Grubby traces
things magazine on hidden cities:
There is a rather grumpy piece in the current issue of Blueprint magazine (not available on line, sadly), that decries the contemporary penchant for fetishising London’s murky and mysterious past; the axis represented by Iain Sinclair, Peter Ackroyd, et al. The article’s gist is that by glamorising the likes of John Dee and Nicholas Hawksmoor, we condemn ourselves to living in a theme park of the imagination, forever obsessed with arcane symbolism, encoded architecture and secret societies. All the while, London is engaged in relentless self-improvement, scrubbing hard at these grubby traces. In other words, the ‘arcanologist’ is on a flight from reality that actually disengages them from real-world concerns.
I have great sympathy with the antiquarian fascination with the hidden city. Ironically, it seems to humanise the metropolis through the most inhumane aspects of city life (’Both Ackroyd and Sinclair see Hawksmoor’s churches as centres of malevolent energies which are connected with the Ratcliffe Highway and Whitechapel murders’, from Barbelith). It’s all very far from the new city of refurbished wharves and warehouses, buffed up basins and goods yards, none of which seems especially concerned with the history of place or the meaning of memory, save for that entirely ersatz historicist confection that sugars the pill of modern London. Related: art underground. Also related, Past Masters, Jane Stevenson on the antiquarian instinct from things 12.