Lights Out For The Territory, 2013

Lights Out For The Territory, 2013

This was taken on a train bound for Charing Cross, London, UK.

Lights Out For The Territory  is a volume of essays by Iain Sinclair, with illustrations by Marc Atkins. It was published in 1997.

The book is structured around 9 walks through London and was published at a time when psychogeography was a new buzz-word.  On his travels he discovers a maze of symbols, ancient and modern and pieces together a coherent, occultist new version of the capital.

Here’s what it says on the back cover: “Iain Sinclair walks the streets of London compulsively, and reads the hidden language of the city like no other writer… [the book] walks the reader into a deranged remapping of London, and Sinclair’s strange connections between places and people take on an integrity of their own. London is scoured in acid humour.”

And here’s the first paragraph:

The notion was to cut a crude V into the sprawl of the city, to vandalise dormant energies by an act of ambulant signmaking. To walk out from Hackney to Greenwich Hill, and back along the river Lea to Chingford Mount, recording and retrieving the messages on walls, lampposts, door jambs: the spites and spasms of an increasingly deranged populace…

Steady on!

In our house, this book can be found: dining room, right-hand bookshelves, third shelf down.

* * *

Thanks to the usual suspects (John, Deanne and Terry) for title shenanigans and Richard at CK Ponderings for being a super-cool collaborator. Our latest collaboration can be found on Richard’s blog.