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

Northwold Road is like a dialysis tube, filtering out Clapton’s poverty as it sluices towards Stoke Newington Common, appropriately known once as Cockhanger Green. As a ‘B’ road it is coloured piss-yellow on the map. The eastern end is clamped onto Upper Clapton Road, not far from a bulletproof petrol station, and clustered round with banks-turned-betting-shops, fried chicken joints, cheap electrical outlets, hairdressers, newsagents, a pentecostal soup kitchen.

This is where I got my first taste of London living. It’s a little shabbier, a lot more expensive, but not much else has changed since 1998. Only people’s clothes and some of the cars tell you that time has shifted on, mostly leaving this area behind. Again.

Now, as then, lingering is discouraged and eye-contact is forbidden. Staring at the pavement also means that it’s harder for the CCTV cameras to identify you, and given the high crime rate in this area it’s quite possible these cameras film in enough detail to actually identify people.

Heading away from Upper Clapton Road, the first landmark I see is one of the least inviting libraries I have ever seen. It has a retro sign - “Clapton Library” - jutting out of the wall, making it look like someone has opened a 1950s milk bar at the entrance to a redbrick penitentiary. I didn’t see anyone enter or leave, but I could see at least two people inside. I should have checked for signs of life.

Northwold Road continues to play chronological tricks as I travel down it. One sign, attached to the side of a building and looking a bit like one of those early 20th century fountain pen advertisements, reads:

 
The name of the Building Society is almost invisible, making ownership of the sign uncertain and leaving one wondering whether it was erected by some enterprising, early loan shark.

Here and there modern buildings have been erected in a sop to regeneration. Red bricks, blue paint, breeze block porticos with air vents sandwiched in the cracks allowed for mortar. Toytown structures storing up trouble for the future.

The older buildings will outlast them: the Sam and Annie Cohen day centre, with pseudo trades-union medallions above its entrance (”Social oOo Club; Teas oOo Welfare Rights; Transport oOo Entertainments”); the vast Victorian buildings of Northwold Primary School, with its separate entrances for Boys and Girls & Infants; the Royal Sovereign pub, defiantly traditional and set against a background of new brick and stone-clad houses.

Northwold Primary is set on a bend in the road which, once turned, leads you into a far more prosperous stretch of road. Here you won’t find history left to rot on hoardings and house sides, but carefully preserved and exhibited, even where it makes little sense. At one house, the owners have kept the remaining quarter of green glazing in one street-facing sash. The lettering suggests it (if not the pane itself) dates from the 1980s:

NORT
PINE • ST
SERV
DOORS,
CABINETS,
COLLECTIONS DELIVERY

Next to it is a pane of cheap, bubbled glass; the type that obscures the sight of people crapping in their own bathrooms.

The corner of my “L” shaped route is dominated by St Michael’s Church. This is huge, Victorian, solid, reliable, boring. There’s a vicarage next door, similarly roomy and dull. I don’t see anyone around, but the noticeboard reveals the parson is keen on building bridges with other faiths.

A right turn leads me on to Fountayne Road, one of the least interesting streets in Hackney. It has a surgery. It has some sheltered housing. The residential houses are big. The water board contractors are digging up the road. I looked harder for points of interest than at any stage so far on this dérive. I didn’t find any.

Next: time for a scratch as I tackle the second ‘O’ in ‘Bollocks’

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

On 5th November 1831, sporting men from across the country trained their field-glasses on Newmarket racecourse in Cambridgeshire. The interest was the result of a massive 1000 guinea wager between a Colonel Charité and George Osbaldeston, a north-country squire. Osbaldeston had bet that he could ride 200 miles in ten hours, provided he was allowed to use an unlimited number of horses. He was elegantly dressed for the occasion, wearing “a purple silk jacket, black velvet cap, doeskin breeches, and top boots”; and, setting off at twelve minutes past seven, he managed to cover the distance in 8 hours 42 minutes using 28 different horses, stopping only rarely to bolt down some cold partridge, bread or brandy and water.

I like to think that Osbaldeston Road in Stamford Hill is named after this stylish eccentric, but it would be a poor memorial if it were so. I wanted to get out of the place faster than the quickest horse could dream of sprinting.

The northernmost lip of this road is sphinctered by two dreary council estates, one spattered with satellite dishes, the other sealed with defensive grilles. I detected a slight edginess in the posture and glances of the passers by. The air was stained by the odour of many different people cooking in confined spaces. I didn’t feel comfortable holding my camera, so I kept it in my trouser pocket, whisking it out for only brief moments.

I learned later that Osbaldeston Road was home to Greig Strachan, a former ambulance controller who broke into a woman’s house in 1993 and tried to rape her. He fled when his victim bit hard on his tongue, dug her nails into his penis and then headbutted him. He escaped and wasn’t caught until relatively recently. This week, his sentence was reduced from eleven to nine years.

