It is inspiring to be a writer or artist in Britain because the pressures on you are much stronger.

If it was really comfortable here for creative people, like in Scandinavian countries, where the artist is supported and everything is reasonable and liberal, then you would not get as interesting artistic responses as you do out in Hackney Wick, where everything is disappearing in front of your eyes due to the Olympics. You are forced to come up with interesting solutions.

The attack on the land is so heavily sponsored by government and local government combined that theirs seems to be the only story available, unless somebody tells another one. Anybody with enough money can find an empty piece of the map and project onto it whatever they want. It is hard to live in that state because the games of spin are so absolute, which makes it all the more important for nutty artists to come up with counter narratives.

What is happening to the libraries is alarming. I don’t use them for research these days, but the old Central Library in Mare Street, Hackney, which is now the Ocean, was very useful back in the ’60s and ’70s. I used to get tonnes of information from there and the Local History Library on Bancroft Road in Mile End, which also closed down a few years ago.

The people working in these places were very informative and could always find you dusty boxes of stuff. The person pointing you in the right direction makes the archive as much as the books, but those kinds of people are disappearing from the scene.

Since I started working in the book trade in the ’70s, I’ve grubbed around in other ways. I’ll dig into a local bookshop if there is one. I don’t do serious British Library or London Library research, or use Google much. I just use what comes up when I’m travelling around. If an interesting book that I think relates to the area or topic comes my way, I’ll read it.

I rarely take holidays – if I do, they tend to be part of a project. I went to Berlin for my next book to observe the material there. I haven’t had a sitting around on the beach holiday for years. I wouldn’t mind one, but it’s just getting harder and harder to survive these days. The older I get, the longer the hours I have to put in and the more stuff I have to do just to stay in the same place.

I think the type of literary book that I write is a pretty hard sell. Publishers are nervous. They just want celebrity memoirs. We might be forced back into the situation of putting on free events in the corners of places and publishing our own work – I can see that coming round again, things going back to being like they were when I started.

It wouldn’t be a bad thing. In fact, it might be quite a good thing.

Iain Sinclair was talking to Tim Burrows.

Ghost Milk: Calling Time on the Grand Project is published in July by Hamish Hamilton.