# Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire

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- Book: [Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire](https://www.bookquiver.com/iain-sinclair/hackney-that-rose-red-empire) ([Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire.md](https://www.bookquiver.com/iain-sinclair/hackney-that-rose-red-empire.md))
- Authors: [Iain Sinclair](https://www.bookquiver.com/iain-sinclair)
- Publisher: Penguin
- Medium: ebook
- ISBN: 978-01-4193-099-2
- Published: 2009-02-05
- Language: en_GB
- Binding: E-book

## Description

Once an Arcadian suburb of grand houses, orchards and conservatories, Hackney declined into a zone of asylums, hospitals and dirty industry. Persistently revived, reinvented, betrayed, it has become a symbol of inner-city chaos, crime and poverty. Now, the Olympics, a final attempt to clamp down on a renegade spirit, seeks to complete the process: erasure disguised as 'progress'. In this 'documentary fiction', Sinclair meets a cast of the dispossessed, including writers, photographers, bomb-makers and market traders. Legends of tunnels, Hollow Earth theories and the notorious Mole Man are unearthed. He uncovers traces of those who passed through Hackney: Lenin and Stalin, novelists Joseph Conrad and Samuel Richardson, film-makers Orson Welles and Jean-Luc Godard, Tony Blair beginning his political career, even a Baader-Meinhof urban guerrilla on the run. And he tells his own story: of forty years in one house in Hackney, of marriage, children, strange encounters, deaths.