Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire

by Iain Sinclair

  There seems to be a level of tolerance, especially around Kingsland Waste. The watchers feel like they know the people, all the faces. They see them every day doing the same stuff. Any action is at the discretion of the Met. The police are the ones who make all the decisions. Surveillance operatives are just collecting footage to justify court cases. A few years ago there was a massive police operation on Holly Street. They arrested eighteen people. They were all prosecuted and convicted. There had been a fairly extensive surveillance operation. When I tried to go into the sub‐control rooms where the police were, my guide said, ‘We can’t go in there. They’re collecting evidence about a well‐known local gang. They think it’s time to move in.’ When the watchers deem their subjects to have reached a critical threshold, they act.

  Targets are watched, twenty‐four hours a day. On that television screen they’ve got the average crime activity breakdown for that hour of that day for the last year. As soon as the sun goes down on Hackney the watchers say, ‘This is when the pond life come out.’ There is so much going on. The watchers can’t concentrate on every little petty thing. They’re waiting for crimes of passion, crimes that happen instantaneously, rather than low‐level drug dealing – which, in Hackney, is perpetual. They film it, it’s logged. In the files. They’re recording everything on hard drive.

  I said, ‘When do you delete it?’ They said, ‘We don’t.’ It is way past VHS. The people downstairs, the parking officers, don’t have this facility; technically speaking they’re in another world. There is a big divide between traffic and crime. The parking people still record on VHS. They have an enormous room that is just racks and racks of tape, continually growing. Upstairs the watchers have very expensive servers. You go to a viewing room and you type in the date and time, you get whatever you want.

  The watchers are such a mix of people. They get them from National Car Parks, NCP. I said, ‘Why’s that?’ The manager said, ‘They’re easy to fire.’

  Most of the time, the watchers are just staring, in a trance. There was this bit where fireworks went off, on one of the estates, they all got quite excited, turned their cameras to catch it. The telephoto zoom is extraordinary.

  I didn’t have to adhere to their code of practice. I could have quite a lot of fun. I was just playing around. I could explore the spaces that I knew – from a completely different perspective. For the first hour it was fascinating. But for them, the official Hackney watchers, it’s highly pressured. If there is a crime, the responsibility to get a clear waist‐to‐head shot (which they need for evidence) is extreme. There is an awful lot of competition between operatives. There’s an enormous buzz when they know they’ve contributed to the arrest of a criminal. Lock on, bring the bastards down.

  When I was monitoring people on Kingsland Road you could tell that they were dealing. I was using that camera on the corner of Middleton Road. I filmed them with a zoomed‐in lens. Every five seconds they were checking to see if they were being followed. A career criminal, a professional drug dealer working these streets, knows that you have to do your work down the alley at the back. Off‐screen you are out of the story. It didn’t happen.

  Rob set down an aesthetically pleasing surveillance printout on the kitchen table: 110 KINGLD/MIDDLETON. 06MOV06. Night‐colour. Halogen lamps smearing like dying stars over the railway bridge. The youthful geographer was in charge when the shooting incident happened in the barber shop. He had swivelled away, tracking other business, appreciating patterns of hot rear‐lights and cool headlights on the main road. Visual evidence was lost. It doesn’t matter how much bunting you drape around the scene, how many blue‐and‐yellow tin boards appeal for witnesses, this narrative is incomplete. No movie, no case to answer.

  The Holly Street Estate, Rob reckoned, if you were dropped there, hooded, from the boot of a car, could be anywhere new in England. One of those off‐highway Cambridge satellites, yellow‐brick, uniform, arranged around recreational squares or concrete gardens that nobody seems to use. Names are aspirational, harking after a myth of the pastoral, woodland walks: Rowan, Holly, Forest, Evergreen Square. Evergreen Square, with its newly constructed mounds and ASBO warnings, bristled with surveillance technology.

  I delivered one hundred questionnaires in Holly Street and got thirty back. Which is pretty good. Twenty‐eight of them wanted the cameras, without question. Half of the responses came before the murder in Evergreen Square. After the murder, loads more questionnaires came flooding in. There was an immediate assumption that CCTV is the solution. They wanted money spent on CCTV systems rather than the Leisure Centre.

