Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire

by Iain Sinclair

  The navigation, Albion Drive to Clarissa Street, gets trickier every year. I have the fantasy, as I push deeper into my Hackney book, that everything and everybody can be found within 440 yards of my house. Of the buried chamber with its brick arch. All the key witnesses are within one lap of the Olympic track. Erol’s substantial archive fits the rule. Walking through the low‐level flats, the Triangle, the estates, is problematic; social planners have blocked rat runs, sealed doors, put barriers across roads. Cutting out, so they believe, the escape routes of street dealers and balcony gangs. Crack houses have been spectacularly raided – with camera crews in attendance. And the result? Urban drift, melancholy bordering on catatonia. Robotic shufflers. Nervous pedestrians breaking into a slouching half‐run, in case the pavement they are using will be discontinued before they reach the Lottery‐card dispenser. Stephen Gill tells me that Hackney, with ninety active enterprises, has more betting shops than any other London borough. They are colonizing Mare Street, like a flock of crows, in anticipation of the Olympic bonanza. Gambling has been categorized as a ‘financial service’, leaving William Hill and his competitors free to take over any redundant bank or failed insurance brokerage: without unnecessary paperwork. Gill is gathering up and photographing an origami of crumpled, chewed and twisted betting slips. He records the name of the nag and the relevant loss, from £2.20 to £500.

  A West African patriarch, who has assembled his entire family, wife, two sons, daughter, outside the newsagent, snatches a ticket from the street‐machine and presses it to the lips of the youngest boy. ‘Bless,’ he says. ‘Bless our good fortune.’ Before he strides imperiously into the narrow shop, pushing aside single‐cigarette cadgers, the confused patrons of a complicated and expensive transport system. Tickets to viral torpedoes. Tickets to stalled tunnels. Tickets to tear up before they entitle you to anything. Consoling junk foods. Sugar hits for the single schoolkid allowed in at one time. Salt licks. Papers full of naked bodies, burnt, bombed or plumped up like inflated rubber chickens. The always‐missing child, her wide accusing eyes.

  23 May 2006: Erol confesses, he is a City man with an office in Mitre Square. His collection is an act of love for a place that is vanishing, every time he steps outside his door. As we talk, the computer pings, apologetically, to alert him to another Haggerston item coming on to the market. He tells me that he picked up a copy of William Robinson’s pioneering, two‐volume history of Hackney for £64. Mr Kagan has never felt comfortable, or been made welcome, at the Archives Department and Local Studies Library in Downham Road. He works best at home.

  The family were gathered around a large television set in a smartly furnished living room. We exchanged greetings, before going through to the adjoining study, the Haggerston store. There is little or no contact with the neighbours, Erol says, they never stay on the estate more than a few months. The garden patch is not much used. He tried growing melons, but the partition fence never felt secure enough to separate his crop from a breeder of pit bulls. And the man’s urgent, earth‐ripping playmates with their dangling, swaying undercarriages.

  I was born here, but I have quite a mixed background: Turkish Cypriot, Sudanese. My parents came over in the 1970s, ’73, just before the Cyprus war. My wife Nadia’s parents came in the 1960s. They settled in an interesting house in Newington Green, the oldest brick house in the country. Henry VIII’s hunting lodge. Nadia was actually born there. Her father sold it for £30,000. Current value? £2 million. Ha! Yeah!

  I’ve been to Cyprus, my parents’ old house, but it’s not the same feeling. To me, this is home. I could never live anywhere else. I have this need to dig deep, to document what I find.

  I grew up, overlooking the canal, in Dunston House. On the ground floor. My parents, as soon as they arrived here, were offered an entire house on Albion Square. They said, ‘No no. Too old.’ They wanted something new. Ha!

  I’d go fishing, across the road, for tiddlers. A terrible place to live. The canal absolutely stank. In summer especially. You would never guess that one day canalside properties would be desirable. I worked, as a young kid, when I was in Laburnum School, on one of those mosaics you see from the canal path, as you go under the Haggerston Road Bridge. It was a good school. We went out on the water, from alongside the wood yard.

