Ghost Milk: Calling Time on the Grand Project

2011 | Travel

Beginning in his east London home many years before it will be invaded by the Olympian machinery of global capitalism, Sinclair strikes out near and far in search of the forgotten and erased. He travels from the mouth of the Thames to Oxford, crosses Morecambe Bay in the footsteps of drowned Chinese cockle pickers, and visits an Athenian, post-Olympics landscape of vast and deserted stadia. It is a story of incident and accident, of the curious meeting the bizarre. Sinclair writes of being a labourer in Stratford, of Orwellian steps to ban a book launch in a library, and of the fundamentalist visions of J.G. Ballard. Stories of police raids and mass expulsions jostle with accounts of failed grand projects: the Millennium Dome, Thames Gateway, and numerous other half-completed, ill-advised or abandoned structures. Burrowing under the perimeter fence of the grandest of Grand Projects - the giant myth that is 2012's London Olympics - "Ghost Milk" is a road map to a possible future as well as Iain Sinclair's most powerful statement yet on the throwaway impermanence of the present.

Iain Sinclair (Author)