17.04.2020

There are places in London where alcoholics congregate, like the bottom of London Fields, by Broadway Market, and Camberwell Green, where if you were able to find records, or permission to dig, you’d surely find evidence of medieval drinking taverns or public houses. And if you went back further, you would discover remains of Saxon banquet halls, and that people drank there ever since a troop of Roman soldiers got sloshed on the local grog brewed by the native Britons. Maybe they were drinking to dull the pain of mental battle scars, just as the drunks there do now. The booze soaked into the earth and attracts drinkers to this day.

Round where I live the echoes of the Victorian opium dens still ring in the ears of the addicts.

I wrote a slightly pompous poem about this years ago. I have to trawl through my memory but I think it went something like this –

Years ago, I remember when

Mothers fed children laudanum

And smoke rising from the den

Masked the stench of rotting minds

But as quick as beer in the taps

Turns to piss down the drains

Years elapsed

And nothing changed

Looking through an old notebook I found this one which is much better –

Hot love

Cold pockets

Full moon

Eye sockets

Meat dreams

I can’t stop it

Just eat

Don’t knock it

MEAT DREAMS!

Don’t knock it

MEAT DREAMS!

I can’t stop it.

MEAT DREAMS!

This post isn't about the pandemic but today is my birthday (not the date of this post, this took a few days to write and research, anyway I don’t want you to know my actual birthday), so I’ll write whatever the fuck I want. Today, that’s a theory I have about the magic cosmic solidarity of East London.

Apparently after the second world war, many Nazis fled to one area in Austria, which ever since returned right wing candidates in elections. I wonder if something similar happened here, we have had wave after wave of immigration, so the people keep changing but for at least 100 years it’s been thoroughly left wing. It’s almost as if there’s a psychic solidarity that hangs in the air as if the struggles of our ancestors have soaked into the clay under the cracked concrete like the shit seeping through the walls of our ancient sewage system. 

When I say magic, I mean the real kind. Symbols take meaning from what is put into them. They mean nothing on their own. For example, the swastika is repellent because it of the horror committed under it. It’s now a repulsive, offensive symbol of inhumanity, the worst side of us, because of the millions that were murdered under it. Imagine scrawling one on someone’s front door. It would be disgusting; you could rightly get arrested for it. Think of the pain and anguish those few lines would cause, what else could you call it but a curse? It’s a black magic sigil endowed with evil power by the atrocities the Nazis committed in its name.

Before the Nazis defiled it, it represented good luck, and tantric principles to Buddhists and Hindus. The opposite of how we see it now.

If you don’t believe me check if you’ve got any money on you. What’s it worth?

Maybe nothing, depends what you believe. The British pound is a fiat currency, which means it doesn’t really mean anything. It’s worth nowt, zilch, nada. Previously it was pegged to the US dollar according to the Bretton Woods system, and the US dollar was based on the value of gold. But in 1971 the US was suffering an inflation crisis so it ended the gold standard, which gave it the ability to control the money supply and create as much debt (money) as it wanted. But the money it made has no intrinsic value, only what people agree it’s worth. It is a faith based system. In other words, magic.

Coincidentally one of the first places in England this alchemy was performed was on the boarder of the East End at the Royal Mint in the Tower of London from the year 886 until 1805 when it moved over the road to Royal Mint Court, where it operated until the 60s when it moved to Wales. In 1696 the scientist Isaac Newton, who famously codified the theory of gravity, became with warden of the Mint. He is less well known for his experiments with alchemy and writings on symbology and the the occult.

Neither of these things, the value of money, the offensiveness of the swastika, physically exist but they are definitely real. They exist in a communal space outside of physical reality. This space is sometimes called the noosphere, which sits above the geosphere and biospheres. This realm could influence our material world in other ways too. We know our actions reverberate down the generations. We all inherit our parents’ trauma, and our whole society is based on what came before. But is it possible there’s are other liminal layers of influence just as powerful but beyond our comprehension, which might not exist but could be called ‘real’?

I think so.

Each area of London has its own feel. That pissed stained alley in Whitechapel where Mary Ann Nichols’, Jack the Ripper’s first victim’s body was found, is still desolate and gloomy. She had a hard life, alcoholic, allegedly on the game at points, and sleeping rough when she wasn’t in the workhouse. Echoes of her life play out down the alley now. It runs down the side of the NHS medical centre for homeless people on Brick Lane. Maybe she was an echo of another that went way before her.