  Then I moved up to the school opposite where you live. I don’t know what it is now. But it’s not a school, is it? I went to college and took some A levels. Then did a foundation course in accountancy. I joined a firm as a trainee accountant, before I qualified. That was in Holborn. I moved into systems, accounting systems. I implemented a system for John Lewis. Financial services for the John Lewis Partnership. I started my own company as an independent contractor. In the City. I landed a large contract with a telecom company and began to move around the world. Three years travelling between Geneva, Paris, other parts of Europe. That’s when I started getting interested in local history.

  When I became successful, I didn’t move out to Surrey. I stayed in Haggerston. It’s the area, I’m really attached to it. I can’t live anywhere else.

  My entertaining is all done in the City. I take clients out, lunches, drinks. When I’m here, at home, I spend my time working through my archives, my books. I walk around all the time.

  As a kid I used to go for a wash to Haggerston Baths. Now they’re closed, locked up. No baths, no laundry, no gym, no swimming. The building looks derelict. They have let it decay. Even from my current perspective, I’m not happy about what’s happening. Local people can’t afford the area. They’re moving out. I was quite upset to see Laburnum School knocked down. One day it was there and the next it wasn’t. Quite shocking. I saw a bell tower standing in the rubble. I don’t know how it got there – or where it went. It is criminal, knocking down a building like that, an historic building.

  I always asked people a question when I was young: ‘What was here before?’ I was intrigued to know. I’ve had a successful professional career, travelling all over the place, but it always comes back to a longing for home. That’s when you realize: this is home. When I got back from my other life, I was thirsty for research, more knowledge about the ground beneath my feet.

  There are people working on Hackney histories, but no one is doing Haggerston. I search eBay constantly. I have alerts that tell me when something on Haggerston has appeared. I haunt old bookshops, ephemera fairs. I collect things and stick them in boxes, shove them away. One day I’ll have time to read those books. I have postcards, photographs, maps. Here is a postcard I bought because it was sent to someone in Haggerston. Here is an old map of the parish of Shoreditch. Your house in Albion Drive is just inside the border.

  There used to be a station in Haggerston. They closed it down. Now they’re going to open it up again. This postcard is of Haggerston Station in 1925. This is the goods depot, between Broad Street and Dalston Junction. That is Shoreditch Station. If you go down Kingsland Road, towards the City, you’ve got Shoreditch Church on the left. Before that you’ve got an old girls’ school, it used to be a school. Opposite that site is a corner building. That building was once the Shoreditch Station.

  It’s hard to record all of these places before they knock them down. On Queensbridge Road, when you go over the canal bridge, they’re building new QEII luxury apartments. There was once an estate on that site. That’s where the old Haggerston Church would have been.

  A chap called Lee – Lee Street was named after him – had the land, even before the canal was dug. It was all fields and market gardens. Nursery Road has been brought back, they liked the sound of that one. The oldest road in the area.

  The original manor of Haggerston stood where those new flats were built in the 1990s, opposite Laburnum School. Edmond Halley was born around there. His study was actually on the site of those flats. There was uproar from historians and the heritage people when the flats were built. If they’d had time for a dig, they would have found significant archaeo‐logical remains, material relating to Hall
ey, the discoverer of the comet.

  I’ve done the research. Halley was born, here in Haggerston, in 1656. He died in 1742. When he was twenty he sailed to St Helena to make astronomical observations. He discussed the law of force under which the planets move in elliptical orbits with Isaac Newton. Our local man! A hero of science! Where is the blue plaque? He published the complete works of Apollonius. After Flamsteed he was appointed Astrologer Royal. His researches – ha! – were as mad as mine: gunnery, ballistics, diving bells, the precise location of Julius Caesar’s landing in Britain.

  There are legal documents on parchment, relating to Stonebridge House. I haven’t gone through them properly. The area where the house stood was later linked to the tobacco industry. There’s still so much to find out.

  I was looking through the Friends Reunited website for people who lived in this area and I found an old lady who was born and had lived all her life in Samuel House. She’s in Essex now. She mentioned that Richardson, the novelist, had his house somewhere around here. All the blocks on the estate are named with Richardson associations: Clarissa House, Samuel House, Richardson Close. It was never clear how these places were named. I’d love to find out.

