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

significant territorial marker, appears like an accusing finger in stills taken from Carol Reed’s Odd Man Out , which was released in 1947. War-damaged Bethnal Green masquerades as an expressionist Belfast. James Mason is an IRA gunman on the run. Twenty years later, his Hollywood career in decline, Mason returned once more to an East End of smoky pubs, dark shadows, charity hostels: to narrate a documentary version of Geoffrey Fletcher’s The London Nobody Knows. Umbrella rolled, vowels clipped, he sleepwalks through a gone-in-the-mouth city, struggling to make conversation with marooned mariners and fire-eyed witnesses. When he performed his dying fall in Odd Man Out , clutching at the gate, before staggering across the snow towards the lights of the police cars, he is in Haggerston Park, E2.
    Another film, so sharp in its exposure of aspects of the coming land piracy that it seemed prophetic, arrived in 1979. The Long Good Friday was efficiently directed by John Mackenzie, but the meat of the thing is in Barrie Keeffe’s script, his intimacy with tired ground that is about to be invaded, overwhelmed, rewritten. The advent of Margaret Thatcher was announced, as Mackenzie’s crime fable makes clear, by local government corruption (‘the new casino’s gone through’), kickbacks to Irish Republicans in the burgeoning construction industry, bent coppers and heritaged Kray hoodlums making overtures to the New York Mafia with their ‘property lawyers, lawyers specializing in gambling tax’. Much of this had happened and continues to happen. It is the Thatcherite legacy we are now experiencing. London topography is reconfigured according to the movie finances of the moment, first as proper cinema, then as budget television.
    A persistent urban myth has the gang who robbed the Brinks-Mat warehouse at Heathrow on 26 November 1983 quadrupling the estimated £26-million value of the gold bars by investing in riverside regeneration. Swashbuckling capitalism led the way for timid hedge-fund managers and Bishopsgate sharecroppers. The defining image of this era – Bob Hoskins with his sleek pleasure craft moored in St Katharine Docks, Margaret Thatcher schmoozing the Reichmann brothers in Canary Wharf – is the maquette of the proposed marina, the city of towers. A Lilliputian theme park of unimaginable wealth-creation. An anticipation of computer-generated presentations for the Olympic wonderland. ‘Water City’, a new Venice (without the memory-mud of centuries), will rise from the stinking tilth of backrivers and duckweed canals.
    Keeffe’s ‘Corporation’, a confederacy of villains, is a direct translation of alliances in contemporary political life. Hoskins, a pumped-up Dalston Mussolini, presenting himself as ‘a businessman with a sense of history’, spiels a pitch as his oligarch’s gin palace makes waves under Tower Bridge. Thirty years on and he could be making his final presentation as a candidate in the London mayoral election, right across the river from the crumpled buttock of City Hall. Which is neither a hall, nor in the City, but a post-architectural doodle with the futile ambition of bringing Manhattan to Bermondsey. ‘We have mile upon mile and acre after acre of land for our future prosperity,’ drools Bob. ‘The right people mastermind the new London.’
    This was a period when blowing the whistle on corrupt practices brought retribution in a traditional form. A Dalston solicitor, on the point of presenting evidence about fraudulent building practices, the use of the cheapest materials coupled with invoices for the most expensive, a dossier assembled by an outraged foreman, was warned off with a sniper shot, from a rooftop, as he stepped from the courthouse. The quality of the marksmanship was professional: the bullet missed by inches. He got the point. And had a story to tell.
    But the scam of scams was always the Olympics: Berlin (1936) to Beijing (2008). Engines of regeneration. Orgies of