Iain Sinclair has long been one of our favourite biographers of London (we were thrilled to talk to him a little while ago) so we have been waiting for him to pen something on last Thursday's events from his own unique perspective. He did so today in The Guardian:
One week on and Hackney transport is the performance art it always was, but more so. The audience is sharper, more alert, quicker to respond... We have been told, but we didn't believe it coming from that source, the politicians, that there were people out there who didn't know us but who wanted to kill us. Blow us apart. Destroy the idea of the city as a community, a viable organic entity. They wanted, above all else, to activate one strand of urban life: paranoia. The dark thing that is always beside us, nudged by every 20-minute hold in an Underground tunnel, close heat, no voice, or the voice of some distant robot...
It's quite a piece and we urge all our readers to digest it before heading home past the Standard panic boards. Or if you have time before the trip home there is a vigil to attend - here's Ken:
At 6pm Londoners are invited to a vigil in Trafalgar Square to remember those who died, to show that London will not be moved from our city's goal of building an open, tolerant, multi-racial and multi-cultural society showing the world its future and to thank the heroes of the transport and emergency services who saved so many lives last Thursday... There will be readings and poems by prominent Londoners, different communities and some of those from the transport and emergency services
