Then there were the arty boys, doing something unfortunate to William Blake, hanging poems from the washing line. One of them, I remember, had the directing thing cracked. He lolled in a chair, passing languid but impatient instructions to his unpaid helpers, who scurried in and out of the garden, trying to peg out a photocopied set of Jerusalem laundry in a minor whirlwind. While the tormented youth groaned, head in hands, knowing what he didn’t like, but unwilling to toss away the fruits of deep contemplation on these scabby ingrates.
The point being that I’d seen it all and reached a state of suspended exasperation and half‐amused tolerance: what new tricks could they demonstrate? Residual vanity – that someone was sufficiently interested in what I was doing to trek out here – persuaded me to respond to the occasional invitations that leaked through my newly installed internet connection. And, in any case, crews were now one person. In and out. No lights. I understood the format, we had progressed backwards to the era of the 8mm diary films: shoot what you like, where you like, nobody is watching. The entire process is predicated on the absence of an audience.
The latest young man, a Cambridge geographer, was impressive. He’d been well tutored. He knew exactly what he wanted and how to go about it, causing the least inconvenience to my obsessive work routines. He was brisker, less anguished, but his efficiency reminded me of my first working encounter with his father, Chris Petit. Chris scouted his locations in advance, plotted the shots, and even laid down tracks for an elegant descent, under the disguise of an upturned boat, into a recovered wartime bunker. The shot was never used. But the principle was there: forethought, shape, rhythm, movement. If Rob Petit had been advised, he acted on this advice with considerable charm and proper determination.
He placed me in a parked car in Albion Square, under the lime trees, climbed into the back seat, and shot my responses in the driving mirror. Painless. Done and dusted in twenty minutes. The subject of this film was George Orwell. An academic paper delivered in a grudgingly accepted format: 1984 and surveillance technology. The only actual reading on the Cambridge course consisted of downloaded extracts, comments by critics on other critics. The trick was to factor in a light dressing of Walter Benjamin, Virilio, Barthes, Foucault, Mike Davis, Rebecca Solnit – without the drudgery of labouring through their books. You quote the footnotes everybody else quotes to make your invigilators feel comfortable: Xerox virtues. A first‐class degree and a future cutting music promos.
Rob posted his little film on YouTube. A number of people reported back, they had seen me in this thing with Tony Blair. What? The one where I’m driving around the M25 with Blair. Shot by Chris Petit. None of them registered Orwell or 1984. The static car, Blair captured from a TV screen, the Petit name: sampled and scrambled into a new and entirely fictional form. Which might be seen as a demonstration of Rob’s thesis. Whatever. George Orwell (Eric Arthur Blair) was introduced to the Hackney set. With lethal consequences. Blair, the Eton‐educated colonial policeman, witness of savagery, morphs into Orwell, plongeur, roll‐ups and moustache, the elective down‐and‐out in Paris and London. A namer of names. Broadcaster, spook. Scourge of monolithic socialist states. And then, triggered by Rob Petit’s camera seance, the posthumous Orwell, sponsor of CCTV systems and mendacious New‐Labour‐speak, evolves into the real presence of the former Anthony Charles Lynton Blair, Fettes and Oxbridge educated, first‐step‐on‐property‐ladder Hackney incomer: the beaming Tony, our failed ‘soft left’ local councillor. The grin without the cat.
Orwell’s name was also attached to a block of flats, down by the canal, that seemed to be under constant, pre‐Olympic revision: mobs of Russians, Poles, Brazilians hanging around their stacked Portakabin favela waiting for the Man, the Irishman, the gaffer in the white van. Whenever there was an immigration fuss in the tabloids, they dispersed overnight; to reappear when the heat was off, with more cones, more discontinued rights of passage, cages of scaffolding. Some of the transient builders slept rough, in Victoria Park shrubbery, on unoccupied narrowboats, industrial squats, but most of them made their way, before work started, to the new Tesco Metro on Kingsland Road. You met them, processing along the towpath, clutching carrier bags, white with blue stripes and red lettering (‘Crisis Care in Your Neighbourhood’). They were invariably polite, a nod, a token bow; generous margin offered to this eccentric English couple on their morning constitutional.
