Self-published Iain Sinclair

I don't agree with him at all about his dislike for the Olympic project. He has just run out of material and this gives him something more to disect.

"He wants to see the River Lea once more "shared by oarsmen, narrow-boat dwellers, dog-walkers, wanderers who were not filmed, not challenged by security, trusted to make their own mistakes". Fair enough. He wants, surely, to let Stratford and Hackney locally self-determine rather than have large-scale regeneration foisted on them. But hold on, no, because "if there is a less enticing blot in this country than the haemorrhaging roadcrash of the area surrounding the [Stratford] transport-hub station", where the air is so bad that it requires "gills and built-in decontamination filters" to breathe, then Sinclair has "been fortunate enough to avoid it". So why not regenerate central Stratford, then? Because that would be to succumb to "warped utopianism". Ah, right. There's a word that Sinclair seems to want to use but doesn't, presumably because of its recent contamination by ghost milk: that word being "community", as (perhaps) embodied in the Manor Garden Allotments and as (perhaps) connoting a local culture that is improvised, long-term and mutual, existing as an accumulation of small and reciprocally beneficial transactions." MacFarlane