In fact, according to Ed Gliniert, with Catherine Eddows Jack was acting out two murders that happened on that spot. The first, also the first ever recorded in the East End, took place in the early 6^th century, and another when Holy Trinity Aldgate Priory stood there (now just a plaque on a wall), in 1530 when a monk stabbed a praying woman to death. In Jack’s time and still today, the site is known as Mitre Square, which itself has magic connotations. The Mitre is a cap, a bit like a pope hat, worn by the high priest during rituals in the masonic temple and the square is the most important shape in the tradition, symbolising morality. Mitre Square was also home to one of London’s first masonic lodges.

Plotted on a map, the first three site the first three bodies were left form a dark equilateral triangle over the East End, while the second three, form a smaller equilateral triangle. Together, the two shapes form the most important masonic shape, the Seal or Solomon or the Star of David. Probably nothing. 

A little correction on the last post I wrote about Jack the Ripper getting his name from the press, he actually first called himself that in a taunting letter to the Central News Agency. In a later letter he also referred to himself as Saucy Jack.

There are many interesting theories as to the true identity of Jack the Ripper, with compelling evidence, including the ritualistic, black magic nature of the killings, implicating the Freemasons, the Metropolitan Police and the Royal Family. That might be one for another day…

Violence is also a dark tradition. Many of our most notorious gangsters and gruesome murderers are from round here. The Krays, the Ratcliff murders, and todays epidemic of knife violence and postcode warfare rages here. Just 20 years ago, a street in Hackney was dangerous enough to earn the national nickname Murder Mile. Between 2000 and 2002, 12 men were shot dead on that street alone. Hackney and Bethnal Green were the scenes of some of the worst rioting during the August 2011 riots that broke out after Mark Duggan was shot by police just up the road in Tottenham. 

But our area has noble traditions too, of solidarity, anti racism, leftist revolutionary movements and trade unionism maybe that maybe come out of this hardship.

The constituency has a new member of parliament, Apsana Begum. She is the first MP to wear a hijab, and I had the honour of co-signing her electoral nomination papers last year. As yet she is mostly unproven, but will hopefully fulfil her promise as one of the most credible left wingers in the Labour Party.

Arguably our best ever prime minister, Clem Atlee, who over saw the creation of the welfare state and the NHS started his career very close by as a councillor in the borough of Stepney (now part of the borough of Tower Hamlets which was created in 1965).

At the 1945 election Mile End elected Phil Piratan, one of only four Communist Party of Great Britain members to become members of parliament.

The area is also notable for being home the offices of the famous Suffragette Sylvia Pankhurst on Bow Road and later on Roman Road. Sylvia differed from her mother, in that she believed all women should have the vote, not just middle class property owning woman. The Pankhursts were originally from Manchester, but Sylvia was attracted to the revolutionary spirit of the East End, the fighting spirit also seems to have had some effect, she was much more militant than her mother. Kier Hardy, the founder of the British Labour Party was arrested at on of Sylvia's meetings in the area.

Battle of Cable Street memorial on the side of St George's town hall in Shadwell. 

Everyone knows the story of the Battle of Cable Street 1936, when socialists, anarchists and anti racists teamed up using the famous anti-fascist slogan of the Spanish Civil War NO PASARAN! (they shall not pass) to block Oswald Mosely’s British Union of Fascists provocative march through the Jewish East End.

The anti-racist solidarity of the area can be traced back a little earlier to 1912 when the Irish dockers and Jewish tailors had consecutive strikes. Both groups supported each other with strike funds and mutual aid, that friendship carried on.

Further back, in 1888, the year of Jack the Ripper’s killing spree, the famous women and teenaged girls’ Fairfield strikes took place in near by Bow in a match factory now converted to flats. The memorial to the event is now walled off and no longer visible to the public.  Another example, along with the Bell foundry, of the theft of our collective history.

But this history is all over the place, if you just wonder around and open your eyes. I’ve lived here for years, but only yesterday, out walking my dog I noticed on the side of St George’s Town Hall, with the famous Battle of Cable Street mural on the side, this plaque dedicated to the East Enders who joined the International Brigade to fight the fascists in the Spanish Civil War. George Orwell, went to report on the war, but picked up a rifle and joined the fight with the Internationals. He was shot in the neck, he survived but his voice was reduced to a strangled croak, this is speculated to be the reason there are no recordings of him.

On another of his adventures, George Orwell got himself arrested and put away up the road in Bethnal Green Police Station. He wrote about the experience in his essay Clink. There was a prison scene in a story he was working on, but didn’t feel like he could be authentic without experiencing it first hand, so he "drank five pints and the best part of a bottle of whiskey" and got himself nicked for ‘drunk and incapable.’ People had doubted the veracity of the story, but recently court records were found that confirmed it. It’s a great essay.