Edging away from the estates, the road gets progressively more affluent, with houses larger than any I’ve seen so far on my dérive: just large enough to have justified, in their heyday, a small and busy staff to keep them and their owners serviced. Many of these buildings are home to large families and have avoided being broken up into flats, but the occasional battered front door (including one with painted handprints slapped on the gloss) and multiple doorbells suggest that at least some have been carved up.

Like many streets in the area, there are skips and piles of earth in the road. But if there are signs of maintenance, renovation and rebuilding, they are more urgent here: the slightest hint of decay attracts vandalism. At the southern end of the street a house with an exoskeleton of scaffolding has a protective screen designed to keep destruction at bay. The boards, stupidly painted white, have been scrawled on in green, yellow and blue:

DYLAN
SPAX FOR GERRIE8)
INA GOT SPAXED
BUN A SPLIFF!
BB

Spax must be a person. Someone pathetic enough to be nicknamed Spax, or stupid enough to relish it. “Bun” has to be illiterate.

Shaking the dust of Osbaldeston Road from my feet, I turned into Cazenove Road. Less a road than a bypass flanked by houses, this thoroughfare links Upper Clapton with Stoke Newington. It’s particularly handy for those who know better than to tackle the traffic in the centre of Stamford Hill.

Cazenove is an Occitan French name, but I can’t make up my mind whether this road tips its hat to the financier or the stockbroker. The stockbroker would be more likely, but this area oscillates between evident investment and stark penny-pinching: massive (often poorly-maintained) houses, large 1930s high-rise estates, leafy groves and ill-considered gaps in the skyline. It’s a road with little coherence, like a drainage channel in which all kinds of treasure and sludge intermingle.

For an important road, with a high density of housing, there are few people to be seen. The only man who was in sharp focus, distinct from his surroundings, was walking past a car with a sandwiched front and speaking loudly into his mobile phone:

“Really? Praise! Really? Double praise! Double Praise! Hallelujah! Praise, praise, praise!”

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’.

This is an account of the first leg of my mildly cynical (though open-minded) dérive, for which I am trampling the word “Bollocks” onto the streets of Hackney. This post was brought to you by the letter ‘B’.

My dérive begins at the end of Portland Avenue, next to Stamford Hill Library. This is less a temple to the written word than a bunker for librarians. Concrete, square, unwelcoming, it’s a prison for books. A red-bearded beggar, probably one of the most widely-read people on The Hill, sits outside with a charity shop paperback. I sometimes glance in through the side windows and see a Jewish man with a flat cap, typing at a computer terminal, whom I fantasize to be The Shaigetz catching up on his hate mail and fan letters.

He’s not there, nor would he be: today is Shabbat, and the main road abounds with Chasidim on their way to and from their synagogues, the men in long silk coats, white or black stockings, and shtreimels, enormous brushed-fur tyres that encircle the head and jut horizontally, almost to the width of the shoulder. I remember reading about a Berlin rabbi who sneered at this style of dress because it made its its wearer resemble a chess piece. It does, undeniably, but it lends an unselfconscious man great dignity.

Away from the Hill itself, there are few people in the back streets. The many holes dug in the road by the water board contractors have been fenced off and abandoned for the weekend, some of them like shallow but wide graves. There are also skips, packed with grit, bulging black bags, cheap carpets, broken furniture: evidence of refurbishment. The area is also crowded with signs, placards and instructions, and every few paces one can read: “Keep clear. Fire Exit”; “Laborare est Orare”, “Disposal of Abandoned Vehicles: Do Not Ignore This Notice”; “Pedestrians LOOK LEFT”; “Pedestrians PLEASE USE OTHER FOOTPATH”; “Children Must Not Play On This Site”; “Reversing prohibited unless under direction”; “Construction Site Keep Out”; “No Parking”; “No Hawkers”; “No Cycling”; “< --- Ladies"; "Men --- >“; “No Ball Games”; “We apologise for any inconvenience caused”.

The three streets that bound the sides and back of the now-privatised Stamford Hill Estate are leafy and mostly prosperous: solid, respectable Edwardian houses pock marked with only small local authority developments. It’s almost as though these roads act as a buffer zone to the big estate, the trees acting as defences against the proximity of the poor. But they are not streets for chatter, for socializing; at least not whilst they are scarred with trenches, mounds of earth and builders’ debris. As I passed through the top horseshoe of the letter “B” that formed my route, I saw only one or two families on the way to synagogue, a long haired man with gimlet eyes and checked trousers, and two women exchanging greetings. There was, though, a can of Becks and another of Heineken sitting on the lid of a garden recycling bin, maybe one of the impromptu bars set up by the Poles who now live in the area.

