The Waste begins just beyond the ancient Toll Booth or barrier, that precursor of Ken Livingstone’s congestion charge. The Fox pub, a Truman’s house, was rebuilt in 1790, at the front of a much older alehouse of the same name. It serviced thirsty drovers arriving in town and travellers setting themselves up for the road out. Rough ground, owned by the Rector of Dalston as part of his glebe, evolved into an open space for political meetings and general trade. Licensed by the present Hackney Council, the market is seen as an encumbrance to the new fundamentalism: discrimination against rubbish, a coloured plastic bin for every form of household waste. Waste has become a prohibited term. The original market, left to its own devices, was a self‐sustaining ecological system. If anyone would give an object a home, for cash, that item had value – if not, it disappeared into the general mound, the urban moraine, to be picked over at no fee. And afterwards the whole mess was swallowed up by contractors on overtime.
I was struck, at the very end of my dealing days, by the confidence with which Balkan newcomers, dead‐baby professionals (doped in the arms of surrogate mothers), invaded this Saturday‐market strip. I had to learn how to take photographs from waist level, framing by instinct, no flash. Only the dull click to give you away. Peddlers of contraband cigarettes, dust tubes. Petty thieves: Norman Palmer abhorred them, the way they clustered and mobbed, swept the stalls in long skirts with deep pockets, their identifying features hidden by headscarves. The forests of surveil‐lance cameras were not yet in place. By late afternoon, it was apocalyptic: the anti‐ecology, the riposte to every form of correctness. Books flung on the ground. Burst sacks of clothes. Indestructible plastic toys. Smashed fruit. Burgers, chips. Empty video husks. Newspaper with nothing to wrap.
But Norman was always chipper, chatting to appreciative customers. Of late, pressure from the council annoyed him, absurdist rules: that he could trade only in certain pre‐defined commodities. One of the other stallholders witnessed his van being craned away, hijacked, seized by the authorities. It was becoming difficult to find somewhere to park within miles of the market; dealers from other parts of town were falling away. End of an era, certainly. Norman agreed to give me an interview. He liked books of local history and, over the years, had supplied me with many odd and entertaining volumes.
29 August 2006. Norman Palmer lives on a hill, above reservoirs, in the Lea Valley. A road in which he can park his van: but already there are encroachments, the city is getting its revenge on the escapees of the 1960s and 1970s, new estates nudge the neat avenues and quiet cul‐de‐sacs of Chingford. The slopes on which the Kray Twins, Reg’s sad wife, the famous mother, are all sleeping. Freighted with floral tributes. Anchored in wreaths.
There is a lush, well‐watered garden and a villa of objects, glass cabinets, exotic birds. I feel the contrast with what I have left behind in Albion Drive: a house plunged into darkness, electrics shot, tallow and tar smells seeping from beneath the floorboards, seething clusters of black flies on the window panes of the sitting room. Scratching of swift feet in the eaves, creatures scampering over our heads, behind the walls. A family of foxes in residence beneath the garden shed. Squirrels kicking off the slates.
Norman has a fox too. Before we settle to our talk, he goes outside, crosses the road to leave meat for a shy red beast who emerges, right on cue, from another garden. The fox nods a brief acknowledgement and bloodies his sharp nose as he tears at his nightly tribute.
Returned indoors, I admire the collection of Chinese porcelain, the way the solid furniture and thick carpets baffle sound. Our recording is barely inconvenienced by the shrieking derision of the mynah birds and parrots. There is a carafe of claret and a heavy goblet. I’m so relaxed out here, in this other life, that I fail to activate the first side of the tape, during which Norman explains how he was made redundant by an oil company. He had a job cruising the edge‐lands, Essex, Surrey, dormitory towns and newly occupied places, prospecting for petrol stations. A scout in the frontier sense. There was always time, promising site identified, to hit the antique shops. Now of course that occupation has gone into reverse, location hunters are deciding which petrol stations to close down. And the blight has struck the inner city: pre‐development wastegrounds behind plywood fences.