A curious thing, one of the first documentarists into the house, Mary Harron, went on to American Psycho, I Shot Andy Warhol, and a Hollywood career. We discussed Ballard at the kitchen table. She loved the deceptively plain style, the forensic terminology, the subversion. She was good. The other directors on The Late Show envied the time she was allowed for her portrait of the emerging Docklands. Paul Tickell, who managed, by carrying on cutting until a few minutes before transmission, to smuggle footage from my 8mm archive into a terse essay, pulled off a triumph of collaged impenetrability: the visual equivalent, so it was thought, of my writing. He was given two or three days to nail down the whole package, Tilbury, Gravesend, North Woolwich, Whitechapel; trains and boats and synagogues. Harron had weeks, down on the river, with Ballard as the High‐Rise prophet‐enthusiast for Canary Wharf and myself as the mad‐eyed doomsayer in the shadows of the last boozer on the Isle of Dogs.
What I didn’t know then was that Harron had been Tony Blair’s ‘date’, as website biographers have it, during his time at St John’s College, Oxford. I might have asked if she was still in touch, and if she could solve the mystery of where exactly Blair lived in those early Hackney years. So many people led me to different houses, most of them within the area, on the east side of Queensbridge Road, now known as ‘Mapledene Village’. One claimed that he encouraged his dog, every morning, to piss on the doorstep. But the whole Blair‐in‐Hackney project was unresolved, subject to rumour: the launching of a calculated political career or a few years treading water, dabbling in law, hanging out, biding his time? The official account, put together after his triumphant ascent to first minister, has him gazing out on a vista of Holly Street towers and dangerous estates. Before crossing Queensbridge Road to sally forth as canvasser and message‐bringer in territory where lesser mortals feared to tread.
Rob Petit returned: with a questionnaire and a thesis to develop. Like Blair, he went door‐to‐door through the Holly Street Estate, in an edgy time, handing out official‐looking envelopes: University of Cambridge, Department of Geography. ‘This is a very brief question‐and‐answer form about the use of SURVEILLANCE and CCTV. It is also a chance to voice any concerns you might have either about crime or the use of Closed Circuit Television (CCTV) in your borough for the purposes of an academic study.’
The boy had a charmed life, he made it, back to Albion Drive for a cup of tea and a debriefing: as evidence for my own resolutely non‐academic, unreliable study. I was musing over a ‘Demolition Special’ from March 1996, a nostalgic reminder of the day they blew up Rowan Court by ‘controlled explosion’. The aerial photograph of the estate refuted my conceit, that the low‐level blocks, squeezed in between Queensbridge Road and the railway, were modelled on the infamous H‐blocks of Ulster. (Mo Mowlam, early Blair associate, later non‐person and former Northern Ireland Secretary, moved into Albion Drive. The landscape must have been a constant reminder of her previous life: overhead helicopters with blades set for maximum noise, screaming squad cars, endgame architecture. She was a very human presence on the street, slightly confused, smiling brightly to ward off damage in the native style, lugging armfuls of newspaper: which, unusually, she had bought, cashdown, from the Turkish minimart.) I’d got it wrong. The structure of the low‐rise flats picked up on the green‐and‐red lizardly artwork in Haggerston Park, a stone serpent on which kids could climb. The planners called them ‘snake blocks’: ersatz Mayan. From above Holly Street was a giant swastika waiting to be connected.
