ABSTRACT
More than any other contemporary novelist—more even than Peter Ackroyd—Iain Sinclair builds his fiction around his ideas about London and its history. Like Ackroyd, he spins endless, numinous connections between the city's past and its present, mystical recurrences of event and character which shape the inventions of his fiction. Throughout the 1970s he was involved in a number of small-press ventures which published his own poetry and that of poets he admired, such as Brian Catling. His first significant London publication was Lud Heat in 1975. This was an unusual mélange of poetry and prose pieces which ranged from reflections on the churches designed by the architect Nicholas Hawksmoor and their presumed psychic power to diary entries and thoughts on a movie by the underground filmmaker Stan Brakhage. White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings, Sinclair's first novel, revisits all the themes that had been rehearsed in the poems and prose pieces scattered through the small-press publications of the 1970s and early 1980s.
