Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire

by Iain Sinclair

  If you had time to put in two hours at the hairdresser, you were in the life. You advertised your non‐labouring status: as gambler, gigolo, showbiz hoofer, promoter of rackety schemes. The Look was hard‐edged, Italianate: Ray Danton, George Raft. Aerodynamic barnet, close‐fitting suit. It aped America, Chicago massacres in stylish swivel chairs. The rogues’ gallery of male models exhibited in barber‐shop windows didn’t change for generations.

  I lived in Hackney for twenty‐five years before I had my first paid‐for haircut – by then, it was too late; the gesture was elegiac. Saint’s Barbers in Cambridge Heath Road was Greek Cypriot, efficient, a little melancholy. Slow chat if you insist on it. Another customer, Tony Lambrianou, was horrified by a bookdealer’s skinhead crop. Such barbarism is associated, in folk memory, with military buzzcuts, electric‐chair rehearsals, mortuary make‐overs.

  When I set out to explore the local shift from old Jewish to Turkish, Turkish Cypriot, West Indian, African, Vietnamese, I couldn’t reach the first shop on my list. Middleton Road was closed with blue‐and‐white ribbons. A hand‐drawn cardboard rectangle announced: BARBER SHOP. This was an active black enterprise, operating in the gap between cultivated privacy and the twitch of justified paranoia. The scene would very soon be decorated by one of those bright tin panels that act as advertisements for crime: FIREARMS INCIDENT. A car. A gun. A barber shop. The synopsis for a straight‐to‐video movie.

  Kingsland Road barber shops in‐fill the gaps between fast‐food joints, upstairs solicitors specializing in debt or deportation resistance, internet cafés and nail parlours that double as money‐transfer operations. Narrow Turkish outfits combine a busy card school with occasional interruptions of male hairdressing. Avant Garde is aspirational, grey lettering on black – but Aladin is less intimidating. I get a decent trim for £7. All done in less than ten minutes. The barber has been in business for fifteen years and like so many in the game he lives outside the borough. I’m the only paying customer.

  ‘A bad road, this one,’ he says, ‘Tottenham to Shoreditch. Always trouble.’

  Fellow countrymen drift in and out, ignoring me, nodding to the barber, exchanging a few remarks.

  Darwood Grace, a Hackney‐born‐and‐bred actor and rap poet, when I question him about the shops where I’m never going to be welcome, refutes the notion that barbers are in any way connected with drugs. ‘They do so well, they don’t need it.’

  Africans favour Faze 2, the Ghanaian ‘coiffeur’ on the west side of Kingsland Road. West Indians use the cluster of shops on the east side, near Dalston Junction. There is always one star cutter. It used to be Ike at Hibiscus. Celebrities look in, the boxer Audley Harrison was a regular. Ordinary customers might have to wait, uncomplaining, for two or three hours. Barbers rent their chairs. They are performers with a following from all over town. The atmosphere is sociable, gossipy. There is always music. The Turkish shops prefer large television sets, often two of them: piped serials from the home country with muted analgesic dross for locals.

  Darwood goes to Tony, next to the Chinese takeaway. He’s into short‐back‐and‐sides, but measured, millimetre accurate. Young black men never shave at home. They’re customized with clippers, not razor. The Look is subject to constant revision. White youths, shifting allegiance, might try Pamukkale on Balls Pond Road. They order by numbers: ‘Six on top, 2 at the sides.’ Zero being skin, pure. Barbers are both mechanics and artists. Ike, so Darwood recalls, won a hairdressing competition by carving a portrait of Malcolm X into the back of the model’s head, twinned with a map of Africa.

  I could drift on, north, beyond Ridley Road Market: mosques, Turkish restaurants, grander hairdressers with names like Golden Scissors and Pasha’s Barbers; bigger televisions, faux‐marble basins. I pause at a window that looks, superficially, like one of those exhibitions of fancy boys. But the temperature has altered and the hair is all wrong: unshaped, natural. These are Kurdish freedom fighters, the war dead. From the war that never ends.

  ‘Young people,’ Darwood tells me, ‘are not interested in politics. Muslims, white: they don’t want to know. Hair is more important.’

  This Kurdish shop, the political window, is a step too far; the end of my barber‐shop promenade and the beginning of something else. Less strolling, more staring.