If the upper half of my route was characterized by renovation and repair, the bottom half was barer and more neglected; although both environments were unwelcoming. Perhaps it was a trick of the light: as I turned into Lampard Grove the first thing I noticed was that the trees lining the street had been cut back to the stump, opening up a wide sky and throwing an unforgiving glare on the roadworks, graffiti, litter and abandoned pallets and carpets. Once again, there were few people; just one or two men at the front of the Lampard Grove synagogue, a solid, functional building that reminded me of an old municipal swimming bath or museum.

As Alkham Road turns into Windus Road, the angularity of the street is nicely broken up by wavy lines of stone, embedded in the footpaths and the road, outlining a trail up Windus Walk to one of the local primary schools. Pupils’ work is moulded onto metal plates and inset into the stones, and the passer-by can stop and read what should be a younger, less jaded view of Hackney and its streets:

When I’m in hackney I hear motorbike roaring like mad dinosars
When I’m in Hackney I hear church bells ringing like wind
When I’m in Hackney, ful like I’m in the sky, sleeping on the rianbow, my blankit is he cloud
When I’m in Hackny I feel randroop on my Hed, it flee liek Babies touching me
When I’m in Hackney I see helecopters choping up the sky
When I’m in Hackney I see dog poo and And dog Barping

To me, only a handful of these statements sound authentic.

Next I made a diversion from my intended route, heading up Windus Road to create the bottom of my “B”. This street is resistant to change. Two of the little terraced houses are wrapped in the residential snakeskin of stone cladding. A decayed shop front displays a flyer from 2005, inviting passers-by to a long-finished series of art workshops. A flaking motor repair garage offers “Steam Cleaning While U Wait”. Punters in the Wheatsheaf stare from the inner shadows of the pub through its open doors. On the corner The Bird Cage, a modern boozer with huge concave windows, marks the frontier with the present day.

The trail back up to my starting point took me past the front of the Stamford Hill estate. It has been cleaned up in recent years, and there’s a newish community centre, but it is on this part of The Hill that the most CCTV cameras seem to be trained. It is more than apt that the film advertised on the nearby bus shelter is called Captivity: for that is certainly the lot of many who live round here.

In simpler times, I wandered the streets aimlessly until I saw something worth writing about.

That ended when someone forced me to stay in the same room as two artists giving a presentation. They said people like me weren’t simply aimless wanderers, but something altogether more meaningful: flâneurs, leisurely explorers of cities who were sometimes known to walk a lobster through the streets.

Not that I would bother to walk a lobster in Hackney: people would just assume I’d bought my lapdog some body armour.

I already knew about flânerie from some reading I did as a teenager; but I still enjoyed the talk, largely because it’s fun to watch people pass indifferent work off as Art by sticking ornate labels on it.

When you boiled away all the piss, the two artists had been reading a lot of Iain Sinclair and had got interested in psychogeography, a concept neatly summed up by Situationist Guy Debord as:

the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals

Heavily influenced by Debord, the artists preferred to get an eyeful of the geographical environment by devising variations on the dérive, a term which could be crudely translated as an aimless stroll off the beaten track.

One method the artists used to create a dérive was by tracing a known route on a map, and then transcribing it as a series of ‘lefts’ and ‘rights’. They would then reverse these and, starting from the same place, see which unexpected places the new route led them.

It was a pleasant enough idea, and they spent many happy hours trying to convince the office workers of a medium-sized market town to give up a lunch hour in favour of the pastime. They even had a video of the one, mildly embarrassed person who did volunteer. My favourite bit was when the dérive directions quickly led him onto a main road that, had he followed it, would have taken him several miles straight out of town without the option of turning.

That’s a mistake that would be very difficult to make in my crowded part of London, but it’s not a risk I’m prepared to run. That’s why I have created my own Hackney dérive, which I will be undertaking in eight, short stages over the coming weeks. In each stage I will use my walk to spell out one letter from the word “BOLLOCKS” on Hackney’s streets, as outlined in the map above. This will take me to new places and help me see old ones with fresh eyes. Then I’ll come home and write about it: that way I’ll be able to find out whether this new method is any more effective that my usual aimless wanderings.

My proposed route is outlined below. If you have any information you would like to pass on about the following roads, or their districts, please let me know.

B

Portland Avenue » Darenth Road » Lynmouth Road » Stamford Hill » Lampard Grove » Alkham Road » Windus Road » Belfast Road » Stamford Hill

O

Lynmouth Road » Oldhill Street » Clapton Common » Braydon Road » Kyverdale Road

L

Osbaldeston Road » Cazenove Road

L

Fountayne Road » Northwold Road

O

Moresby Road » Warwick Grove » Mount Pleasant Lane » Upper Clapton Road

C

Southwold Road » Upper Clapton Road » Lea Bridge Road

K

Lower Clapton Road » Millfields Road » Lower Clapton Road » Downs Road » Cricketfield Road

S

Downs Park Road » Amhurst Road » Dalston Lane