With stock in hand, Norman began to trade south of the river in East Street Market – and then in Kingsland Waste. He has been on his Hackney pitch for twenty‐five years; first as a regular, then as a casual. A permanent casual. The rental is £25 per stall. His colleague, Harry, takes five, rolls in at four‐thirty in the morning and flogs clothes to dealers. The random stuff he spreads across the floor is hoovered up from assorted charities.
Norman has an established clientele: Dan Cruickshank is a regular, muttering enthusiastically, discoursing on this and that. There is a woman from Stoke Newington who writes about dogs. Acquisitive teachers mark up the week’s effort. Hoarders, obsessives, ragged fanatics. The Waste stall, Norman reckons, is an unlicensed academy.
He is assisted, now that his old mum has stepped down, by the redoubtable and electively mute Ralph: who accepts cashmoney and does the lifting and dragging. But he knows his stuff, this man, he started in Cheshire Street, with his brother, buying German‐language primers, so that he could collect Second War memorabilia. Over the years, Ralph has amassed a valuable holding.
The problem with the Waste, Norman tells me, is that there is no collective voice, no spokesperson to argue their case.
I concentrate on pushing the right buttons. Now the story is told. How the dealing life continues, despite everything.
I do a lot of probate and quite often clear the houses.
I got my knowledge when I was doing the oil‐company thing, with Chevron, Standard Oil of California. The sales director used to come out with me, regular, once a month, to see the plans I was working on, the prospects. We used to work until about twelve o’clock, lunchtime. Then he’d say, ‘Norman, where are the antique shops?’ Mainly Home Counties this was. He would buy clocks. When he went back to Dallas, he had six containers full of antique clocks. And most of those were bought out of his expenses. Whack!
I had an interest in Chinese porcelain at the time. It has become prohibitively expensive now. Going round on behalf of the oil company, I kept my eyes open. When I was eventually made redundant by Chevron, I thought: ‘Well, all right, I know what I’ll do.’
We’ve got four children. With four children it’s difficult to live. My wife, June, used to go to jumble sales. There was always an interest in what you could pick up.
I was born in Mildmay Road, down from Ridley Road. As a kid I used to go to the Waste. A fantastic area in which to grow up. Mosley preaching on the corner of Shacklewell Lane, outside the synagogue. He used to spout, regular as clockwork, on Shacklewell Lane.
One of my friends at school, Monty Goldman, is always trying to become mayor of Hackney. Little Jewish feller. He’d come to school on a Monday with a black eye from fighting the blackshirts.
I went to school in Parmiter’s, up in Bethnal Green. I used to live in Clapton, Stamford Hill. I really do know Hackney. It used to be a marvellous market, the Waste. You could buy anything there. Particularly if you were interested in tools, clocks, watches. Fantastic. There’s still a tremendous interest in old tools. I have a couple of dealers who are seriously into antique tools.
I was too young to appreciate Hackney in the war period. I was evacuated to Bath and when that got bombed, we were brought back. My brother is six years older. He remembers how everybody was down the pawnshop. The dodging around, nicking stuff off fruit stalls. I was too young for that. My brother Ken often told tales of tricks and dodges.
Even these days a high percentage of goods are nicked from my stall every week. You’ve got an influx of people for whom thieving is second nature. They don’t think anything of it. Take the Nigerians. On Saturday there was a huge Nigerian, he’s got loads of gear in his arms and suddenly the stallholder is saying, ‘Oy oy oy, you haven�
��t paid for that.’ He’s taking absolutely no notice whatsoever. He loads up his car and drives off. Ha!
Then you get the Eastern European gypsies coming down. A woman with a plastic baby in her arms and this great stomach that looks like a pregnancy and is actually a cage with an empty space in it. The real arms of those women go way down here. Ha! I’ve had that as well.
