Read it in Books:The Last London.

"Give me a lever of attention and one fixed point and I'll move the world" - Iain Sinclair.

Where does London begin? Where does London end? I've lived here for twenty-four years and I've walked right the way round the city and even I couldn't tell you exactly. Iain Sinclair has lived here far longer than me and is widely regarded to be, along with Peter Ackroyd, one of the finest and most incisive writers when it comes to defining and documenting the city and even he isn't totally sure.

In 2017, aged 72, Sinclair set out on a series of psychogeographical perambulations across the capital in a hope to discover what has changed and what has remained of the London he first encountered as a much younger man. To see if he could discover secret histories, untapped energies, and ancient forces stored in the lanes, lines, and loam of London. To see if London had changed beyond all recognition, to see if London has lost its soul, to see if London, essentially, was still London.

These were compiled into a book, The Last London:True Fictions from an Unreal City, and the journey begins in Haggerston Park, "where James Mason staggered and died in the Belfast snow of Carol Reed's 1947 film of Odd Man Out", designed by Rupert Lyell Thorpe to invoke the Art Deco concrete boat buildings of the thirties more often seen in places like St Leonards-on-Sea. It takes Sinclair passed filled in basins, Arts and Crafts convents, and a boarded up Children's Hospital in limbo while it waits for the right development package.

Sinclair's journey continues past the "hypodermic spire" of George Dance's church of St Leonard in Shoreditch, past the "anonymous hotel rooms of back-street Euston" where Walter Sickert imagined, and painted, "laboured coitus" behind "heavy curtains" on "goosefeather mattresses", and on to Whitechapel, Stepney, and Mile End in pursuit of Sebald's fictional Austerlitz. En route he imagines "bottled flashbacks of John Healy's The Grass Arena".

When he walks through Finsbury Park and Broadway Market, with its wonderfully named Cat and Mutton Bridge, he sees kerb-crawlers, rats, bored and edgy security guards, betting shops, factory outlets for Burberry, Aquascutum, and Pringle, and mutilple basement excavations for home owners who see their homes as chips in a game of global capitalism. Barges sell Beatrix Potter books, offer haircuts, yoga, and homemade cakes. The ruins of old London rub up against the things that make up new, gentrified, London.

His walks take him to Waterlow Park in Highgate, to Waltham Abbey (for a five day trek to the south coast, another abbey in fact - Battle), and to Croydon (where the London Overground gives up the ghost and London itself abdicates, "the heretic's Santiago de Compostela") via Surrey Quays, Shadwell, Sydenham, and New Cross, all the way treating us to discursive digressions on maritime history, Italian immigration in to London, and even the Honor Oak tree near my flat under which it is said Elizabeth I sat, giving it its name, on May Day 1602.

Forest Hill's Horniman Museum and its collection of tribal masks, stuffed animals, and ethnomusicology gets a look in too. Which is nice. Other walks lead to Tilbury ("the essence of entropy"), Gravesend ("an English Calais where fig trees thrive on the heat left in the walls of abandoned riverside industries") and Barking which, in the form of the Barking Riverside, Sadiq Khan was trying to recreate as some kind of Barcelona-on-Thames. On these walks his thoughts turn to the 2013 funeral of Margaret Thatcher, the Poll Tax, and witchfinders. Subjects that are not necessarily unconnected but then nothing is in Sinclair's London.

There are excellent turns of phrase about how "we have learnt how to make a ritual of grief", how Donald Trump is "a perma-tanned bagpipe held in place by weight of hair", and how the Boris bikes (actually a Ken Livingstone initiative) allow "clients for a modest charge to pedal around inner London advertising Barclays Bank". Or, now, Santander.

He's not keen on The Shard ("a church spire with no denomination and no faith but that of money") but his hatred for everything to do with the Olympics (he mentions it a bit too much) is total and emanates from the pages of the book like smoke from an oil refinery. The Overground, "the ginger line", is seen as "one of London's transmuted Olympic rings", Shia funded Westfield casinos corrupt the project further, and when the Olympic stadium is renamed the London Stadium its new hosts West Ham Utd hit a string of particularly poor form. It is, to Sinclair, the Death Star. A super weapon used to destroy London from within.

The London under threat for bland Olympification is not always a pretty one but it's not always an ugly one either. It's a megalopolis of swerving joggers, free copies of Metro, gasholders, duckweed, Tesco's carrier bags emblazoned with the slogan EVERY LITTLE HELPS, bicycle balconies, coughing coots, and uniformed Academy kids. More than anything else Sinclair sees, among "the Babel of misunderstood tongues", London becoming, like every other large city on the planet, a place of sameness, a place of "managed alienation".

