Psychogeographers announce that there is still beauty in urban decay*

 

Iain Sinclair divides people. To be honest, he divides me. I'm a big fan of some of his books, Downriver most specifically, but London Orbital and bits of Lights Out For The Territory too. His work undoubtedly has a degree of cultural importance. He has documented spaces and places, processes of urban change and renewal that might otherwise have gone ignored. He's also guilty though of self-aggrandisement, self-parody, cronyism (endless vainglorious cameos from tediously eccentric friends) and, worst of all perhaps, a certain fetishisation of urban decay. Like a modern day aristocrat on the Grand Tour, Sinclair seeks out poverty and destitution and turns it into some aesthetic tableau. Rusty factory units are his romantic ruins and tramps huddled below underpasses his ruddy faced yokels. 

Lately he's been popping up all over the place, proselytising against the London Olympics, or promoting his latest book Ghost Milk, depending on which side of the divide you're on. He was in The Observer on Sunday sparring with former Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport Tessa Jowell about the supposed 'legacy' of the games and last night he popped up on BBC2's Newsnight. The short film Sinclair made for the programme showed him at both his best and worst. There are many reasons to be sceptical and even downright hostile to the games - the ticket allocation farce, the treatment of river boat dwellers on the River Lea and the loss of allotments, natural habitats and open space amongst them. Sinclair is right to point these things out, but there are strong arguments to be made about the economic and political effect of the games and Sinclair isn't really making them.

Instead he offers an aestheticised vision of, for want of a better term, shittyness. At one point during his film he pointed to a breakers yard and declared it as good as a Joseph Beuys artwork. This is the urban hipster version of shabby chic, an effete observation that recalls the British painters of Saint Ives patronising (in every sense) Alfred Wallis. At other points he wanders around expressing exasperation at builder's hoardings causing him some minor inconvenience or rails at the cleaning up of the boating lake in Victoria Park. But these seem like the gripes of the terminal misanthrope, a Victor Meldrew-ish exasperation of life at its most petty and a hopeless railing against any form of change. It's hard when knocking Sinclair not to come across as some vapid boosterist and one can sympathise with his visceral dislike of the language (and the effects) of regeneration, but he also has that hopeless, miserable English disease of thinking the worst of everything. The Olympics will be a disaster, he seems to say, simply because everything is. Like Marvin the Paranoid Android wandering Hackney Marshes, he suggests that all new building is pointless, all attempts at planning doomed and any development always the product of base venality.

But buildings always replace other things. They are always about destruction as well as construction and we celebrate ones now that must have appeared insensitive behemoths when they were completed. As an architect it is impossible to share Sinclair's deep but affected cynicism about new building. Sure, much of it is shit but then again, most of the buildings in the Olympic Park emphatically aren't. A couple even look genuinely beautiful. And if you can't build a new urban park in a place like Stratford, where can you? And this is the point. Sinclair's vision ultimately suggests an ever tinier and more myopic introversion, a celebrating of the incidental, peripheral, neglected and marginal to the point where you can't see anything else or do anything else ever again. He's right to rail against the class cleansing inherent in regeneration projects (although other people like Patrick Wright and Owen Hatherley have done this much better and with less sentimentality), but it's hard to get away from his own bourgeoisie conceits and fusty contraryism. Whatever, his eyeor-ish traipsing around East London made me look forward much more to the 100 metres.

* This post's title is a reference to The Onion's recent and very funny headline, link here.