  It was OK, delivering those questionnaires. I got one back that was really threatening. The guy thought the survey was trying to justify CCTV. He said, ‘You go to Cambridge, how could you possibly understand? Take a walk in the real world. Stop handing out fancy surveys from your fucking ivory tower.’ And then he said, ‘I hope you get caught on CCTV being stabbed in the face with a broken bottle.’

  Stevens Nyembo‐Ya‐Muteba, forty, father of two, was a mathematician who had been offered a place at Cambridge University. A refugee from Kinshasa in the ‘war‐torn’ Congo, he arrived in London in 1997 and worked as a chef ’s assistant at the Criterion Brasserie, a restaurant owned by Marco Pierre White. He moved, with his young family, to the newly constructed Holly Street Estate, a flat with convenient access to the playground in Evergreen Square. His daughters were aged five and six. The Evening Standard, reporting on his murder, drew the obvious parallel, Hackney/ Kinshasa: ‘Mr Nyembo‐Ya‐Muteba had fled the capital to escape the violence in the region in which Joseph Conrad set his novel Heart of Darkness.’

  The new technology, covering the dark places, pushed the dealers and runners indoors. After forced entry, they congregated in stairwells. Mr Nyembo‐Ya‐Muteba, trying to study, to get a few hours’ sleep before the next day’s work, confronted twelve youths, asking them to move on, to keep the noise down. He was stabbed repeatedly in the chest. A neighbour found him sprawled on the stairs: ‘I knew from his injuries that he was critical.’ Another neighbour, Hayri Kilicarsian, claimed that these youths regularly violated the interior spaces of the flats, the off‐camera zones. ‘They piss on the floor and smoke drugs. They climb on to people’s balconies.’

  The Albion Square Residents’ Association Newsletter reported that the Revd Rose Hudson‐Wilkin of All Saints Church led a solemn procession from the ‘snake park’ to the site where the victim died. ‘TV cameras were present but discreet.’ Overnight, Evergreen Square had acquired all the cameras in the world. Men standing on the roofs of vans. Concerned women in television slap, their backs to the flats, talking intimately to tight lenses.

  The excitement of the original incident had faded by the time that Joseph Ekaette, nineteen, previously imprisoned for the rape of a schoolgirl, was given a second life sentence for the murder of Nyembo‐Ya‐Muteba. The rape of the fourteen‐year‐old girl was filmed by one of his confederates on a mobile phone.

  St Philip’s Road

  Coming off Richmond Road and taking our time with St Philip’s Road – there was an ongoing debate between us about the correct time to arrive for a meal – we ran into Charlie Velasco. Or rather, Anna nudged me in the ribs and said, ‘Is that Charlie? Do you think Syd will be coming?’ I’d been absorbed in the scale of some of these properties, the shabby or retrieved grandeur, the way Hackney keeps you off‐balance by confounding your expectations, flitting so rapidly from action, buzz, collision to zones of recessive and haunting silence. Charlie was in snug football shorts and a starched dress shirt, open to the chest. He was carrying a wood‐framed tennis racket. And flicking his hair like Ile Nastase.

  ‘Looking for London Fields?’ I said, assuming that there was a discreet meeting to be arranged, a new deal to be brokered. I never worked out what exactly Charlie did for a living.

  ‘Same as you: Patrick’s. We’ve now eaten twice in Hackney in fifteen years. That has to mean something.’

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nbsp; Up on his toes, he offered Anna a not entirely welcome kiss.

  It was an era, the mid 1980s, of breaking bread, coping with olives, in other people’s houses. Charlie adapted: tennis racket in one hand, plonk in the other; two bottles, to make up for the inferior quality. Back in the 1960s and early 1970s there were communal meals, we rarely shifted beyond the kitchen. Ginger cats, yoghurt cultures. Liberal councillors before they’d been found out. Then there were children and people moved away. I worked long and unpredictable hours, I was always on the road. For five or ten years, I suppose, we hadn’t really seen anybody: immediate family, in‐laws, an accident of bookdealers, motorway service stations, chips at the seaside. Midnight curries with Driffield in Glasgow.

