[Photo taken from here]

I’ve never been a flag-waving patriot, and I don’t intend to start now. I’m quietly content that I’m English; but I’m just as glad that my heritage is fortified by relatives from earlier generations of Scots, Irish, Belgians and others. As I was telling a Welsh friend yesterday (as we shared a drink on St George’s Day and bemoaned some passing drunks who were sporting St George Cross hats and comedy underpants) my ideal of Englishness is probably embodied by Tommy Huggins (a.k.a. Monsieur Hougins) in A.G. MacDonell’s England, Their England. Huggins is a colourful, drunken eccentric whose insistence that he is Belgian conceals the fact that he bravely and sincerely fought for his nation - Britain - in the Great War. He’s enough of his own man to grow into his own form of Englishness without resorting to jingo or tribal bullshit.

It’s this wider understanding of Englishness - and the fact that he centres his argument on events in Hackney - that has drawn me to this article by Patrick Wright. He says:

It’s possible to be vigorously English without resorting to mournful elegies, or without having to prove your descent from the ancient Iberian or Celtic stock that Hilaire Belloc, writing a century ago, described as ‘the permanent root of all England’.

I like this thought: he’s talking about an Englishness that’s about “being” rather than “belonging”; something that’s defined by a person’s attitudes rather than their being part of an exclusive club. But what interests me most about his argument is the fact that he says the expression of Englishness comes to the fore when the local - and not just the national - is under threat.

..the England invoked in earlier times has often been thrown into relief by a burning sense of imminent danger. This is easily understood at times of war, when the threat is palpable. Yet it is by no means only at such moments of righteous emergency that Englishness has been a defensive stance. Even in peace time, being English can feel like a perpetual Dunkirk, in which everything that is valued is polarised against ‘encroaching’ developments that promise only nullification and destruction.

And what better place to see this in action than in Hackney? Citing the time he lived in the borough in the early 1990s, Wright says:

…there was one street above all that seemed beyond hope of improvement or recovery. It was spurned even by its own graffiti, which declared ‘Broadway Market is not a sinking ship. It’s a submarine.’

As anyone who knows the area will tell you, Broadway Market is now a thriving, busy, valued part of Hackney life. But it was achieved at a price, and in the teeth of fierce and soulless opposition:

What takes place here on Saturdays is as much a weekly resistance movement as it is a street market with an alternative, organic air about it. The revival has been achieved by local people against powerful opposition. The first enemy, as so often in these parts, is easily identified as Hackney Council, which, as the organisers claim, first tried to stop the street market happening and then, when it emerged as successful, turned round and attempted to take it over. The second is the developers favoured by the council’s officers as they prepared to sell off the street’s shops and buildings.

Hackney’s officials appear to have recoiled in dismay when local traders defied expectation by scraping together the resources and offering to buy their long-rented buildings. Their preferred buyers are developers of an absentee and sometimes also offshore variety: people whose manoeuvres as they assemble sites for demolition are even less encumbered by respect for local life. The campaign for Broadway Market has been accompanied by a vigorous defence of local traders faced with eviction. This time the graffiti has declared ‘We want our café not yuppie flats’.

Though only a local affair, the battle has gone into wide circulation as an encouraging story proving that the spirit of England is not entirely dead.

It’s an attractive thought. Could our other local battles be the furnaces in which Hackney’s communities forge a common expression of Englishness? There are plenty to choose from: the battle for Dalston’s future; the skirmish over Ridley Road Market; the war over proposed developments in Shoreditch.

I’d like to think so, but - given the tenacity and cold determination of local officialdom - I suspect I’m taking too poetic a stance. It’s a very English failing, after all.

Another day in Hackney, and the council sends letters to everyone in my street threatening them with a £100 fine if they don’t keep their wheelie bins off the pavement. Of course, no-one thought to send a polite letter first: civility has no place in the council machine.

Meanwhile, over the Hill on the Hackney side of the Haringey border, the roads have been taped off and the place is teeming with police, detectives and bystanders. I ask a policeman: “Was it a bus incident?” He replies: “I can’t say”.

But the bystanders have got word from somewhere. “Someone got stabbed.” “Someone got killed”.

Two more policemen arrive on the scene as I leave (I’ve been buying fruit from Fresh ‘n’ Fruity). One says to the other: “What use are we going to be to anyone here?”

Perhaps they could be investigating last week’s murder?

