What you see is what you get

The Wellcome Trust puts on some of the most engaging exhibitions in London and holds in its permanent collection a number of fine works. Its roots are in biomedical research, but those roots have, with modification, sprouted so many disciplines and areas of tangential enquiry that it makes perfect sense to have commissioned Iain Sinclair to write about the physical and psychological effects of buildings and places on the health of the people who inhabit them, pass through them, long to get out of them, represent them, think about them.

Sinclair’s approach is not that of a sociologist, an off-the-peg analyst of urbanism (density good, sprawl bad) or a travel writer on a journey to ‘find himself’ (in the way that they wearyingly will). He is, rather, in a typically oblique way, an investigator into the ashes of architectural determinism — the once fashionable notion, too readily dismissed, that design can dictate behaviour. Of course it can. But maybe not in the way that, for instance, ministers of the environment and health, mall barons, educational authorities or housing associations intend it to. Buildings change use. They acquire new connotations, new inhabitants. Fifty years of shipping containers have freed 19th-century warehouses from their original purposes and ceded them to a new bourgeoisie. Mutation and decay are recurrent themes of Sinclair’s work. He quotes Lynsey Hanley’s Estates: ‘Council houses were never intended to be holding cages for the poor and disenfranchised.’ Quite. But no government since 1979 has acknowledged it.

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His method is never programmatic, most often serendipitous, constantly digressive, constantly connective. He owns a multitude of gifts. One is that he has the keenest instinct for drolly telling detail. ‘No satellite dishes here, the plague buboes of poverty,’ he writes of eastern Bloomsbury, with which he was, till beckoned by the Wellcome Trust, surprisingly unfamiliar.