Lud Heat

Originally published: London: Albion Village, 1975.

'There is no Light without Darknesse and no Substance without Shaddowe.' So proclaims Nicholas Dyer, assistant to Sir Christopher Wren and man with a commission to build seven London churches to stand as beacons of the enlightenment. But Dyer plans to conceal a dark secret at the heart of each church - to create a forbidding architecture that will survive for eternity. Two hundred and fifty years later, London detective Nicholas Hawksmoor is investigating a series of gruesome murders on the sites of certain eighteenth-century churches - crimes that make no sense to the modern mind . . . Cover art by: Barn'whether the book addresses graffiti explicitly, evoke a city from the past, or are considered cult classics, the novels all share the quality - like street art - of speaking to their time.' Guardian Gallery

Imagined Londons explores the diverse ways that Britain's "global city" has been imagined and represented in literature, history, the arts, and popular culture, from the mid–nineteenth century to the present day. American and British contributors examine a variety of topics, ranging from poetry to architecture, from dance music to gay pornography, from "tube" maps to the role of Bangladeshi communities in shaping contemporary London politics. Broadly interdisciplinary and deeply attentive to London's historical diversity, the book is unified by its attention to a single question: How have the many imaginations and representations of London shaped—and been shaped by—history and culture? The answers provided within this volume offer the chance to view London in surprising new ways.

Iain Sinclair's classic early text, Lud Heat, explores mysterious cartographic connections between the six Hawksmoor churches in London. In a unique fusion of prose and poetry, Sinclair invokes the mythic realm of King Lud, who according to legend was one of the founders of London, as well as the notion of psychic 'heat' as an enigmatic energy contained in many of its places. The book's many different voices, including the incantatory whispers of Blake and Pound, combine in an amalgamated shamanic sense that somehow works to transcend time. The transmogrifying intonations and rhythms slowly incorporate new signs, symbols and sigils into the poem that further work on the senses. This was the work that set the 'psychogeographical' tone for much of Sinclair's mature work, as well as inspiring novels like Hawksmoor and Gloriana from his peers Peter Ackroyd and Michael Moorcock, and Alan Moore's From Hell.

This classic text has in recent times been fused to its contemporaneous volume, Lud Heat, but very much deserves to stand on its own. Suicide Bridge was originally published by Albion Village Press in 1979 with the sub-title A Book of the Furies, A Mythology of the South & East - Autumn 1973 to Spring 1978. As elsewhere, Sinclair saunters into the shadowy city underworld with his ever-watchful eye and roving syntax, this time probing the mythic figures from William Blake's Jerusalem and the mythical king Bladud. Previously text-bound entities such as Hand, Hyle and Kotope are made flesh and and given to foggy breath in the contemporary landscape. Addressed to "the enemy" the reader is precariously perched on the teetering bridge while the author kicks at the mythic spindles that hold it up. Sinclair's alternating, inter-penetrating prose and poetry become the uneven struts and pylons of a new concrete/abstract literary edifice. - 'One of the cliffs of Blake's and Coleridge's Albion sweeping against the walls of Everywhere...This is the landscape of another realm. We are walking over a raw and smoking surface filled with surprises. All around are the possibilities of lost tribes quietly bustling in the shadows...This is a rare jewel.' - Michael McClure

Downriver is a brilliant London novel by its foremost chronicler, Iain Sinclair. WINNER OF THE ENCORE AWARD AND THE JAMES TAIT BLACK MEMORIAL PRIZE The Thames runs through Downriver like an open wound, draining the pain and filth of London and its mercurial inhabitants. Commissioned to document the shifting embankments of industry and rampant property speculation, a film crew of magpie scavengers, high-rent lowlife, broken criminals and reborn lunatics picks over the rivers detritus. They examine the wound, hoping to expose the cause of the city's affliction . . . 'Remarkable: part apocalyptic documentary, part moth-eaten ghost story, part detective story. Inventive and stylish, Sinclair is one of the most interesting of contemporary novelists' Sunday Times 'One of those idiosyncratic literary texts that revivify the language, so darn quotable as to be the reader's delight and the reviewer's nightmare' Guardian 'Crazy, dangerous, prophetic' Angela Carter Iain Sinclair is the author of Downriver (winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Encore Award); Landor's Tower; White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings; Lights Out for the Territory; Lud Heat; Rodinsky's Room (with Rachel Lichtenstein); Radon Daughters; London Orbital, Dining on Stones, Hackney, that Rose-Red Empire and Ghost Milk. He is also the editor of London: City of Disappearances.

London Orbital is Iain Sinclair's voyage of discovery into the unloved outskirts of the city. Encircling London like a noose, the M25 is a road to nowhere, but when Iain Sinclair sets out to walk this asphalt loop - keeping within the 'acoustic footprints' - he is determined to find out where the journey will lead him. Stumbling upon converted asylums, industrial and retail parks, ring-fenced government institutions and lost villages, Sinclair discovers a Britain of the fringes, a landscape consumed by developers. London Orbital charts this extraordinary trek and round trip of the soul, revealing the country as you've never seen it before. 'My book of the year. Sentence for sentence, there is no more interesting writer at work in English'John Lanchester, Daily Telegraph 'A magnum opus, my book of the year. I urge you to read it. In fact, if you're a Londoner and haven't read it by the end of next year, I suggest you leave'Will Self, Evening Standard 'A journey into the heart of darkness and a fascinating snapshot of who we are, lit by Sinclair's vivid prose. I'm sure it will be read fifty years from now'J. G. Ballard, Observer Iain Sinclair is the author of Downriver (winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Encore Award); Landor's Tower; White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings; Lights Out for the Territory; Lud Heat; Rodinsky's Room (with Rachel Lichtenstein); Radon Daughters; London Orbital, Dining on Stones, Hackney, that Rose-Red Empire and Ghost Milk. He is also the editor of London: City of Disappearances.

Welcome to the real, unauthorised London: the disappeared, the unapproved, the unvoiced, the mythical and the all-but forgotten.