UPDATE: Yes, it’s yet another teenage murder on the safe streets of Hackney. Expect Diane Abbott up here for a publicity stunt in the near future.

UPDATE 2: The murdered teenager has been named as Devoe Roach. Two other teenagers were murdered on the same day - one elsewhere in London, the other in Birmingham. More details here.

Note: I’ve posted the other camera-phone photos I took on Hackney Lookout.

I’ve been deeply amused by my local council’s reaction to the news that the Government wants to shut down 2,500 post offices, including seven (for now) in Hackney.

Even though it’s the Labour party that is ramming through the cuts, local councillors from the same party have been running about desperately trying to look like the good guys. So much so, in fact, that councillors from the De Beauvoir ward - who don’t have a post office of their own to save - have been dashing over into Islington to preserve the big branch on Essex Road (this one, for convoluted reasons, can actually be blamed on the Lib Dems).

But the thing that really made me laugh was the coverage in Hackney Today - the council’s propaganda rag - which you can see above, counterbalanced by a bit of news from the Press Association. The council knows how to turn out a carefully-worded article, sure enough, and the photo of mayor Jules Pipe is charming; but anyone reading the words would have no idea that the party that runs both the country and the council are the ones that condemned the post offices in the first place.

Well, fair play to them if they think it’s the best use of local taxpayers’ money and they can get away with it.

Not that getting away with it is hard. As the BBC pointed out a couple of years ago, many residents have “no idea” that Hackney Today is produced by the council; although that didn’t stop some commenting on its “lack of real news”.

But, as always with these in-house rags, one has to be so careful not to overstep the mark. That might - shudder - attract accusations of impropriety. Satire, such as this, is all very well - but to stand accused of actual wrongdoing…. well, that would be, wrong.

That’s why I’m simply going to offer one recommendation which, I am sure, will make Hackney Today a newspaper that residents will be proud of: ask Jules Pipe to stand down as mayor and become a sub-editor once more.

I’m sure that Jules’s grip of local government regulations and his keen eye for detail, as acquired on the Sunday Telegraph, will enable him to spot errors and contradictions such as this one from slipping through the net.

Naturally, as mayor, he would be familiar with the “Code of recommended practice on local authority publicity” (snappy title, available here), which states that

Publicity should not be, or liable to misrepresentation as being, party political.

Knowing that, surely a keen sub-editor wouldn’t allow the three Labour councillors of De Beauvoir ward (email: debeauvoir@hackney-labour.org.uk) to use the pages of Hackney Today to publicise their website at debeauvoircouncillors.blogspot.com in every issue.

After all, this is a website that has the strapline “News from your local Labour Councillors” and jolly, partisan remarks like:

Unfortunatrly [sic] Islington’s Lib Dem run council dealt the first blow to the Essex Road Post Office by selling the building

and

Labour’s Alan Laing, Cabinet Member for Neighbourhoods, said: “Hackney Council aims to attract and increase the number of female cyclists within London

and

By the end of next month, there will have been even more new trees planted around the Borough as part of Labour in Hackney’s commitment to plant 1000 new trees by 2010.

and

The Green Party in Camden are now using Labour run Hackney as an example of good practice.

After all, publicising a website like this in a council publication only weeks before a mayoral and LGA election might, for all I know, contravene this other regulation:

Particular care should be taken when publicity is issued immediately prior to an election or
by-election affecting the authority’s area to ensure that this could not be perceived as seeking
to influence public opinion, or to promote the public image of a particular candidate, or group of
candidates.

Anyway, as I suggested, the trick is to reissue Jules Pipe with his blue pencil; and if he can cut some of the crap like “good practice” whilst he’s at it, then so much the better.

At last, some news about a Hackney resident that will appeal to all my readers: TARZAN FLASHER SWINGS INTO TROUBLE.

I can’t say I like the PKK (Kurdistan Workers’ Party) any more than the many countries that list it as a terrorist organisation. But I’m glad we still live in a country that allows its supporters to protest if they want to. Something tells me, though, that this demonstration won’t convince Turkey to release Abdullah Öcalan.

More camera-phone photos are here.

Afternoon. Toddler crashed out my chest. He wakes up after 25 minutes and screams and screams. I change him. He screams. I give him food. He screams. I give him juice. He screams. I stick his coat on and he dashes for the door, laughing, and slides down the stairs.

