Iain Sinclair returns to The Wanstead Tap, again in conversation
with John Rogers, author of This Other London

Iain Sinclair
Living with Buildings

Walking with Ghosts
– On Health and Architecture

One of Britain’s finest writers embarks on a journey to explore the relationship between our health and the buildings that surround us.

We shape ourselves, and are shaped in return, by the walls that contain us. Buildings affect how we sleep, work, socialise and even breathe. They can isolate and endanger us but they can also heal us. We project our hopes and fears onto buildings, while they absorb our histories.

In Living With Buildings, Iain Sinclair embarks on a series of expeditions – through London, Marseille, Mexico and the Outer Hebrides. He explores the relationship between sickness and structure, and between art, architecture, social planning and health, taking plenty of detours along the way. Walking is Sinclair’s defensive magic against illness and, as he moves, he observes his surroundings: stacked tower blocks and behemoth estates; halogen-lit glasshouse offices and humming hospitals; the blackened hull of a Spitalfields church and the floating mass of Le Corbusier’s radiant city.

And he peels back layers of life. A father and his daughter, who has a rare syndrome, visit the estate where they once lived. Developers clink champagne glasses as residents are ‘decanted’ from their homes. A box sculpted from whalebone, thought to contain healing properties, is returned to its origins with unexpected consequences. Part investigation, part travelogue, Living With Buildings brings the spaces we inhabit to life as never before.

“A remarkable book; surprisingly gripping and often very moving… stories weave and unweave over the book’s course, patterning thought into a complex built environment, at once disorientating and illuminating.” – Robert Macfarlane.

Iain Sinclair was born in South Wales. He went to school in the west of England and university in Dublin. He lives, walks and writes in east London. His books include Downriver, winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Encore Prize, Lights Out for the Territory, London Orbital, Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire, American Smoke and The Last London.