  Patrick Wright, moving into St Philip’s Road with his partner, Claire Lawton (who had her hands full, locally, as a specialist in geriatric medicine), signalled the social restlessness that would fuel the property boom of the Thatcher decade. Tony Blair and Cherie Booth were the paradigm, Mapledene Village and away along the path of the submerged Hackney Brook to Islington, in the shadows of Highbury Stadium: £615,000 their selling price in 1997. Then Connaught Square, a town house picked up for £3.56 million (before the revisions and the decorators). You arrive in a new setting, you cook food for new people. These occasions, with Patrick and Claire, opened up my sense of where we were; the incomers noticed details I had missed, they teased out fresh stories, they listened attentively to the neighbours. A new book was forming; Patrick would begin his odyssey down Dalston Lane, a few hundred yards to the bus stop (his way out): A Journey through Ruins.

  I met Patrick in the Prince George on Parkholme Road, he was writing something about my first novel for the London Review of Books. It was a good session. And an astonishing thing for me, that a discredited poetic, buried as deep as the Hackney Brook, should be revealed, analysed, re‐presented. The massive wardrobe of the Whitechapel hermit David Rodinsky would be splashed, in shades of grey, across the cover of a literary magazine. The pub where we drank, Patrick intimated, was part of the story, the social shift, the property hunger: he was the first writer I had met who talked money. Poets of the 1970s were grateful to be paid anything. Bookdealers treated all novelists as if they were the future dead, inconveniently hanging on, reluctant to make those signatures – captured through the tedium of a book launch or reading – worth something. Patrick, returning from Canada to Thatcher’s Britain, had this awkward and unworkable belief: that authors should receive their due; the merit of a long‐considered and crafted piece of work should receive a reward commensurate with its status. Insanity! For a while, his energy – the height helped, the Saxon flop of hair – carried it off: broadsheet commissions on top dollar, transatlantic jaunts (tickets covered), late‐night television spots, lectures. But vultures in collarless shirts were waiting. The George was a birdcage, a trap in which to memorialize loss. The surrounding streets were filling with City migrants, commissioners of documentaries, advertising men, the putative tribes of New Labour. Patrick recalled the Hackney Literary and Philosophical Society and namechecked notables of an earlier generation, Michael Rosen, David Widgery, Sheila Rowbotham. Widgery, with his spicy mix of politics, topography, medicine and personal anecdote, was in some ways a rival.

  Patrick was so articulate – Anna still smacks her lips over ‘discontinued alternatives’ – that you were almost persuaded to give him your trust; sentences launched with such schoolmasterly confidence must surely capture the world. The performance was, in the best sense, disinterested, fired by the excitement of discovery: knowledge as its own reward (in the promise of an adequately substantial cheque‐in‐the‐post). Patrick’s semaphored, straight‐to‐camera conviction could have initiated a major career, if there had not been one drawback: he meant it. He lacked Tony Blair’s indifference to facts, morality, cultural memory. It was the stark contrast between a romantic puritan and a fellow‐travelling papist, half in love with ritual and wipe‐the‐slate public confession. ‘Blair’s great skill,’ said Denis Healey, ‘was personal charisma – what used to be called bullshit.’ The watery eye, the insane stare of the secular saint who mistakes sincerity for truth.

  We discovered, before the first pint was swallowed, our mutual addiction to field notes: as the residue of, and the excuse for, random expeditions. Move, dig, notice, report. We could walk London. In Vancouver, Patrick had run up against the poet Charles Olson’s notion of ‘open‐field poetics’: everything goes into the stew, localized documentation, letters, bills of sale, news reports. Evidence. Until the greater vision is achieved, the cosmology of the impossible: the curvature of the universe that is love.

  I found myself placed at the dinner table directly opposite the handwritten poem‐poster by Louis Zukofsky. We encountered some of Patrick’s colleagues and contacts. Potential friendships, challenges: the soups, the virtuoso carving, the cheeses and puddings. Men now seemed to do most of the cooking. The kitchen was close at hand. We sat out there with Raphael Samuel and Alison Light. Raphael, short and intense, with a shawl of dark hair swept across the skull, was an intimidating, adversarial presence. On his best behaviour. He disapproved, with good reason, of my gothic‐tourist raids on what he regarded as his personal and tribal fiefdom, Whitechapel. Patrick’s assaults on the heritage industry – which very soon became a heritage industry of their own, pirated and parroted by media drones – had been challenged by Samuel, who argued that the tone was patronizing. Raph wanted to defend the integrity of popular culture, the excursion, the day out for working people. His own Elder Street property, crammed to its weavers’ attic with research files, never‐to‐be‐written books, would, as a result of the heritage exploitation of Spitalfields, Hong Kong bankers buying blind from catalogue, be worth well over a million pounds.