I strap him in the pushchair and then we’re off, out into the crisp Valentine’s chill. Push slow, “One!” Push slow, “Two!” Push fast “Threeee!” Laugh and laugh and shrug off stares.

Over the Hill. Up to Seven Sisters. Buses filled with early commuters, staring blank disappointment through panes of scratched glass. Smiles from old women. “One!” push slow. “Two!” push slow. “Threeeee!” and laugh. We’re behind our own glass, but we don’t know it’s there.

Into the supermarket. Aisles filled with desperate men, clutching single roses with uncertainty. The chocolate aisle filled with the miserly and the unimaginative. We buy juice and little bags of “junk-free” crisps.

The spell breaks with the crinkling of the bags. The toddler screams. And screams. And screams. I hate people who eat their shopping before paying for it. And I think the child should wait. He screams louder and louder.

“Hello.”

It’s a young boy, swinging on a tubular barrier. The smaller child stops yelling.

“Hello.”

“Why was he crying?”

“He’s tired. He needs more sleep.”

“What’s his name?”

“William.”

“Hello William.” Then: “Does he cry at home?”

“Yes, sometimes. Especially when he’s tired.”

Pause. Then: “He’s got a scratch on his face.”

“Has he?”

“Yes.” Points: “Just there.”

“That’s not a scratch,” I say. “It’s a bit of grot.” I chip a sliver of dried grime from the child’s face.

“He’s got bogies up his nose.”

“Has he?”

“Yes. Dried bogies.”

“Well, it is cold. He must have had a runny nose.”

“I don’t like dried bogies.”

“No, I can imagine.”

Another lull. “What’s your name.”

“Ben. What’s yours?”

“Kameron. With a ‘K’.”

“That’s a nice name,” I lie, hating myself for my snobbery.

“How old is he?”

“He’s just over one year old. He’s one year and four months old.”

“I’m four. I’m nearly five.” He looks around for a bit. “Can he talk?”

“Not yet. He can say some things. ‘Juice’. ‘Socks’. ‘Shoes’. ‘Cheese’. Words like that.”

“I’ve been growing a plant at school. I’ll show you.”

The older boy finds his mother at the opposite till. She’s packing her shopping. I smile at her. Her face relaxes diffidently. I remember I’ve not shaved for a couple of days and that a stye has inflamed my left eye. I am wearing a good overcoat, but I have paint flecks on my cheap, brown shoes. I look down at heel. The child comes back with a clear plastic glass. Inside is damp cotton-wool wadding. A bean has split from its shell and has erupted into a seedling. The label on the front has the boy’s name in capital letters: KAMERON.

“I grew this at school. That’s a ‘K’, he says, tracing the letter with his finger. Look William.”

He thrusts the pot under the toddler’s nose. The child is deeply unimpressed and returns his gaze to the checkout woman who is blowing him kisses.

“That’s amazing,” I say. “What kind of bean is it?”

Then a voice from the back of the till: “Kameron.” It’s the boy’s mother.

He scurries off to her and gives her the bean. Then he rushes back. “Goodbye William”.

William is still enraptured by his female admirer.

“Goodbye Kameron,” I say. “Say ‘goodbye’ William,” I add, knowing well that he wouldn’t if he could.

I smile at the boy and his mother as they leave.

Ten minutes later we board a bus. I park the pushchair in the designated space and sit down next to it. On the other side of the buggy is a folding chair. One stop later a woman gets on the bus and pulls down the seat, squeezing herself onto it sideways so her legs are in the aisle. The toddler looks up at her often, but she refuses to acknowledge his existence. I feed him snacks and, now and then, look at the woman. She checks me out by looking at my reflection in the bus window. Then I realise that I’ve seen her before: not her, but a picture.

Monday: Launderette

Monday morning in the Launderette. One lot of clothes on warm. The other on hot. I’m sitting by the tumble dryers reading The Times.

The door crashes open. A red headed man lurches in with a self-assured woman. He’s swigging from a can of Kestrel super-strength lager. She’s carrying the washing.

“‘Ere,” shouts Lager as he pitches forward towards the service counter. “You got any washing powder?”

“Don’t shout,” shouts his companion.

“I’m not shouting,” yells Lager.

They get the washing in and woman leaves. Lager sits on a ledge and drinks. I get on with the tumble drying.

After a while he gets bored and leaves. Twenty minutes later he’s back, without drink. I look up to see him draped over the top of a large washing machine. There’s a strange whirring noise, as though he’s using a small drill to chip sludgy powder from the tray.