  Patrick Rain, our school‐keeper, had a pristine leisure outfit for every hour of the day. He rose early, around 4.30 a.m., and missed nothing. I was never quite sure if his earpiece was a hearing aid or a link to some secret‐police facility. He was the accepted authority on murders in the night, drug arrests, body bags, turf wars. He reckoned – ‘Iain, I can tell you this much’ – that the barber shop on Middleton Road was owned by a Nigerian woman and that it divided into separate salons for men and women. The shooting occurred in the male part of the enterprise. I noticed that after the handwritten card vanished from the window, the business was retitled. The first ‘F’ was in a different font, it disappeared, leaving you with a concern called Lawless Finish.

  ‘Si‐reens,’ Patrick said. ‘All night long. Si‐reens and helicopters. It’s not worth going to bed.’

  It was impossible to photograph the windows of Kingsland Road barber shops. I tried, at all hours, but never managed to escape the lurkers and loiterers, hoodies with phones clamped to their chins like electric razors. Loud whisperers on pavement bicycles. The ones who patrol the newsagent, spotting scratchcard winners, undercutting cigarette prices with contraband bundles.

  Barbers in doorways. Cameras alert them, offend them. Cameras gather evidence. They disturb the climate of managed paranoia. They stop time: that great river in which nothing is more significant than anything else. Single images are pinned to the wall of the incident room in the Stoke Newington police station. Single images, arranged and rearranged, create a narrative, solicit a conclusion: guilty.

  From a safe distance – it was getting dark – I risked a shot of the barber shop where the shooting had taken place. The flash gave me away. Like a flare over no man’s land. Photographing yellow‐and‐blue tin notices is easy. Text doesn’t interest the custodians of property. My murder album was growing.

  ON WED 29TH NOV 06 AT ABOUT 2.45PM A FIREARMS INCIDENT TOOK PLACE IN MIDDLETON ROAD NEAR TO THE JUNCTION WITH KINGSLAND ROAD. DID YOU SEE OR HEAR ANYTHING? PLEASE CALL US.

  What did I see? Blue‐and‐white ribbon. Building work on a bridge that once took a railway down to Liverpool Street, then didn’t, and will again: a Transport for London promise. A goad to developers stretching the City beyond Shoreditch, shoehorning developments into unlikely lacunae, closing roads. I see scaffolding, boarded‐up shops, enterprises that have run out of enterprise. I see street muggers, relatively harmless, and corporate muggers who will gut, fillet and repackage the entire strip of the Great North Road. I see the pole with its camera‐eye turning Hackney into a real‐time movie. Bleeding the excitement out of crime.

  They pile into a car, four‐handed, and cut across my path, with a screech of brakes, before I’ve reached Mayfield Road and the turn into Albion Square. Loose leather coats with deep pockets. ‘What you doing, man?’

  I’ve been through dozens of these routines with City snatch squads and security vigilantes on edge‐land estates, but never with a mob of militant barbers. I offer the usual flannel; the consequences, if I fail to convince them, might be extreme. I have a doctorate in affable vagueness. A crazy old coot guilty of possessing something as antiquated as a 35mm analogue camera. A version, then, of the truth: ‘I’m interested in shopfronts.’

  In Broadway Market, on a stall specializing in expensive books by photographers, I came across Hackney Wick, a portfolio by Stephen Gill. There were numerous points of interest: the book was self‐published, independent in spirit, quirkily topographical and it provided an excellent representation of something that was no longer there. Gill had picked up a Coronet camera for 50p at the Hackney Wick boot fair, and he used it, soft at the edges, to celebrate the last rites of
the Sunday market that took place at the former dog track. But, most provoking of all, these were the photographs I would have taken if I had Gill’s expertise, his touch, his determination to be there, day after day: until the pile of random images made sense. By becoming a book, a collection.

  We made contact. I visited Gill’s Bethnal Green studio and admired his collection of books by other photographers, his respect for memory and archive. Beyond the window, I could see the trains that Gill would jump on, at whim, for estuarine excursions, potential projects, records of sleepers, paperback readers, or those who simply acted the part by staring out at damp fields.

