Iain Sinclair · Diary: The Plutocrat Tour · LRB 7 July 2022:

Heading west towards Woolwich and the remains of the Royal Arsenal, with its buried munitions and restored warehouses, I came upon a stretch of park at Gallions Reach that promised to be the hoped-for resolution of my quest for a General Theory of Everything. This managed landscape was electively megalithic, conceived and delivered on top of an older park in 2017. It looked like a direct translation from Wiltshire, from Silbury Hill with its satellite earthworks. Somebody had been playing with contaminated soil trenched out from the Royal Arsenal. Alluvium, silt and clay, the spoil of local development, had been shaped into a set of humps worthy of the physician and antiquarian William Stukeley. Gallions Hill, a conical mound with gentle helical paths, was the dominant feature. Neo-paganism and sloganised futurism came together as part of the post-Thatcher colonisation of East London. The mounds scattered through new estates in the Olympic Park were contrived with earth dug out for the Channel Tunnel. Beckton Alps, across the river, was a ritual viewing platform, now fenced off and protected, a sculpture made from arsenic and toxic ash from the bombed gasworks.

As a series of ritual tests, I worked my way from the lesser mounds, not knowing if they contained buried mechanical diggers or sacrificed bones of First World War munitions workers, to the breast of the ‘mother hill’, which was encircled by a perimeter fence. Closing in now on a great secret, I scrambled to the summit, noticing that another knapsacked figure, about my own age, was making a more measured ascent by way of the helical path. We met at the compass point indicated on the flattened viewing platform. I did not ask the name of my fellow pilgrim and I did not offer my own, but we enjoyed a long and enlightening conversation. From this height, the spread of habitation, in all directions, clarified the day’s story. The Gallions Reach view offered a route map into past and future.

There’s only one Iain Sinclair. A decade back I wrote a longish essay about him for Books & Culture. (I can’t help smiling at the quirk British lefties have of designating everything bad done by Tony Blair as “post-Thatcher.” As though Blair were no more than a misty emanation of the terrible Iron Lady — which, come to think of it, is just what people like Sinclair think he was.)