It’s not a drill. It’s a toy hamburger. He winds it up again and again and drunkenly watches it hopping on its plastic feet. Now and again he reaches for his mobile phone and puts it away, muttering “Fucking woman. Where are you?”

Wednesday: Newsagent
Queuing to buy a magazine. Two teenage girls in front of me. Cheap jewellery and clothes permeated by the smell of fast food. Two Orthodox Jews pass us from behind. The girls look at each other.

“Cccccnnnnnggt,” splutters one like a pig blowing its nose. She makes corkscrew gestures at the side of her head, tracing the line of imaginary peyos.

“Ffffnnngggtt,” snorts the other and they laugh.

They reach the head of the queue. The first, piggish girl addresses the shopkeeper whilst texting on her mobile phone.

“Child travelcard.”

“Do you have ID?”

“Don’t have no ID”

“Then I can’t sell you a child travelcard.”

“Fucking cunt,” yells pig features and she and her friend storm out.

“Did you hear that?” the shopkeeper asks me.

“Yes.”

“She called me a fucking cunt.” It’s all part of a normal day for the shopkeeper, but he doesn’t see why he has to put up with it.

“I know. I don’t see that you can do much about it, sadly.”

“She called me a fucking cunt!”

“I know. Never mind.” Pause. “Have a nice day!”

We laugh. Thankfully not everyone’s a fucking cunt.

Wednesday: Bus
Lower Clapton. Top deck of the 254. Three girls and a mother. Phone rings. Mother answers, speaks, ends conversation.

“That’s Leanne. She’s just got her phone bill. Two hundred pound!”

“No way.”

“Yeah. Two hundred pound.”

“Does nan know?”

“Yeah. She’s not happy.”

They get out somewhere on the Upper Clapton Road. I look round and the man opposite is leaning out of his seat, with his head and shoulder dangling into the aisle. He’s about to tip over, and as I reach out to grab him he’s caught by the pregnant woman sitting behind me. She is beautiful.

“Are you all right?” she says.

“Aye,” says the guy, in the tones of central, eastern Scotland. “I’m sorry. I hasn’ae slept fae two days.”

At that he falls asleep again. The pregnant woman and I take it in turns to catch him.

“Why don’t you lean over the other side?” I ask, after about the fourth awakening.

“Aye. It’s so fuckin’ embarrassing. I got off a tube. Fell asleep and woke up in fuckin’ Uxbridge or somewhere.”

He falls asleep again. We reach Springfield and the pregnant woman, child and husband get off.

I catch the sleeper one more time.

“How far tae Manor House?”

“About 6 or 7 minutes.”

“Walking?”

“No. About 15 minutes.”

“I need some fresh air.”

He gets up, walks to the front of the top deck and peers out the window. He sits down again and falls asleep.

Someone else catches him as he tips into the aisle and it’s time for me to leave.

Even the Home Secretary would feel safe walking round my area at night if she’d been properly trained.

Diane Abbott and three Labour colleagues - Keith Vaz, Gwyn Prosser and Karen Buck - take to the well-lit streets of Stoke Newington to prove that it’s safe to walk the streets of Hackney. Vaz sniffs an onion and inspects a butternut squash for the cameras, but fails to buy anything.

Meanwhile, in an East London hospital, a teenager lies in a critical condition, stabbed the night before on Rectory Road, near Hackney Downs.

Safe, Diane, safe.

In this series of posts, I’m following the route taken on 26th July 1898 by a social investigator, George H. Duckworth, who was helping to compile Charles Booth’s Poverty Map for London (1898-1899). He was accompanied by a policeman, Inspector Fitzgerald, who accompanied him round a district that was

The investigator made detailed notes, supplemented by Fitzgerald’s observations, and I have been comparing these to my observations of the streets and buildings as they are today. I quote often from the original notebooks, so it’s worthwhile reading my introductory post and also familiarising yourself with the poverty map’s colour coding, listed to your left and explained in more detail here.

———

Duckworth began his day at Homerton Station, so I head down there to look around. Then, as now, the platforms were situated just off Church Road, known since 1936 as Barnabas Road. When the investigator arrived in 1898 he saw a street that was moderately comfortable but bruised here and there with want; and whilst, today, he would no longer be able to look out for bootless children or straw-hatted rent collectors, he would immediately realise that this pocket of Homerton has been left to rot.