  Stephen agreed to be interviewed for my Hackney book. He had grown up in Bristol and had come to London to work, as a dark‐room assistant, telephone answerer, courier of prints in taxis, at the prestigious Magnum Agency. Now he lived in Darnley Road, off Mare Street, and he cycled out, most mornings, along the River Lea and around the future Olympic Park. He liked my notion of walking a triangle – Kingsland Road, Mare Street, Hackney Road – making shots of barber shops. It suited his conceptual method of expressing his love for the borough. But he had serious reservations about my unspoken suggestion that barbers could in any way be connected with illegal activity.

  ‘A bad stereotype,’ he said.

  There shouldn’t be any difficulty, Gill insisted, about ingratiating himself with the barbers, to the point where they would allow him to make a promotional record of their premises.

  ‘I would be slightly worried,’ Stephen emailed me, ‘if your text, based on our walk, did suggest that some barbers are linked to drug dealing, as I simply don’t think it is possible to say any more what kind of business is running from drug money. Many are just trying to keep their heads above the water. Hackney gets so much stick and of course we should present the truth as we see it, but I would also love to help Hackney get back on its feet. I am sure many businesses do have some goings on with drugs, but one is just as likely to find carpet sellers, TV repair, pizza delivery, news‐agents etc who have dodgy things going on. I felt I should just mention my feelings on those issues really as I so often hear people say things like “oh look at that guy in his nice car, he must be a pimp or drug dealer” and it annoys me so much.’

  Our walk begins with corrugated‐roller security screens. There are no windows on view. Black barbers don’t open before midday. Gill, without bicycle, is removed by a few degrees from his natural rhythm. A soft‐spoken, sharp‐eyed man. But no easy touch. He has managed his career very successfully, by working long hours and sticking with assignments of his own devising. Hackney Wick, so he tells me, is to be found on eBay at £400. There is a new project afoot that will keep a record of the Lower Lea Valley, up to the moment when the skeleton of the first Olympic building appears. Archaeology in Reverse, he calls it. ‘You learn to think in images. And in the strategic arrangement of images. Language is imprecise. It muddies the water.’

  Low on the fence at the corner of Middleton Road, Stephen notices a remnant of the blue‐and‐white incident tape – which I photograph and he spurns. He might do something, I suggest, with the collection of metal shutters: in silver, blue, perforated like Aertex. Barbers and nail boutiques: these are nocturnal operations.

  When Gill returned to make contact with the shop owners, it wasn’t entirely the smooth passage he anticipated. I chatted to Mr Aladin, after the photographer’s visit, and he laughed. ‘No way, no way.’ The privacy of the card‐players in the back room was invio‐late. The barbers have all the portraits they need: catalogue models who look like dummies dressed with human hair, lard sculptures. Glamour portfolios play against the grid of Kurdish martyrs in the shop window, further up Kingsland Road: men with scarlet headbands and yellow stars, moustaches, beards. The men frown, the women smile: just faintly, a reflex curl of the lip contradicted by dark‐rimmed eyes. KAHRAMANLAR OLMEZ HALK HALK YENILMEZ! STOP THE DEATHS.

  Conversation, yes, the barbers do conversation. Rubber plants. Motorbikes inside the shop. Eagles for Istanbul football teams. But leave the camera at home, please. Stephen sniffles, it is the season of pollen allergies. He leads me into fascinating caverns at Dalston Junction where they sell wigs, hair‐straightening chemicals, extensions, gels. So much life, so much competition: the photographer is welcome in shops that are storerooms.

  There are no surprises after the rebranded Gillett Square, a major council enterprise: East Berlin with official art and block‐buildings that take their look from customized Portakabins. Alongside the terracotta slab of the Dalston Culture House you will find a series of slate‐grey booths that should be selling tickets to concerts by tribute bands. One of them does hair: CHICAGO BARBERS (WE SELL ITALIAN SHOES, PERFUMES & SUITS). ADULTS £6, CHILDREN £4. Not one solitary person, dog walker, blue‐bag vagrant, passes through this square. The architecture is against it, Kingsland Road takes the flow, the buzz. Strategic cameras transmit an empty set into a covert editing suite where low‐paid voyeurs lose their days (and nights) watching nothing happen, very slowly. Having purged the square of its natural clients, the street drinkers, the sponsors are left with a loud absence that can be recorded in real‐time but not photographed. A ‘Mediterranean‐style square with a drinking ban’ is the boast on promotional sheets pushed through our letter boxes. An absurdity that will make no sense until global warming rolls a warm sea down the course of the old Hackney Brook.