  Another thing, that lamp post. I’ve often wondered about how it got there, why it survived. Behind All Saints Church, to the right, down Livermere Road. Have you noticed it? It’s Georgian or early Victorian. I’ve never seen another one like it. I wander this area constantly and I often fetch up there, standing beside that lamp post, in the twilight, at the back of the flats. It’s very strange to find a thing like that in the middle of an estate.

  Queensbridge Road

  The comet, Anna suggests, when I tell her about Halley, would have been visible to terrestrial observers at the time when Farne was enrolled in the Comet Nursery, over the canal, in Orsman Road, Hoxton. Was it from Halley and his Haggerston connections that the nursery got its name? For years, first with Farne, then William, we made that short journey, crossing invisible boundaries: territorial transgression. Our metaphorical comet, scratching its belly on the sharp, pencil‐point tower of the mosque on Laburnum Street, had come to ground. An electronic call to prayer reverberated over diminished and deserted streets, over the cancelled swimming pool, so fondly recalled by Erol Kagan.

  In September 2006, I walked out to see the film‐maker Emily Richardson. She lived on Queensbridge Road, at the Hackney Road end: in the Victorian terrace where the notorious Dr Swan once kept his drug‐dispensing surgery. Swan had long since departed. The terrace had been improved into small but desirable flats: convenient for Columbia Road’s Sunday flower market and the nicely kept Haggerston Park. Emily, commissioned to make a three‐screen film, Transit, about whatever it is that lies beneath London – memory‐sludge, alligators, carcasses of cattle and dogs, mystery religions, crowns, coins, rivers – had also been concerned about what lay within her own body, the child she was carrying. A transitional project at a pivotal point in her life in a city that was remaking itself with ever‐increasing velocity. I would improvise remarks on these themes, without seeing the footage (drifts through Ridley Road Market, Waterden Road on the perimeter of the Olympic Park, subterranean Smithfield): before it was projected on three screens, with overlapping sound, among the arches of a former slaughterhouse. In return for my services, Emily would record an account of the birth of her son in the Homerton Hospital. A location, I felt sure, that would recur in my book.

  There were times when Queensbridge Road, with its broad pavements, hectic traffic, permanent cones and obstacles, was best avoided. That light‐jumping charge of killer vans and sacrificial bicycles that brought you past Ridley Road, Dalston Lane, the fringes of Hackney Downs, to Clapton. Aka: the Crime Scene. Murder Mile. Why so modest? The topography of drive‐by assassinations, blue‐and‐white tape, flowering concrete, was spreading: in an elegant correlation to soaring house prices. To fluctuations on the underground NASDAQ, our chemical‐commodities market. Postcode revenge killings by tribal groups with a neurotic attitude to territory: rucksacks filled with disconnected Sat Nav gizmos, the cargo‐cult scavenging of urban hunter‐gatherers. Ripped‐out electronic hardware, until it is traded, is trash. A useless burden. Outdated as soon as it comes into your possession. The confirmation that you are beyond the credit system. Slaves of the consumer spectacle peddling secondhand junk in a plunging market.

  ‘Drugs have become our main problem,’ said the Neighbourhood Watch Newsletter in June 2005. ‘Both because most reported crimes in the area are drug related and because of the influx of crack dealers and users hanging round the streets. Dalston Junction has become a “dispersion zone”, so that we are experiencing “spillover”, especially on the corner of Middleton Road and Kingsland Road. We have been promised a surveillance camera for this corner for months, but it has not come.’

  As if to confirm my thesis, whereby the backdraught of crime‐noise adds value to property, by increasing demand for CCTV systems and stimulating an anxiety‐lust to secure your own private space, a letter arrives from Currell, the estate agents.

  ‘On the corner of Middleton Road and Queensbridge Road, E8, is Middleton Court, an interesting prospect for anyone wishing to take advantage of an investment or rental opportunity. This exciting new development, close to the London Fields conservation area, comprises thirteen apartments . . . If the current development of the East London Tube link is maintained, the future accessibility of the area to the City and the West End will be assured, therefore this is an opportunity not to be missed . . . Car parking spaces are also available at £15,000.’