The Alma public house would still be one of the first landmarks he saw, but instead of a busy boozer under the stewardship of delightfully-named Fanny Finch, he’d be confronted with a neglected building, left dilapidated after an attempt to convert it into flats, its tiled entrance smashed out and then engorged with breezeblocks.

I find myself wondering how Duckworth would interpret the busyness of the glass telephone boxes, one either side of the station approach. As I walk past, both are in use; and as one person vacates his booth, another man crosses the road and enters it. Duckworth was a man who could whip out a moral judgement at moment’s notice (“Some slatternly girls. ‘No brothels now but there used to be.’ But it looked as though there might be still…”). Would he see people who lacked mobiles, or men who were chasing drugs, or whores, or both?

I can’t decide; but at least the kiosks aren’t smashed and I’ve not seen anyone piss in them.

From the station Duckworth and his escort, Inspector Fitzgerald, walked up Church Street and turned into Homerton High Street, examining in turn the fibrillae of roads and closes that splay off on its journey east. First on their route were Nisbet Place and Nisbet Street (which Duckworth spelled as ‘Nesbit’ throughout).

East down Homerton High Street to Nesbit Place, which has a block of model dwellings and some small factories of tables and pianofortes. Children were making a grotto in the St[reet]. Further east into Nesbit St, which the map marks as dark blue lined with black. From Fitzgerald’s account it would perhaps be dark blue but not black. It is evidently poor. Many children and costers barrows about (2.40). Two families in each house. Houses two-storied. “Prostitutes used to live here but do not now & it was never a notorious place” said Fitzgerald. One or two houses were noticeable for torn blinds and broken windows. The houses have 7 rooms and are let for 13/- to 14/- per week. They have yards rather than gardens at the back of them.

Neither Nisbet Street or Nisbet Place now exist: both were demolished as part of the slum clearances between 1935 and 1936. By then, it was becoming unacceptable to let people live in houses like these on Nisbet Street, pictured here in 1930.

Instead, those who knew best decided that the working classes needed didn’t just need homes, but an “experiment in the construction of a village in modern dress.” * Of course, that was just a good way of talking up a vast, crowded, six-storey citadel of 311 council flats. The year after they were built, they looked like this:

Imposing. Vast. A ghetto dressed up as Progress. Even King George VI and Queen Elizabeth dropped by to declare the place officially open:

Note how the families hang out of their windows to greet their royal guests: although there are over 300 flats, there are only 15 communal entrance points. That’s one door to the outside world for roughly every 20 families.

Little residue of that pride is evident today. The exterior walls show where channels of water have run unchecked down the bricks. There’s litter on the communal grass patches that face the street - visible from the flats, but accessible from none. A diamond shaped placard in one window declares

TOO
MANY
FREAKS

All the communal doors face inwards, into what was probably conceived as a spacious courtyard. It has a playpark in its centre, ensuring that a group of bored and slouching teenagers is the main focal point in this ill-conceived, patronising design. For the first time I realise that council blocks and state secondary schools have shared the same kinds of shape and function as the decades have evolved. Back in the 30s, inward-facing segregation was sold as utopia; these days both kids and residents get shoved in flimsy glass and steel structures behind a perimeter of metal fences, spied on all the while by CCTV cameras for their own ’safety’ and ‘protection’.

Surroundings like these poison human warmth. If planners and architects don’t trust whole groups of people to live like others, and they use bricks and mortar to force them apart, pride decays into neglect. Especially when their municipal landlord couldn’t care a prickly turd about the few symbols of shared purpose that are left to its tenants:

Four bolt holes of contempt.

Duckworth and Fitzgerald moved on from Nisbet Street to Tranby Place (now gone) and then into Crozier Terrace. It too was poor - “dark blue” - and

Its inhabitants are common labourers. The men work in the dust shoot in the marshes and the women go our charing at 2/6 per day or go out/take in to do washing. Houses two storied.

Today, one side of the street is blocked in by the doorless, eastern side of Nisbet House, its six stories dotted liberally, but not uniformly, with satellite dishes. No terraces remain, although there is a pub on the junction with the High Street, The Jackdaw and Stump, which looks as though it must have been built shortly after Duckworth’s tour. It is brightly painted, with slightly sagging net curtains forming a backdrop to a series of no-nonsense notices and placards. The imposing carved eagle above the main door suggests the place has changed its name at least once, but the back of the building is dilapidated with crooked pipes, rotting window frames and an off-kilter burglar alarm.