Rob marched off, a fresh‐faced officer heading for the trenches, to investigate stree
ts he had already experienced in their virtual form through satellite mapping. Albion Square, Queensbridge Road, the Holly Street Estate: coded blots of yellow and green under a blue grid of celestial lines. You can understand how, working from such remote evidence, planners make their mistakes. The demolition squad talk of themselves, in their PR newsletters, as ‘The Quiet Ones’, specialists in implosions. ‘Immediately after the blowdown there will be a dust cloud which rises from the block.’ A cloud of hairballs, scorched pigeon feathers, newspaper screws, cat droppings, articulate pollution. ‘Infestation is not a problem in the blocks as they have been empty for some time therefore depriving rats or cockroaches of the food and warmth that they require.’
The Cambridge geographer, child of the leafy North London suburbs, was not much younger than I was when I moved here; when I set out to explore. He is better informed, surveillance technology at his fingertips. And he is quite prepared to take on the inhabitants, directly, in their homes: where I was overwhelmed by the mystery of place, an illusion of personal invisibility.
‘As you might expect,’ Petit reported, ‘I’m getting much more from talking to people and conducting interviews (recording on to tape), than I am from the survey. Had an interesting chat with Paul Turner of Albion Square (is he the High Court judge?). And Ann Jameson was very good as well. I also received some serious hate mail from the survey, addressed to a “slack arsed intellectual” and signed “anonymous – cos I don’t want to end up in Guantanamo”. There are serious undercurrents running through the estate, not what it looks like on the outside.’
8 January 2007: the survey was complete. Rob had succeeded, in a couple of months, by playing the Cambridge card and submitting himself to a rigorous screening process, in gaining access to Hackney’s surveillance monitoring centre; a bunker about whose existence I had heard not so much as a whisper.
I found out where it was. You know the library in Stoke Newington? You go into the council section of that building and you find that CCTV monitoring has been twinned with Energy Planning. Which means that if there is ever a nuclear attack, this becomes the central control. This is the covert centre of operations in Hackney.
I met a man who was quite helpful. He spent half a day taking me through all this stuff. I had to pass through five levels of security, just to get to the room where I met him. I had to provide two different types of ID. The Hackney people were quite sensitive to the fact that terrorists might do some reconnaissance.
You go through numerous corridors into this big room. It’s like a hospital, an underground hospital. They’ve got a monster generator, in case all the power trips out in Hackney. As you enter the room you can hear, from twenty yards away, the hum of these monitors. It’s like being blasted by a wall of EM radiation.
The room is about five times the length of your kitchen, but not much wider. Banks and banks of monitors. There were five operators, doing eight‐hour shifts. I don’t think they get a lunch break. They were goggle‐eyed. One of them fell asleep. I was sitting next to her.
There are two sub‐observation rooms, much smaller. These are used by the Met Police. The main room is all council employees, CCTV operatives.
I have a map of camera points within your local territory. I showed it to my guide. He said that a lot of cameras on the estates are run by housing associations. On Holly Street there are three separate housing associations running the systems and consisting of nothing much more than a guy on the door, a couple of TV screens. They haven’t got the technology to endlessly record on hard drive.
Most of the cameras are on main roads. There is only one in your immediate area, on the junction of Kingsland Road and Middleton Road. What they said is that they’ve put in a network point, further down Middleton Road, to wire in all the cameras on the Holly Street Estate. And the Stonebridge and Haggerston estates too. They are meant to be wired in to the central observation room. My guide said that the aim is to get as many cameras as possible linked to the control room. It’s proving difficult, because the housing associations are very possessive.
The council shares its cameras with TfL, Transport for London. Most of the cameras on the main roads are shared. You can be operating your camera on Hackney business and be overridden. A little notice appears on the screen saver: ‘This camera has been taken over.’
I had an interesting chat with the chairperson of the Albion Square Residents’ Association. She said they’d had meetings where people were demanding cameras around the square. The request went through a lengthy process of evaluation. They decided they couldn’t do it. The woman said, ‘There’s enough of a feeling already between “us” and “them”.’ And she pointed to the Holly Street Estate. She didn’t want to create new antagonisms or to stress the divisions in city space. It seemed to me that the debate was more about funding. The Residents’ Association has three grand in the kitty. It would cost more than that to run the cameras for a year. The notion was impractical.
