Came to me highly regarded with 5stars in Stewart Lee's round up of the books he read in 2017.
I like London, I like Stewart Lee and I like social commentary pieces so I thought I'd give it a go.
I found the prose inaccessible and, having got through one chapter really didn't have a clue what I had just read, I just couldn't follow it. Second chapter the same so I've given up.
Maybe it has some really great things to say, but I couldn't get at them. ( )

I know I once read, and I suppose it may still be true, that London is the most surveilled city in the world, based on the number of CCTV cameras per person. An awareness of this reality is one of many that hovers in the margins of Iain Sinclair's Last London, but the lines of the pages are Sinclair's own indefatigable observation, overhearing, trailing, tailing, and cultural auditing, as he orbits through Olympicopolis, "Shardenfreude," and a variety of other psychogeographical states and locales. The text combines his own stream-of-consciousness flâneur experiences with kledomancy, graffiti transcription and exegesis, literary anecdote and gossip, and historical research.

In the 1925 story "He," H.P. Lovecraft wrote of New York City "the unwhisperable secret of secrets—the fact that this city of stone and stridor is not a sentient perpetuation of Old New York as London is of Old London and Paris of Old Paris, but that it is in fact quite dead, its sprawling body imperfectly embalmed and infested with queer animate things which have nothing to do with it as it was in life." In the twenty-first century New York's unlife has since spread to cities throughout the United States, and through the neoliberal metastases of capital it now spans the world, infecting even the London and Paris that Lovecraft used to supply a contrasting sense of durable urban vitality. (Not that HPL himself ever visited either city.) Arriving at this conclusion independently, Sinclair seeks in this book to preserve his observations of the "last London" as it succumbs to the virus.

The press of gentrification, speculative property redevelopment, and globalized real estate investment all contribute to the sense of expiration here. It's the sterility and expropriation that are so fatal, not the decay and mutation. The book's not sad, though. "I love it," Sinclair writes of the "panoramic edgeland vista" he encounters in his effort to walk to Barking, under the spectre of the US Presidential election of Donald Trump (241). The final chapter is festive in a manner that might take less artistic people 20 to 40 micrograms to achieve. Also notable throughout is Sinclair's network of fellow creatives, who accompany him and serve as rests, termini, and haunters of his walks.

Many allusions to contemporary literature, politics, commerce, and so on are made at a rapid pace with little assistance to the reader's comprehension. I guess that's what search engines are for, when it seems important. The book is longish for its style, but Sinclair's elliptical rants and musings all add up to a worthwhile read. He's an author I've been curious about for many years, and I'm glad to have finally gotten around to reading this very current work. ( )

I’ll be visiting London this fall for the first time since my honeymoon 23 years ago. In anticipation of all the changes that await me, I decided to check out Iain Sinclair’s The Last London. Although he’s a well-known novelist in the UK, I’m only familiar with him through his appearances in filmmaker John Roger’s YouTube videos of his walks around literary London.

Based on the description, I was expecting a melancholy tract lamenting the relentless modernization and homogenization of the ancient city, and that’s certainly plays a big part, but on the whole this book is much more nuanced and multi-faceted than that. First and foremost, this is a challenging read. Sinclair has a very unique way of coming at things and, as a result, his writing is often unnecessarily complex and circuitous. I frequently found myself unsure of the point he was trying to make. There are also many references to art – literature and literary figures, in particular – much of which was not familiar to me. But the reward for toughing it out are moments of undeniable brilliance and humor.

To the younger crowd, he might come off as curmudgeonly, particularly when he carps about the dangers of bike traffic or obsessive cell phone dependency, but that’s also when he’s at his most hilarious. Two of the book’s funniest passages are simply snippets of overheard phone conversations and a list of slogans taken off posters pasted up in his beloved neighborhood of Hackney. It seems that Sinclair sees globalization as blurring the edges of London (and, by extension, all cities), as it bleeds into the rest of the world, losing what makes it unique and making it indistinguishable from any city, anywhere.

For all its dry humor, keen observation, sardonic wit and obvious affection, The Last London makes me a bit heartsick for all that’s been lost in the two decades since last I saw that amazing city. ( )

This book about Sinclair's wanderings around he City of London has almost fictional feel to it. An almost novelistic encounter with peoples and places: the Vegetative Buddha. I found his story of the Society of St. Mrgaret interesting as a fellow Anglican being sympathetic to Anglo-Catholic causes. He treks the Overground Railway, an unheralded aspect of London Transport. Then there is Shangri-la and the Haggerston Baths - not really sure they are findable. He makes it down to Croydon to establish a link with Sebald. He explores the Thames estuary beyond Gravesend and very much an edge place. He ends with Brexit and what can that mean for London. Unfortunately, this review book did not contain the index, which mkes it problematic for checking things out. ( )

Blurbs indicate The Last London is Sinclair's coda to a lifetime's commentary on London's devolution. It's unclear to me now whether I inferred that myself before cracking the book, or applied it unconsciously after reading that and perhaps other promotional material. The title contains an implied judgment, but the subtitle adds ambiguous nuance to that last (and I suspect editors supplied the subtitle if not the title).

Now I've read it, I have neither the impression The Last London attempts to summarise nor to exemplify Sinclair's position, and the only emblematic passages I noted are less memorable encapsulations of what I'd read in Ghost Milk. True, individual essays can be read as a summary: for example, "Brexit" ends with dates like a tombstone, "1975-2016", but are those dates for London or for Sinclair's walkabouts? Other essays on the excavation trend --London's expansion down rather than up or outward into suburbs-- or urban archaeology are the most interesting, but these I found additive more than providing any sigma summation.

The rest I found interesting but not for any insights into London, particularly.

The last London is a lost London, a city of fracture and disappearance. [162]

Perhaps a more instructive view is of Sinclair's essays comprising his literary leave-taking, and not an argument that London has reached a culmination. Sinclair departs the London he knows even as he resides in Hackney, the city around him dissolving to a point he's left it without having gone anywhere.

I wouldn't think this a suitable place to begin reading Sinclair, even within his professed docunovel ouvre. It is pleasingly free of plot or strongly-drawn characters, allowing significance to arise from the interaction of the text and the reader's own musings. This gauzy character suits the subject, I think, though perhaps others will only find reason for complaint. I brought recollections of cultural critique from prior Sinclair, asked what this new narrative would say about urban development and about London character, and the result was satisfying. Still, I anticipate stronger impressions and more lasting meaning from prior London docunovels. ( )