London is a single, swollen organism, a living entity – that’s the given we have to acknowledge. We are part of every fossil-encrusted stone, every bloodied feather. As we walk, the city absorbs us, changes us, and allows us, if we are fortunate, to make our own small contribution. The city, before the Great Fire, was a dense forest of church steeples, a stone fleet riding at anchor; every mast or trunk in communication with the next, sustained like dying trees on transmitted sugars. And now it feels, in the addiction and vertigo of the digital revolution, as if this ancient organism is wheezing, drawing its final breaths. We were never more than an extension of the geology of the Thames Valley. London slithered from that sediment, unformed and latent, some time after the Roman invasion in 43 AD. It took a few years for the trading post to establish itself as anything more than a convenient crossing of that great river. Whatever emerged from the reeking mud built protective walls from its own substance. Every pore of this monster feeds us and feeds from us. Lodging here, we have accepted a social contract that is now wounded or broken.
Iain Sinclair, The Last London: True Fictions from an Unreal City.