At the time George was living in Fieldgate Street, five minutes walk from my flat, next to the Royal London Hospital, in a doss house that Joseph Stalin also stayed in in 1907, the very building my partner lived in for a while almost exactly 100 years later. He described the squalor there as bad as any slum in Calcutta, which he visited working as an imperial police officer. It’s still pretty fucking ropy to this day.

There’s kindness in the cockney spirit. One of the defining customs of propah cockneys is pearly kinds and queens. The dress up in bizarre outfits covered in mother of pearl buttons sewn into talismanic magic symbols like horse shoes and bells, and collecting money for charity. The tradition has spread across London, every borough has its own pearly royal family, titles are hereditary, handed down from one generation to the next.

Philanthropy has always existed here too. Cockneys are famous for looking out for one another, as are the Bengali community who moved in later.

Again, out walking yesterday I took the time to look properly at this memorial for the first time. I discovered it is dedicated to a local brewer who used his profits to set up a school for the local poor.

Update, out walking a few days after I wrote this, I took a different turn from usual and came across this, I think it's the school the brewer built. 

In 1870 Dr Thomas Bernado founded the famous children’s adoption home in Stepney following an outbreak of cholera that killed a lot of parents. Over the years, the charity has been implicated in scandals, some involving Dr Bernardo himself kidnapping children, which he admitted to but called it ‘philanthropic abduction’ and said the ends of getting the children into care justified the means.

The Salvation Army was also founded in the East End in 1865. It has its controversies today, but in those days took up many functions that weren’t otherwise provided, setting up homeless shelters, soup kitchens, and what we would now call safe spaces for women fleeing abuse and prostitution.

Over the road from Jack the Chipper at the bottom of Whitechapel Road, is the Altab Ali park. Altab Ali was a Bengali garment worker from Wapping who was killed in a racist attack, one of 31 racist killings of black and Asian people in the city between 1975-1981. In response 7000 East Londoners marched behind his coffin to Downing Street. But not long after 150 National Front thugs rampaged down Brick Lane smashing windows and threatening people. In response the Hackney and Tower Hamlets Defence Committee called a solidarity strike, 8,000 people walked off their jobs, including workers at the Dagenham Ford plant, East End restaurant and clothing workers, school kids and government workers. They blocked the roads and had solidarity street parties. Eventually, thanks to their struggle the park Altab was killed in was named after him.

Around the time Stephen Lawrence was killed by racists at a bus stop in Eltham (still a bit St George’s cross flags and shaved heads), Quddus Ali was beaten almost to death in Tower hamlets. In 1993 the British National Party had another rampage down Brick Lane, a week later they had their first ever councillor elected in the neighbouring Isle of Dogs, council workers there went on strike in protest. Meanwhile the BNP carried on selling newspapers at the top of Brick Lane, as a way to provoke the Bengali community that lived round there. In response the Anti-Nazi League called a protest. Hundreds of people showed up and chased the racists from their pitch, they’ve never come back. The next year the 40,000 people with Trades Union Congress Unite Against Racism marched through the area.

I had my own taste of anti-racist solidarity when in 2011 the English Defence League, inheritors of the defunct BNP’s group of lost sad wankers, marched through the area. The racists were met with a much larger counter demonstration who the Bengali community welcomed with cups of tea, biscuits and orange squash. That day was the first time I went into a mosque, I left with a much stronger feeling of solidarity with my neighbours. Once again, the racists’ plan backfired.  

Each of these events, these marches and strikes are rites, that strengthen the bonds that don’t physically exist.

East London has magic built into its arteries and bones, often but not always of a dark nature. We know that after the Great Fire in 1666, Christopher Wren and his assistant Nicholas Hawksmoor wanted to turn the capital into the new Jerusalem. They didn’t manage the grand piazzas and boulevards they wanted but did succeed in endowing greatest city on Earth with magic. Not many people realise they laid the new East End out, not according to the most pragmatic, direct routs, but according to sacred geometry, and Kabbalistic and Old Testament mathematics. Hence why Hawksmoor’s churches form a pentagram across the city.  

To this day, there is anarchist graffiti all over the place and Labour, Jewish Anarchists, Queer Jews Burn Nazis and other leftist stickers going up all the time. To me these are magical glyphs and spells, the effort of which keep our faith in the spirit of solidarity alive. Rather than the enormous amount of money required to produce the black magic invocations of capital called adverts that make us believe in brands, its demonic manifestations, our magic only requires faith, effort and hope.