At one time, this wholesaler was bringing stuff down, cut glass from Poland, cutlery sets, all cheap. He’d say, ‘Have a go at these, Norman.’ And he’d pile it up and say, ‘I’ll be back later.’ He took away whatever hadn’t been sold. But whole sets were vanishing! In front of your eyes. I couldn’t understand it. They were disappearing up women’s skirts, gypsies. I had to stop doing the sets. When it came to the weighing out, the man from Palmerston Road wasn’t interested in where they’d gone. Unbelievable!
It was astonishing the authorities allowed those cigarette sellers to carry on. It was a huge racket. The gypsies were amazing characters. Their attitude was: ‘I’m a crook – so what?’ It didn’t matter how obvious they were, they still managed to operate.
I don’t know how a lot of the stalls in the Waste earn money. The gypsies were thieving off people who could least afford it. I think most of the street markets are hanging on by their fingernails. If they move off into boot sales, they’re going to take even less money. They built up a very big market at the back of Walthamstow Town Hall. It was along similar lines to Hackney Wick.
With the advent of the council’s interest in the market, things changed. Harry used to leave a load of stuff behind when he went home. But the council imposed a restriction. They said, ‘If you leave stuff, you’ll have a £75 fine.’ They were claiming that the market was very, very expensive to run.
Harry still leaves stuff, nothing like he did. I still leave stuff. Most of what I leave is harmless or useful to the right person. At one time a couple of schools came down to take away the books.
It did dawn on the council that this was degrading for the area, scavengers crawling over mountains of rubbish. So they gave Harry an official warning.
It’s amazing how he’s made a go of it. I’ve never found anything worthwhile on his stalls. But he takes serious amounts of money. If you took Harry away from the market, you might as well close the place down. But is it worth saving? Unless they can solve access – which they can’t – you’ll never build the market up again. The people who are left, up the Waste or in Whitechapel, they’re not earning a fantastic living.
It’s fading away, the market culture. If I was young I’d be concerned. I’ve got people coming to me that have units or shops in Camden Passage, people who are young enough to have quite a few years ahead of them, and they are seriously worried. They’re going to have to move out. They’re not doing the business. At one time there were couriers herding Italians and Americans around places like Camden Passage. It doesn’t happen now.
Development and regeneration never helps. You can’t move across from the Waste to Broadway Market by London Fields. It’s not just council regulations, it’s space. To operate and generate interest in the junky bits and pieces that I offer, you need space. A lot of space.
When you’ve got the momentum going, it generates that lovely rush of competition. That’s what kills them. The council are saying, ‘To provide the space you want to operate, you need a large area, with car parking provided.’ That will always be the downfall: car parking, accessibility for the public. If it’s not easy for people to get at you, you’re in trouble. If the market’s big enough, like Brick Lane and Cheshire Street, you don’t mind parking a mile away. Having a bit of a stroll. If I couldn’t park my van at the back of the stall that would be the finish of it.
I was getting parking tickets when I used to park in Middleton Road. I couldn’t park alongside the stall on the Waste. I had to arrive early, unload, park the van somewhere and come back. You have to be able to arrive on site. If you can’t do that you’re in trouble straight away. That’s from the trader’s point of view. The public? You need access and no aggravation.
June can’t get out of Chingford fast enough. She can see the place changing before her eyes. We’ve got an estate slapped down around the corner. People are moving away from here in droves. Really. Because of the policies conducted by Waltham Forest Council. They love the idea of integrating the socially deprived. It sounds like a commendable idea, but it doesn’t work.
I don’t see a need for us to move, to be honest. I can park the van right outside. June, every time she goes down to Morrisons, comes back saying, ‘I remember when . . .’ She starts counting coloured people at bus stops. That undermines her position a little, I think. It’s still a perfectly nice area and I have no problem with it. But it has changed, seriously changed. Let’s put it this way, it won’t get any better.
Hackney is improving all the time. You can see plenty of money being spent on properties. The borough is coming back to its former self. I’ve noticed it, driving around. It’s nice to see. It’s still on the up, the rise. And the further it goes, the more it conditions people – even the ones trying to cause trouble – the better. Troublemakers are stalled by the fact that they’re in a nice area. Once they feel a bit of pride about where they live, anything is possible.