At the foot of the road, there’s a children’s nursery. But before you reach it, there’s a secure gate leading off to an unmarked complex of buildings. I see only two people exit from the gate, whilst a Dial-a-Ride bus is given access. Only later do I discover that the street is also home to a medium secure unit, a hospital for mentally disordered criminals.

The unit’s siting makes sense. When Duckworth left Crozier Terrace and turned right into Homerton High Street, he soon walked past the Hackney Union Workhouse which, in 1911, had a lunatic block built on its western side where today’s secure unit is sited. The Workhouse also had an infirmary and, when the site came under the control of London County Council in 1930 it became Hackney Hospital for the next 57 years.

I decide to take a closer look at the former workhouse later, and in the meantime I follow Duckworth’s steps round into Sidney Road (Kenworthy Road since 1939) where:

…came a block of newly made or half made streets round the Sydney [sic] Road Board School. They are on the top of the hill which goes down into the Hackney Marshes. Chevet Street. Swinnerton St: road hardly made or very badly kept. No pavement. 2 storied houses - purple in character. Women throwing slops in the street.

The Board School is now Cardinal Pole Roman Catholic School. As I approach, Wednesday afternoon lessons have just finished and pupils are making their way down the hill in groups, seemingly unaware or uninterested of the fact that they are forcing other pedestrians off the path. Despite the policemen stationed at the school gates on both Kenworthy Road and Swinnerton Street, I feel uncomfortable with the idea of taking my camera out of my pocket, so I decide to take photographs of this area at the weekend. Instead I look around and memorise what I see, from the mobile phone mast on the top of the school block, to the girl who, in full view of the police officer, whips out a marker pen and casually scribbles on a white patch of wall before vanishing into Kemey’s Street.

The collection of graffiti contains the usual declarations of love, musical affiliation and gang worship, but also - weirdly - has a streak devoted to Iraq and Afghanistan.

Emma love’s Darren Forever

E.9. Stikz

Swinnerton Street itself has improved little since the time Duckworth witnessed women throwing their slops into it. There are still a few two-storey cottages at either end, but the bulk of the road is lined by the back walls of houses belonging to the relatively modern Herbert Butler estate. This arrangement rips the character out of most of the road, reducing it to a sluice channel for windswept litter and schoolchildren.

One of the smaller roads, Mabley Street, which connects Swinnerton Street and Kenworthy Road, has fared better since Duckworth reported that it was “still in the course of building.” Yet the investigator would certainly have concluded that the houses on its north side showed signs of being more affluent than those on its south. The latter terrace has signs indicating two flats are being offered for rent, whilst black binbags are piled deep up the entrance steps to many of the houses. A window in one house has been boarded up, many of the buildings have flaking paintwork, and there are boxes of fried chicken, spilling bones out on to the pavement. I see one resident - a woman - poke her head out of a basement flat and quickly disappear again.

The north side of Mabley Road, on the other hand contains two properties for sale, has neatly-piled refuse (including a Marks and Spencer bag hangly elegantly off a railing) and one resident - wearing the heavy rectangular spectacles beloved of those who work in the media - smoking a cigarette outside his front door. Duckworth would have classed these houses pink to red, whilst those opposite would have been purple to pink.

I move on to the former Hackney Workhouse, which is less than a minute’s walk away. The block below, as seen from Chevet Street, is the infirmary complex that was built in 1882.

As I look upwards, an argument breaks out in the corner house that joins Kenworthy Road and Chevet Street, so I head off to a local pub to refresh myself and marvel at how Duckworth covered so many streets, in so much detail, in a single day.

Next: Up Glyn Road to Clapton Park where Duckworth finds many boys bathing nude in a ditch.

I’ve been getting on well with my walk round Homerton, but it’s taking an age to properly research and write up.

I have, though, discovered a cache of fascinating films that have been put online by the Hackney Archives Department. You can find all of them here, but the one that has been of greatest interest to me so far has been this one of a slum clearance.

Note: It’s easy to find on the site linked to above - I’ve removed the clip from this page as the QuickTime was crashing some PC browsers.

I’ve been poring over the Booth Poverty Map for London (1898-1899), taking a close look at the areas in Hackney that I’m most familiar with. My house isn’t on the chart - it stops short at the bottom of Stamford Hill, whilst I live near the top. Indeed, most of the redbrick terraces that characterise much of my area had only just been built.