This was put up by the Special Patrol Group, a gang of anarchist or leftist/anti-advertising artists who commandeer advertising spaces. They seem to operate in East London a lot. This was on Commercial Road a year or so ago, on the boarder of Shadwell and Whitechapel. Interesting article about them here - https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/media/2015/09/how-special-patrol-group-are-encouraging-public-hack-advertising-space

On the way to work last year. On Cambridge Heath Road, near the corner of Whitechapel and Mile End Roads. The dishonesty in the way our own mythology has been stolen to create a lie to trick us into drinking poison, really jumped out at me that morning. Undeniably a form of black magic.

Just a quick note about calling brands demons. Wikipedia tells us “A demon is a supernatural being, typically associated with evil, prevalent historically in religion, occultism, literature, fiction, mythology, and folklore”

What are brands other than supernatural? They are above and outside of nature. They don’t exist apart from in our imaginations, but are nevertheless enormously powerful and endowed with character and consciousness. Just like demons. Brands are invoked with the sole purpose of tricking your money out of you like an evil spirit or a leprechaun. I can’t think of a better name.

No idea what this one is about, but I've seen it a couple of times now and I really like it. 

Since starting work on this, everywhere I look I see these little pieces of scrawled moral support, or stickers telling you you’re not mad, there are other people out there who can see how fucked up everything is too, despite how the BBC presents the world. People who believe things could be better. Other times it’s just rage and pain on the walls, or the marks of someone desperate to prove they exist.

Where are they now? These scribblers seem to have had an unusual eye for detail, you don't usually see the exact time of day as well as the date they left their mark. Maybe it's so they can go back there.

Among the obscenities you commonly find on toilet walls, you find the occasional thing that reads like a prayer, or a jolt of truth. Passing through Shoreditch the other day, I saw a picture of Philip Green painted on a wall with the word GREED across it. Unfortunately, I didn’t manage to stop for a photo. Interesting considering it was right between the glass and steel vampiric capitalist necropolis in the Square Mile, and the low lying neon temple district of its host/parasite servant priesthood on Shoreditch High Street.

Researching this piece, I skimmed through an Iain Sinclair book and came across this passage.

Urban graffiti is all too often a signature without a document, an anonymous autograph. The tag is everything, as jealously defended as the Coke or Disney decals. Tags are the marginalia of corporate tribalism. Their offence is to parody the most visible aspect of high capitalist black magic.

I guess I wasn’t the first to have that thought.

The revolutionary spirit has been around here a long time. Since at least the 1381 Peasants’ Revolt. The revolt was sparked by a poll tax, the third in as many years, which took no account of the individual being taxed’s wealth. The same kind of tax that caused riots in 1989. People had issues since the introduction of the Statue of Labourers was imposed a maximum wage for workers, which was supposed to fix the spiralling cost of labour following the black death.

The rebellion started out in Essex and Kent, on the 13^th of June the Kentish men arrived in London, where they met the 14-year-old Richard the second, at Mile End, about two miles up the road from Brick Lane. In order to quell the rebellion, the king offered cheap land, an easing of trade restrictions, and the end of serfdom and forced labour.

Meanwhile, down the road at the Tower that gives Tower Hamlets its name, another contingent of rebels arrived. The story is the guards forgot to raise the drawbridge and drop the portcullis, but it’s likely they sympathised with the rebels and let them in. A contemporary account from someone called Jean Fossiart describes it like this “the men-at-arms guarding the Tower put up no resistance, and the peasants shook their hands as brothers and stroked their beards in a friendly fashion.”

This is the only time the Tower has been breached since William the Conqueror built the White Tower in 1078.

Unfortunately, once the rebels were placated the king conveniently forgot all the promises he made and nothing really changed.

And in 1450 another revolt took place in London. This time the rebels decapitated the Archbishop of Canterbury and the king’s treasurer Sir James Fiennes, and put their heads on poles on London Bridge. The rebellion failed when Londoners, appalled at the violence, rescinded their support.

Perhaps that rebel spirit comes from all the industry that the area’s been home to for so long. But why were so many workshops attracted there? It’s a similar story in Paris, New York, Glasgow, Helsinki in fact a lot of cities, that have their working class and poorer districts in the east. In London it could be because the Thames flows west to east, so the further east you were the more shit there’d be in the river. It was also the home to the docks, where the river was widest. But Paris is the opposite, the Seine flows the other way. Maybe it’s the direction of the prevailing winds, blowing the pollution from the factories to the east.

But factories have closed and the spirit remains.