gale. The eyes of the skull knob on the gearstick pulse dangerously. The migraine radio thumps to assert a fading connection with the world we have left behind. But the headlong momentum of the broken road, endured in a foetal crouch for so many miles, is swiftly absorbed...