I am very pleased to finally get my hands on a copy of this book to add to my Iain Sinclair collection; Liquid City by Marc Atkins and Iain Sinclair was first published in 1999 by Reaktion Books and serves as a follow-up of sorts to Sinclair’s Lights Out for the Territory published two years earlier in 1997 which saw Atkins provide intriguing accompanying photographs which brilliantly captured the essence of the book.
Atkins and Sinclair were already firm friends before the two books came together. Sinclair, twenty years Atkins senior, has recorded many of his wanderings in the heart of London and its suburbs with Atkins either recording the walks with his camera or featuring as a memory recall. By the time of this book both artists were firmly established in their respective professions and Liquid City shows them at their peak.
Sinclair begins the book with a comparison of styles, Atkins, he says, ‘employed a furious intensity’ in his capture of places, adding to his monumental collection of photographs of London, much now lost to time and redevelopment: ‘a displaced autobiography, portraits of vanished writers, demolished buildings, unique epiphanies of light that can be re-imagined but never experienced for the first time. You can’t rebuild London from this formidable catalogue, but you are free to work your own combinations’
The title of the book represents the meandering flow of the Thames and the writing and photography reflects the river. In typical Sinclair fashion he takes a part of the city (east and south-east) and visits its ghosts, backstreets and those lesser known figures from book dealers to artists and filmmakers. Sinclair is the champion of the London underdog as well as its underground. He reminds us all of the many lives lived whose legends deserve a wider audience and Atkins has provided us with a pictorial view of an ever changing landscape.
Further reading
Categories: British History and Folklore, The Reading Room
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