The Flycatcher of Graham Road
He stands at the study window, mid‐morning no brighter than dawn’s dim cataract: Hackney light double‐filtered by smeared panes and his thick spectacles (one arm of which is secured with a blob of pink plaster). Arm fishing inside loose flannels, the watcher rakes a pinched scrotum, sniffs his fingers and snatches up a copy of Marxism Today. Which he uses, with an angry slash, to dislodge a pair of mating flies from the surgical gauze of the net curtains. Fresh sticky‐blue corpses are arranged, with the others, on a chipped and coffee‐ringed saucer. Later, when the sorry creature is at the limit of its endurance, the murdered insects will be fed to an axolotl. It is morbidly immobile in its high‐sided tank, sprawled flaccid on a gravel beach: a being that the man loathes even more than himself, more than the worst of his private impulses.
He is a prisoner of the city, this journalist, art scribe. He watches, waits: for recognition, reinvention. Neurotically, he scans roof‐scapes, the coughing road with its proletarian shufflers. The cell of his book‐lined study. The tank with its lizardly captive: a prisoner’s prisoner. His wife, an Italian, teaches in a local school which the man finds ‘rough and rowdy as they come’. Menzies Tanner is not rough or rowdy; he is damaged, hurt, in thrall to pornography, cranking peephole machines in which grey shadows grind and sweat according to the momentum of suppressed desire. Chewed hangnails. Blistered tongue. Language‐runs, word‐pellets to be squirted on to the page, never spoken.
Coming out of Cambridge, late‐modernism, left‐field politics, and beginning to write under the inspiration of John Berger, Tanner was absorbed into Hackney as the cheapest equivalent of Berger’s alpine retreat: a necessary distance from which to view the noble peasants of London. Graham Road flows sluggishly between Dalston Lane and Mare Street. There is a building, at the western end, marked with a red cross. He is much too preoccupied to notice buildings, but he notices this one – where he misses the discreet German Hospital, which is set back, under development. Here, Tanner wrote, was a street of substantial villas fallen on hard times, multiple‐occupied by legions of the disappeared. Certain addresses carry certain pains; you grow to resemble the bricks that surround you. Tanner intensifies this effect by psychic transference with the reptile in the tank: until the beast becomes his Dorian Gray, his attic portrait. But art writers are also dealers, they fix the market. Pictures and property: use one as collateral against the other. A house in Graham Road against a Leon Kossoff. One of those stunning panoramic spreads produced from Kossoff’s Dalston Lane studio, when he gazes down the tracks towards Ridley Road Market and the fleshing sheds.
I used to meet Tanner from time to time, social gatherings at a neighbour’s house – and
although we didn’t really get along, with prejudices on both sides and rivalry at the bookstall on Kingsland Waste, we chatted. He knew some of the Cambridge poets I had recently come across, although such matters, he implied, belonged in a past from which he was extricating himself; as he underwent the lengthy process of Freudian analysis and the not altogether unpleasant task of talking about himself for an hour each week, uninterrupted: the fascinating flaws, treacheries, sufferings. Tanner was employing, at his wife’s expense, a paid facilitator, a gentle dominatrix with an impressive collection of degrees. Just as, cash‐in‐hand, he used sex workers who were, in their own right, part of the mechanics of the city. And of art. Phone‐box models for hire. Accepting, but never soliciting, the questionable immortality of oil paint, film and word‐showers.
Later, much later, when Tanner was dead, heart attack at a pre‐opening champagne launch for the London Eye, I was commissioned to write a piece on a show of Kossoff drawings for the influential magazine the former Graham Road hack owned and edited. Drifting to the right, remarrying into money and influence, Tanner had become a visible and well‐regarded cultural commentator. He escaped to the leafy Oxford suburbs and spoke of Hackney only in terms of Kossoff paintings.
Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire Page 10