  Before I open the front door, before the dog accompanists and preoccupied joggers hit the early streets, the first of the hustlers is at me. A middle‐aged black man in a dark suit, single gold‐capped tooth in winning smile. Perhaps one of the professionals from the Professional Development Centre across the road? A Hackney educational adviser with a parking problem? He says, talking very fast and avoiding my eye, that he is Carol’s husband. From no. 20. She’s the midwife, you know her, the one with the blue Volvo? He’s locked himself out. Can he use the phone? Of course he can. But he carries on, loading the riff with too many precise and unnecessary details. There is no answer to his call. Or my guilt over not knowing Carol, the Volvo‐owning midwife. Call aborted, he asks if he can ‘warm his hands’ for a few minutes on the radiator. I’m drifting back, to finish my transcript of the Kagan interview, while he thaws out – until Anna appears on the stairs, well aware that Carol is a fiction and the blue Volvo has never been parked on this stretch. The soft‐access sweep of the house must be filed alongside the rest of the sob stories, specific amounts of cash solicited for taxis to accident sites, hospital runs, dying children in the Whittington Hospital.

  ‘I am the proprietor of a successful retail business in Basildon, Essex, and I need £19 to reclaim my vehicle, after a minor accident on Queensbridge Road. The garage won’t take credit cards. I’ll pay you back within twelve hours. I will leave three brand‐new shirts as a guarantee. In the cellophane packaging.’

  They tell us far more than we want to know. Charitable instincts have long since been eroded. We have no greed left to take advantage of the paper fortunes offered by the Central Bank of Nigeria: who operate for convenience from a bedsit in Leytonstone.

  ‘Another 419 this morning,’ I report. The relevant number in the Nigerian criminal code for internet fraud. The contract to which we have put our signatures, for the good life in Hackney, is low‐level tinnitus, acoustic irritations that spoil our sleep.

  The throb of engines as couriers wait to make their exchange. A man bleeds to death on Albion Square. A former council employee with a disabled parking permit is thought to have enjoyed a substantial bingo win. Two bandits force their way into his house. Rob him, beat him. He gives chase, collapses, heart attack. Major family funeral.

  I wake in the night to discover a fishing‐rod poking through the letter box, baited for car keys.

  And now
, as I turn the corner into Queensbridge Road, a Rasta is at my shoulder muttering: ‘Givus 20p, man. Givus 20p.’ On and on. Until I give him the money and he spins away to attach himself to a builder in a yellow tabard, who is heading in the opposite direction. ‘Givus 20p, man. Givus 20p.’

  The snaggle‐toothed hoodie, the next in line, has a mild approach. Hands spread wide. ‘I don’t do this, boss. Just a quid.’ He is not offended when I pat empty pockets. ‘Good luck, boss. All right? Next time, OK? You take care.’

  The waif in the bus shelter is after a cigarette. I can’t help, but an older man, grey hair, grey tracksuit, briefcase, gets her lit. And stays to chat. The kids who dance around asking for the time are sizing up the watch I don’t wear. They don’t know what day it is but they know they don’t care.

  On a bench, outside the Belgrave Arms, where Tony Lambrianou’s father took his once‐a‐year Christmas drink, a gaunt female in a headscarf calls out: ‘I need 50p to go to the toilet.’ A superfluous request, it would seem, from the evidence of the pavement.

  Lately, these episodes have diminished, replaced by an hysteria of squad cars launching themselves into the air, blue lights flashing, as they fly from the hump of the Queensbridge Road Bridge. I miss the action, the Jacobean dialogue: the acknowledgement of my presence as a very minor contributor to the circus of the streets.

  A raid took out the crack dealer who operated from Shoreditch Court, a block once favoured by retired local folk, builders, small tradesmen. Pat the school‐keeper (and special constable) told me that he’d seen a black zip‐up bag that you could hardly lift for the weight of handguns, along with an AK‐47, Mace, machete, grenades. Overnight, the beggars and tollers and con artists moved on. I would have to find new fictions to lend credence to my continuing documentation of a place that didn’t exist. Were Henry Mayhew’s painstaking interviews with urban invisibles any more reliable than the wild exaggerations of Charles Dickens?