Charles Booth created the maps as part of his Inquiry into the Life and Labour of the People in London, which he undertook between 1886 and 1903. His broad aim was to create a detailed picture of how poverty was spread throughout the capital, and where the worst afflicted areas were. A first map, Descriptive Map of London Poverty 1889, was compiled from information gathered from School Board visitors. A second series of maps, of which part of one is reproduced above, covered a wider area and was also based on the findings of social investigators who accompanied London policemen on their beats.

As you can see, the map is colour coded. Each colour represents the level of poverty or affluence to be found in the different streets and houses. Black was the most miserable coding and was used to denote:

The lowest class which consists of some occasional labourers, street sellers, loafers, criminals and semi-criminals. Their life is the life of savages, with vicissitudes of extreme hardship and their only luxury is drink.

The shades of blue indicated poverty, pink represented people with reasonable earnings, whilst red and yellow were used respectively for middle and upper-middle class residents. You can find a more detailed breakdown here.

Booth’s work was valuable, not only in giving us a detailed economic picture of London’s inhabitants, but in helping him to push for the introduction of Old Age Pensions. The owner of a successful shipping business, Booth saw his pensions plan as a necessary step to nip socialist revolution in the bud.

You can argue amongst yourselves about whether he achieved that - for good or ill. What I find particularly fascinating is using the map to see how the different areas of late 19th-century Hackney have fared. Broadly speaking, the poorest areas on Booth’s map appear to be the parish of St Mary of Eton (the site of the former Eton College Mission, now in Hackney Wick); the area to the south and south east of the then Smallpox Hospital in Homerton; the area surrounding the southern tip of London Fields; parts of central Dalston, spreading up to the southern part of Stoke Newington; and large areas of Haggerston, Shoreditch and Hoxton.

Haggerston is, even today, one of the most run-down parts of the borough, although it is slowly being regenerated as the gentrification of Shoreditch and Hoston creeps north. Hackney Wick is in dire need of investment (so let’s hope that the small part of the 2012 Olympic Park that creeps over the Newham border in Hackney Wick does it some long term good). Homerton is still a depressed part of the borough, and the southern end of London Fields is attracting wealthier residents round the Broadway Market area.

On the other hand, areas like Lower Clapton and Clapton Pond which have suffered greatly in recent years from poverty, crime and violence, are very much on the up and - increasingly - reverting to the fairly comfortable or affluent places they were about 100 years ago.

Of course, the summaries I’ve made about these areas are massive generalisations, although they are based on what I have seen as I’ve walked the borough.

That’s why I’m going to try and find time to make a better comparison in some of these places.

As I mentioned before, Booth was able to improve his second series of maps by sending researchers out to accompany policemen on their beats. They would make detailed notes of their walks and record some of the comments made by the officers. These notebooks have been digitised and put online, and they make fascinating reading. For example the notebook relating to my own area begins:

Thorpe [the policeman] has corns on his feet so I went round this district on a bicycle & then went over the street with him on the map afterwards. There is a marked absence of Public Houses and poor streets. Olinda Road at the NE corner of Stamford Hill is the only exception.

It’s no different today, except the coppers now have cars and can get the new community support officers to do most of the walking for them. Oh, and we’ve got more poor streets than before.

What I propose to do, then, is to trace the routes of some of the walks made by the social investigators and compare what they saw with what you can see now. I’ll plot the routes out on a new map, so you can compare them side by side, and I’ll add the photos I take to the Google chart over on my Hackney photo blog.

The first walk I hope to tackle is this one, undertaken on July 26th 1897.

Walk with Inspector Fitzgerald round district bounded on the South by the North London Railway, on the East by the Hackney Marshes & the Hackney cut, on the North by Millfields Road, & on the West by the Lower Clapton Road and the Urswick Road. Starting from Homerton Station.

Come back after the weekend to see how I got on, but in the meantime here’s the district as plotted out in the investigator’s notebook:

And this is roughly the same area today:

View Larger Map

I only hope I don’t get corns on my feet: I don’t have a bicycle these days.

The clothes and the uniforms may belong to 1977, and there may be three officers instead of today’s normal roster of two; but many Londoners still see the scene above acted out dozens of times over the course of a year.

