Iain Sinclair’s Early Writing

Chapter 5, ‘Iain Sinclair’s Early Writing: The Arcane Scholarship of Place’, begins by exploring the special influence of an eccentric 1914 text by Elizabeth Gordon entitled Prehistoric London: Its Mounds and Circles (1914) on Sinclair’s occult-inflected poetic geographies of London. Examining his creative exchanges with other writers, including Peter Ackroyd and Alan Moore, it explores the coterie atmosphere of Sinclair’s early work before going on to navigate his increasingly venomous and toxic vision of East London and the Thames Estuary in the period spanning 1970 to 1994, adumbrating and critiquing the parallel development of what Patrick Wright has called the ‘acid negativity’ of Sinclair’s prose.

Trends in heavy metals, polychlorinated biphenyls and toxicity from sediment cores of the inner River Thames estuary, London, UK

River islands (Ait or Eyot) within the inner tidal Thames serve as unique recorders of current and historical estuarine chemical pollution.