A place where notices are affixed to park railings encouraging people to report rough sleepers, a place of Chinese owned newly built canalside apartments, a place of artisan bakeries,a place where every sentence kicks off with the word 'so', a place where the urban middle class flood the streets on a flotilla of Bromptons, and a place where properties are purchased by newly rich Chinese businessmen who have no intention of ever putting a foot in them. A simulacrum of London, Sinclair laments, that has replaced the real London on the site of the real London. Londoners made tourists in a managed mock up of their own city.

Sinclair uses words like bedizen, charivari, colophon, convulvulus, eidetic, eidolon, eruv, excarnate, housecarl, klatch, lamasery, maquillage, mephitic, midden, neurasthenic, omphalos, phylactery, quiddity, rattletrap, repined, susurration, thegn, tidewrack, transhumance, ullage, and widdershins - and even one the dictionary refuses to help with:- bubucle, . He quotes WG Sebald, Edgar Allan Poe, Georges Simenon, and Thomas Pynchon and he references William Blake, Karl Marx, George Orwell, HG Wells, Nicholas Hawksmoor, TS Eliot, JG Ballard, WB Yeats, Kafka, Walter Benjamin, Jean-Luc Godard, Thomas Mann, Wittgenstein, Stewart Lee, Derek Jarman, Carol Reed, Antoni Gaudi, Mervyn Peake, Charles Saatchi, Captain Beefheart, Don DeLillo, Dvorak, Alred Jarry, Ayn Rand, John Clare, Andrzej Wajda, John Berger, Michael Moorcock, David Adjaye, Will Self, Nicholas Serota, Tony Robinson, Idris Elba, Peter Mandelson, and Lindsay Anderson. Even Fred West.

He calls on artists like Van Gogh, Picasso, Bosch, Bruegel, JMW Turner, David Hockney, Francis Bacon, Magritte, James Ensor, Joseph Beuys, Anselm Kiefer, Wyndham Lewis, Leon Kossoff, Joseph Cornell, Willem de Kooning, Robert Rauschenberg, Kurt Schwitters, Tracey Emin, Rachel Whiteread, Richard Wilson, Grayson Perry, Gilbert and George, Piranesi, John Minton, Bob and Roberta Smith, Richard Long, and Tacita Dean to illustrate his journeys into the darkened soul of post-Brexit, pro-business London, anti-fun, anti-culture London.

He tells of the Megalosaurus Charles Dickens imagined on Holborn Hill in Bleak House and Arthur Conan Doyle's crazed Ubermensch scientist Professor Challenger who aims to drill himself deeper into the core of the Earth than any man has done so. He sees the fantastical imaginings of these master story-tellers returning as post-truths posited by populist politicians in the form of unnecessary garden bridges, cable cars, and fracking ventures.

I enjoyed his articulate, imaginative, and righteous anger and even shared in much of it. But - and I know it's almost sacrilegious to say so - the book was not, for me, a page turner. I struggled to motivate myself to finish it, chapters dragged, the lack of narrative thrust made the prose feel more leaden than it should have done and, ultimately, except in rare excerpts, it left me unmoved which is not what I want from books about London.

But, despite this and despite his irksome habit of calling his Nokia a duncephone, I found it to be insightful and educational if rarely entertaining. Sinclair writes about London in a way I am unable to but I feel that for the first dip of my toe into his literary waters I may have been served better by his earlier books when, I understand, he wrote more positively of the city. I'm no spring chicken but Sinclair's got a couple of decades on me and at times it seems like he's justifying his move to the south coast and, like so many before him, London has served him well but has now chewed him up and spat him out. It's what London always has done and it's what London, unless Sinclair is 100% right in some of his more depressing predictions, always will do. There's nothing wrong in wanting a quiet life by the seaside or in a more rural area and it's not necessary to justify it.

Sinclair's last walk takes place in the run up to the Brexit referendum (which may explain much of his rancour) and it feels as if Sinclair is not just saying goodbye to Hackney, and London, as he moves out after forty-one years but to the Britain he'd known, loved, and been endlessly fascinated and frustrated by. Is it just the age old story of an older man moving out of the big city to retire to the coast? Or is something more sinister afoot in the body politic of British life? Iain Sinclair never specifies but he paints a broad and fantastical enough picture with his words that you're left thinking there's a bit of both going on.

"Only when we walk with no agenda does the past return" - Iain Sinclair.