Free Ghost Milk: Calling Time on the Grand Project by Iain Sinclair Page A

victims of property mania or traumatized war veterans, they are construction workers, often Polish, saving their wages and choosing to kip down close to where the action is: the tsunami of speculative capital, wanton destruction, hole-digging. The throwing up of apartment blocks, dormitory hives, warehouse conversions along murky waterways. A much-lauded development calling itself Adelaide Wharf (an aircraft carrier ploughed into a wood yard) replaced a long-standing cold-store operation. ‘With its 147 units (prices up to £395,000), this is a tremendous example of aspiration coming to fruition,’ said Stephen Oaks, area director for English Partnerships.
    Inch by inch, the working canal between Limehouse Basin and the Islington tunnel has become a ladder of glass connecting Docklands with the northern reaches of the City. Footballers, with loose change to spare, are rumoured to be buying up entire buildings as investment portfolios; many of these gaudy shells, low-ceilinged, tight-balconied, are doomed to remain half-empty, occupied by employees of the developer. Ikea storage boxes gimmicked out of swipe cards and toothpicks. The urban landscape of boroughs anywhere within the dust cloud of the Olympic Park has been devastated with a beat-the-clock impatience unrivalled in London since the beginnings of the railway age. Every civic decency, every sentimental attachment, is swept aside for that primary strategic objective, the big bang of the starter’s pistol.
    When did it begin, this intimate liaison between developers and government, to reconstruct the body of London, to their mutual advantage? Dr Frankenstein with a Google Earth programme and a laser scalpel. In the early 1970s, when the deepwater docks were already ruined by containerization, restrictive practices and fearful-angry ‘Enoch is right’ marches, Maxwell Joseph acquired Truman’s Brewery in Brick Lane. The brewery with its stables, cellars, cooperage, cobbled yards, acted, along with the Spitalfields fruit and veg market and Nicholas Hawksmoor’s Christ Church, as buffer-reefs against the encroachment of the City. A paternalistic employer was lost, along with the heady drench of hops from the brewery and the wild gardens of adjacent streets. Joseph flogged the Gainsborough portrait of Sir Benjamin Truman, the brewmaster, asset-stripped the operation, and bought up surrounding acres in canny anticipation of future development packages, the coming world of retro frocks, Moroccan internet cafés and ‘plastinated’ freak-show corpse art by Gunther von Hagens. The eastward shift, towards off-catalogue territory, was launched. Spitalfields Market, with its parasitical life forms (allotment gardeners, twilight prostitutes, vagrant drinkers around wastelot fires), was expelled to Hackney Marshes. Where it would function quite successfully up to the point where the football pitches, alongside the new site, would be required as parking space for the 2012 green Olympics.
    Johnnie Walker, chairman of the Hackney and Leyton Football League, was enraged. Despite assurances from a multitude of faceless authorities, that work would not begin for four years, the diggers arrived before the start of the 2007 season. Eleven pitches, trampled by hard-swearing enthusiasts, were lost. Anne Woollett of the Hackney Marshes User Group complained that the ODA (Olympic Development Authority) had sequestered portions of East Marsh, a year ahead of their promise, to construct ‘a huge 12-lane motorway’. Challenged, a spokesperson for the ODA admitted that two trenches had indeed been dug, for ‘archaeological’ research. Animal bones and beer cans were photographed and preserved; along with the rubble of blitzed Second World War terraces over which the football pitches had been laid out. ‘The heritage must be protected.’
    Much of this tricky element, heritage, can be recovered from vintage films as they are reissued on DVD. The tall chimney of the Brick Lane brewery, a