Author(s): Iain Sinclair

History

London is a city of disappearances and fallible memories. Alongside the contemporary city, of noise and celebrity, is that other city: of the dead, the unvoiced, the erased. Here there are fabulous identities which, freed from their mundane reality, survive as eternal fictions, and urban myths with more blood and vigour than the contemporary cartoons of manufactured notoriety. Iain Sinclair has long been fascinated by interzones, cracks, crannies, 'lost' biographies and myths of place. In London: City of Disappearances, he turns away from official versions and approved histories, and, with the help of Tibor Fischer, Rachel Lichtenstein, Nicholas Royle, Sarah Wise and others, brings to light the fugitive scraps, ragpicker's bundles, faded newspaper cuttings and patterns in the dust.