This is an account of the second leg of my mildly cynical (though open-minded) dérive, for which I am trampling the word “Bollocks” onto the streets of Hackney.

The first “O” of my “Bollocks” looks as though it has been slammed sideways into a ramp, stamped on, then hit with an iron bar. So it’s quite unsurprising that I am welcomed near my starting point by the pick-a-fight phrase “Batty Boy”, inscribed on a vandalised electricity box. A graphologist might deduce an extrovert from the forward-sloping scribble, but I divine at least a pinprick of yearning.

Any aggression is left behind me as I leave Lynmouth Road and follow the curve into Oldhill Street, a mostly commercial parade that looks like a film set and is filled with illusions. The houses at the near end are wide and shallow, with round-arched doors and upper stories that are crested with triangular lintels. There’s a sweet, zuckerbrot appeal to these buildings, but their folksy frontages disguise unimaginative boxes that cost £400 per week to rent .

The street is home to a mix of mainly Jewish businesses, selling flowers, shoes, fruit, Chasidic men’s costume, wines and spirits, klezmer (and, for all I know, lots of other genres), toys, fish and meat. With an astonishing lack of delicacy, the windows of the phone box near Mesoiroh Books are blanked out with an advertisement for a “2xCD Deluxe Pack” called “Lust”.

Whilst the street has a predominantly Jewish character for most of the day, by mid afternoon it is busy with people of many different races and religions who arrive to collect their children from Tyssen Primary School. The school has new buildings with walls of varnished wood and bright red paint, inset with windows like portholes. The effect makes the school look disconnected from its surroundings, as though it has been moored temporarily on the street in preparation for a longer voyage. Surprisingly, though, the school is one of the strongest links the street has with its past: it sits on a wider area of land that once belonged to the Tyssen family, which by 1830 owned the largest estate in Hackney.

The church on the corner of Oldhill Street and Clapton Common is dedicated to St Thomas the Apostle. Whilst it has a pleasant 19th-century tower, the rest of the earlier building was destroyed by a bomb in 1940. Its replacement is (on the outside at least) dull and unimaginative: not a fitting tribute to the saint whose symbol is the builder’s T-square.

I cover only a short stretch of Clapton Common, past some abandoned public toilets on the one side, and a small green on the other. Ahead of me is a tiny used car pound with a dilapidated cabin for an office. Next to that is the Swan. This is a no-nonsense working class boozer, and I like it. Last year, as I sat in the concreted beer garden out front, I watched a party of two chubby women and a guy (with a fag tucked in his baseball cap) drink champagne out of glasses more suited to gin and tonic. In the background I could hear only the traffic and the usual loud mouth yelling at a woman who had just arrived:

“Oi darling. You’re a schoolteacher, ain’t you?”

“How did you know that?”

“You look like one”.

The used car pound and the pub are both sentinels to a neglected stretch of Braydon Road. It’s littered with cans, and home to battered and flaking garages, steel grilles, an abandoned shop-front. Refuse sacks and graffiti are both used as territorial markers at the entrance to a small local authority estate on Clarke Path. I veer past it and continue down Braydon Road, dull in its main stretch as it was dilapidated at its outset. Then I join Kyverdale Road and follow it south to complete my battered ‘O’. It’s a private place: you can hear people talking in their homes, but you see few in the street. And like my walk that traced the letter ‘B’, I see lots of skips and builders’ rubble. This is where people lock themselves away to live, just on the edge of the illusory, yet busy Oldhill Street.

Coming soon: more bollocks as I follow the paths of ‘L’.

Similar posts on this blog

• Dérivative Bollocks
• Picking a fight with fame
• Dérivative Bollocks (Stage 1): B
• Dérivative Bollocks (Stage 4): L (ii)
• Common Ground in N16