Iain Sinclair is coming to Wanstead Library to talk lost rivers

Iain Sinclair, London's most famous walker-with-a-notebook, is coming to Wanstead Library. On Thursday 3 December, from 7pm to 9pm, he will talk to the writer and film-maker John Rogers about Rogers' new book, Confessions of a London River Hunter.

Tickets are £6 and are sold through Newham Bookshop, which lists the evening at Wanstead Library on its ticketing page. Rogers announced the event on X, calling Sinclair "the great Iain Sinclair". It is a proper literary night in our own library, and for six quid, which is about the price of a pint.

Why Wanstead should care

Sinclair's work is rooted in London and shaped by psychogeography, from the essays of Lights Out for the Territory (1997) to London Orbital (2002), a walk round the M25, as his Wikipedia entry sets out. Rogers is a long-time fellow-traveller: he directed the documentary London Overground with Sinclair, according to his site, and the new book's cover credits Sinclair with the introduction.

The book is about the capital's lost and half-lost watercourses. Rogers says on his blog that there are said to be more than 350 rivers and streams in Greater London, and that he walked some of the least-noticed ones, from the Yeading Brook in the west to "the lost river of Leytonstone". The book is out in November from Three Imposters, and Rogers launches it at Housmans in King's Cross on 9 November.

We are not short of water ourselves, from the lakes of Wanstead Park to the Roding down the road, and anyone who has stood on a wet Wanstead Flats in January knows how much of the district is a drainage problem. It is an easy talk to walk home from, with a few new names for the puddles.

Booking

• When: Thursday 3 December 2026, 7pm to 9pm
• Where: Wanstead Library, Spratt Hall Road, E11 2RQ
• Tickets: £6 standard, via Fienta. Newham Bookshop is on 020 8552 9993 or info@newhambooks.co.uk

The library's diary is filling up, and our November what's on guide has what comes before it.