  The following weekend, without my interference, Gill repeats our walk. He gets no further, coming north from Shoreditch, than the Whiston Road turn, where he encounters a family party. Dressed in dark clothes. Two sets of grandparents, he reports. With grieving parents, young children. About twelve persons carrying flowers. Which they weave through a fence, before attaching a number of cards and drawings. And they are wailing. Yes, wailing.

  There is no question of lifting his camera, though Gill does have a fancy for covering funerals. The formal qualities appeal to him. The rituals. The stoic comedy of dispersal. This event is not a funeral, it is a return to the scene of a very recent death.

  A young man of seventeen, on his bicycle, going left at the lights, was crushed under the high wheels of a preoccupied heavy‐goods vehicle with no inkling of his existence. He was extinguished in an instant. For a few weeks the drama will be memorialized by a curtain of wilting, drooping flowers. The bones of the story can be found, inscribed on blue‐and‐yellow tin. With a request for further information. Cellophane chokes the trapped flower heads: the noise of colour against the momentum of the busy road. A deadly double act has been introduced into the borough: eco‐inspired cyclists and relentless convoys of lorries, heading east, to service the deadlines of the Olympic Park. They don’t see each other. They don’t belong in the same dream.

  Middleton Road

  Middleton Road wasn’t always Middleton Road; the eastern segment, between Queensbridge Road and London Fields, was once Albert Road. It’s broader than Albion Drive, the parallel southern neighbour, and better served: Hackney councillors have taken up residence. The western strip, a humped rat run between Queensbridge Road and Kingsland Road, remains something of a front line: a random demographic sample trapped between the fiercely perpetuated oasis of Albion Square and the flagship disaster of the Holly Street Estate. If there is a fashionable way of getting urban planning wrong, Holly Street has tried it: tight Victorian terraces demolished for tower blocks (leaking, crumbling, populated by jumpers), which were themselves demolished to make way for low‐level H‐blocks: based, presumably, on HM Prison Maze at Long Kesh. Holding camps for social engineering. And visited, so he boasts, by the preacher/politician Tony Blair, at the start of a glittering career of photo opportunities. Those early Hackney days are unrecorded, but Tony has been back many times since, to large it on the front page of the Hackney Gazette.

  A favourite Blair location is ‘The Building Exploratory’, a model village on an upper floor of the Queensbridge Primary School. Photographed here – like Lady Thatcher with the ma
quette of Canary Wharf – Blair rises over a dwarf principality: a blue‐suited King Kong, close‐shaved, Max Factored. A sweat‐slicked moon‐face with rictal grin pressed against the tiny windows of a faithfully reproduced miniature of one of the detonated Holly Street towers. They have recordings made by the expelled tenants and toy television sets that flicker in shadowy interiors. There are maps memorializing addresses where bombs fell in the 1940s. Fragments of brick and tile demonstrate succeeding geological eras. Hackney as primal swamp: a huddle of huts beside a broad river. And Hackney the asylum from the city’s pestilence, the original garden suburb.

  At night, orange lights in these knee‐high tower blocks do not go out and the voices of inhabitants are still heard. I think we are all in there, our ghost skins, our disembodied memories. There are even rumours that neighbours no longer seen on the street have taken up residence in the second life of the model Hackney. In troubled sleep, the small protection of this village contained within a secure school building infects our dreams. We are the robotic residue of dramas enacted by eidolons and spectral selves.

  Trapped inside my house in a reproduction Albion Drive, I witnessed the latest procession of dignitaries, flag‐bedecked mayoral limousines, come to pay homage to this prime facility, London as a teaching aid. There were helicopters overhead and motorbike outriders for the prime minister: his flashing smile, his wave. The way he bounds up the stairs, promoting his late‐youthful energy. Fit for purpose. Sprinting down corridors where pupils are forbidden to run.

  Forgotten friends from our early days tell their tales, make their complaints heard from within the plywood depths of a shrunken Middleton Road. The special‐needs teacher assaulted with a pig’s head who spent the next thirty years, buried in legal documents, fighting her own case for compensation. And her husband, the council building foreman, asked to smash up new kitchen equipment, who stumbled on a web of scams, pay‐offs, kickbacks – and was offered the choice of immediate retirement on health grounds, a full pension. Or something worse. That which can be imagined is what happens.