There’s a lot more they’ll recognise in Paul Trevor’s archive of photographs, now available online at the Visual Arts Data Service, which he took in Spitalfields and the surrounding areas (including Hackney) between the 1970s and 1990s: shops, launderettes, mosques, graffiti, markets, families. There’s also a lot that we should be glad to have seen the back of: particularly the then frequent National Front and White Pride marches.

So go take a look. What stands out for me, though, is not how much more tolerant East London life has become when compared to 30 years ago, but how fragile those changes for the better actually are.

I love finding out what this area used to be like, so I’m glad to have found Eileen Perrin’s recollections of a 1920s childhood in Hackney. She lived near Balls Pond Road, but used to come up to Stamford Hill to see boys sailing their model boats on the pond, and also to Stoke Newington’s Clissold Park to visit the animals and eat cold ices.

We didn’t stay in. Every day Mum took me out in my carpet-seated wooden pushchair when she went shopping, or she would take me to Clissold Park. I remember the mound there, with its beds of red geraniums. On top of it children would be standing on the steps of the pink granite obelisk of the drinking fountain. When I reached up to press the brass button for water, holding a heavy metal cup under the spout, I smelled iron. Then, as I bent my head to check whether the smell came from the water or the cup, Mum called out that I was not to drink it.

Children left the cups dangling by the chains. These clanged against the stone sides of the bowl as the water ran away down the steps into the flower beds.

At every step towards the animal enclosure Eileen’s new brown sandals squeaked, but Mum said they would soon wear in.

Behind a high wire fence was Old Bill, the so-called reindeer, standing chewing the cud. All manner of creatures were kept there, rabbits, a wallaby, a peacock, peahens, black and white speckled guinea fowl, pheasants and guinea pigs.

On we went, past the green metal slatted chairs set out under trees round the tea kiosk, out through the gate where a Wall’s ice cream man was usually waiting on his three-wheeled bike-trolley, Proffering my penny, I would choose a strawberry Snofrute while Mum had a tuppeny briquette in a wafer. If the Snofrute’s chequered blue and white card wrapper stuck fast to the triangular rosy water-ice, Mum would take it and squash it a bit in her hands until the wrapper cracked away, and the ice could be pushed out at one end.

You can read more about Eileen’s childhood here.

The other week I dropped a line to Hackney Today to ask whether, after a hiatus of some years, I could have a copy of the paper delivered to my flat. A copy landed on the mat that same day and not only was I impressed, but I also said so.

In the same post, I also said:

I was delighted to read that, to “celebrate the £800million restoration of St Pancras International station” (in Camden), “[Hackney] Council was given its own Eurostar carriage for the day” and that “places on the special trip were awarded to residents connected to three local charities”. Admittedly, details about why Hackney needs to be represented in Paris, exactly what the trip achieved, and the identities (and number) of the councillors and officials on the trip (and whether they were paid or using holiday time) were rather scant.

Anyway, Polly Rance from the Council has been in touch about it. This is what she says:

Dear Ben

I read your blog, and other local ones, with interest. I was particularly interested to read your feedback on Hackney Today and I am pleased that your complaint about non-distribution was responded to so effectively and quickly by my team. It is always good to get positive feedback.

Just a note of clarification in answer to your questions on the Eurostar trip.

Eurostar donated use of a carriage each to 5 neighbouring London boroughs and it was our responsibility to fill it. We decided to offer seats to volunteers who work hard for the Speaker’s chosen charities (Hackney MIND, St Joseph’s Hospice, and Hackney Age Concern), as well as a group of full time carers identified for us by social services. All those who went had a fabulous time and saw it as a real treat, including one Age Concern volunteer in his 80s who had never left London before that day and called it the trip of a lifetime. Forty seats in the 48 seat carriage were occupied by these volunteers. The Speaker of Hackney, Cllr Faizullah Khan went along with his consort. A journalist from the Hackney Gazette attended, and one officer from Hackney Today, plus a photographer. Two senior council officers went along as we felt we should take some corporate responsibility for the welfare of the volunteers on the trip. No officers were paid for their time. So three council officers, unpaid. No expenses were claimed and the day did not cost the Council any money.
I hope this answers your questions.

Incidentally, I am always interested in reader feedback on Hackney Today, so if any of your readers want to get in touch with me directly they can do so at polly.rance@hackney.gov.uk.

All the best

Polly Rance
Head of Media and External Relations
London Borough of Hackney

So there you go. Hats off to Polly for getting in touch.