ABSTRACT
In Ghost Milk, Iain Sinclair (2011a) wrote a psychogeography of London and how the Olympics promised to bring an ‘astonishing future’ to the empty wilderness and ruined/ruinous city. He critiqued the aristocratic, gothic narrative that east London is a ‘wilderness’, a post-industrial wasteland, by narrating the social, sporting and built fabric that had always been there:
And then the Olympics arrived to swivel a searchlight on the dark places, to impose a fraudulent narrative. Everything they boasted of delivering, as legacy, after the dirt and dust and inconvenience, was here already. It had always been here, but they didn’t need it. They lived elsewhere.