The Residents’ Association has good links with the council, the council is happy to deal with them. The CCTV operatives said, yes, they had heard of Albion Square and its problems. They are quite well connected, the people on the square. As a result, a camera was installed on Middleton Road.
In the Stoke Newington surveillance room they were saying, ‘We’d have a camera on every street corner in Hackney.’ Their view is that if it can be proved that this technology displaces crime, we must put cameras everywhere – so that there are no dark places in the city. Then the problem is solved.
It goes back to what my guide was saying about CCTV cutting into the budget of the library services. None of the money for this operation comes from central government, it all comes from Hackney council tax.
The Home Office in the 1990s put up a lot of money for council CCTV schemes. 78 per cent of the crime prevention budget goes on CCTV. They then commission a report. At the end of the 1990s, they conclude that CCTV does very little to reduce overall crime statistics. It might help a specific area. If you put CCTV on Holly Street, it will reduce crime – but in national terms it doesn’t have any effect. They said, ‘Our money has been completely wasted.’ Government is now encouraging other people to initiate CCTV schemes, but they are not offering any financial support.
I asked the Hackney CCTV watchers how they stop criminal behaviour. All the entire operation amounts to, I discovered, is the collection of evidence for various Met operations going on at the time. Met officers are constantly swanning in and out of the Hackney control centre. They say, ‘Can we get video footage of such and such a location?’
Hackney council taxpayers are essentially writing a blank cheque to provide resources for the Metropolitan Police. The other major activity in the Stoke Newington CCTV room is the storage of automatic number‐plate recognition software. The boundary of Hackney is policed by a surveillance ring‐fence. It’s one of the only boroughs that has this automatic recognition facility. They bought it from Northern Ireland, Special Branch, RUC. Every car that enters Hackney has its number plate scanned. What this has achieved, the operatives told me, is to cause drug dealers and others with stolen vehicles to stay within the borough. It’s a self‐imposed tagging scheme. As soon as a car crosses into Islington it goes off‐screen.
‘We don’t tell anyone we’ve got this facility,’ they said. If they did, the criminals would stay inside or outside the surveillance net. What happens is that a big TV screen has footage of cars entering territorial waters. It operates like a congestion‐charge camera, all the number plates are captured, then scanned, with the information sent to Scotland Yard. Details are logged against a data base for London: major or minor crimes, politics, terror. Within a minute of the car driving across the Hackney border, an alarm goes off in the CCTV room. Lights go red. The authorities make one arrest a day. There is a 60 per cent chance that vehicles will be caught once the alarm sounds. A frantic chase sequence is immediately initiated. It makes a great movie.
They sat me down in a
dark room and showed me this presentation they’d edited. It was done in the style of those American TV things about the hundred greatest chases. Completely sensationalist. A car waiting at the traffic lights. The unmarked police vehicle pulls up. The guy in the car knows exactly what’s happening, so he runs. He’s been picked up on number‐plate recognition. He’s running across this estate. He runs for ten or fifteen minutes, full pace. The whole chase is captured by surveillance cameras. The guy was vaulting over fences, doing acrobatic stuff. Eventually he is arrested, off‐screen. They brought him back to the van. They showed footage of the van driving away. The van stops. They get out, the guy is convulsing. They angle the camera in. What happened, he has swallowed some heroin. Getting rid of the evidence. All on camera. It has burst inside him. Totally real. The guy was black.
I asked the people watching the screen, ‘How do you decide what constitutes criminal activity?’ They would never say ‘racial profile’. They always said, ‘body language’. Body language. But when I was sitting with this watcher we saw two black guys, hoodies with mobiles. The watcher turned to me: ‘When you see people like that you zoom straight in.’ I said, ‘What do you mean by that?’ He was, like, ‘body language’.
Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire Page 19