  Charlie, stepping into the garden for a companionable spliff, asked after Andrew Motion. Apparently the future laureate had a place in De Beauvoir Town. I don’t know if he was a tennis partner of Charlie, but he didn’t show, that night: some complication with the train from Norwich, double‐booked.

  ‘Tony won’t go near the courts on London Fields,’ Charlie told me. ‘He tried a jog one morning, but never again. Feral dogs and worse humans, drinkers on every bench. Crime and the causes of crime. Something must be done.’

  I had no idea who Tony was. Nobody did. There were people who claim to have seen Blair picking up the kids at the school gates, but that was much later, in Islington.

  In our early Hackney days there were tennis courts marked out on the grass in London Fields, a cricket square, an open‐air swimming pool that cost almost nothing, a coin dropped into a slot in the wall. Dr David Widgery, so my neighbour Harriet reported, strolled down to the Lido, after one of her lunch parties, stripped to the buff and leapt, with a revolutionary screech of triumph, into the cool, leaf‐surfaced water: he was expelled. Blacklisted. Forgiven.

  I played tennis on a slithery and pitted hardcourt with Jock, a retired postal‐supervisor from Mount Pleasant, and his mate, Little Sammy from Stamford Hill. Jock’s correct serves and wonky knees, Sam’s darting, snapping patrol of the net, against my crude fore‐hand thumps and all‐court hustle. Then, on a broken bench, we would enjoy some chat, while Jock massaged the life back into his rheumatic joints and Sammy smoked the very thin roll‐up cigarettes he carried around in a tin. He played in his trilby, took off his jacket – for which he came prepared with a hanger – but was otherwise suited. Waistcoat, shiny tie, black shoes: fit to move on to the synagogue. He was involved with a married woman in Clapton. The tennis was both a warm‐up and a genuine excuse for an adulterous morning in Hackney.

  Charlie Velasco didn’t get Blair on the London Fields court and he would never have contemplated introducing him to the regular football matches that Jock supervised – as player and referee – on the red dirt patch behind the mesh fence. These crude Sunday‐morning affairs, featuring pick‐up teams of anywhere between four and fourteen a side, were brawls in which Ch
arlie took no interest. He had his myth to protect: how, in a charity match at White Hart Lane, a neat lay‐off to Trevor Brooking (who was clattered by Boris Johnson) was acknowledged with a thumbs‐up from his temporary manager, Steve Perryman. Charlie, like Martin Peters, was a thinking footballer – but he did most of his thinking posthumously: in the pub, the restaurant, on the train, flights to Finland or Macedonia, when he made contact with established journalists like Brian Glanville and Hugh McIlvanney. ‘You’re box to box, son,’ Ron Atkinson told him, as they stood side by side, shaking off the drops, at a black‐tie bash in Park Lane. ‘Like Dracula with piles. Heart of oak, brains to match. It used to be a working‐man’s game.’

  They were all there, kicking up the red dirt, the Irish boys, the Turks, the black guys who thought they were playing basketball, backs to you, never passing, doing their tricks – and white strollers who would rather lose by eight goals than score with an ugly tapin or a header that would mess up their latest cut. I had lumps kicked out of me by a five‐foot scaffolder who compensated, in terms of weight, by making up for the absence of shirt and vest by wearing a huge pair of steel‐capped boots. He was training his son to play alongside him, a precise duplicate whose boots were pristine and yellow. And whose patriotic tattoos were still raw and scabbed. John H. Stracey of Bethnal Green, who had recently defeated Jose Napoles for the world welterweight title, turned out. As did Eric, my neighbour from Albion Drive, oldest son of the senior long‐term residents, the Morrises. A couple of the flashier young strikers were on the books at Orient, you could see immediately why they wouldn’t make it: they could do everything except acknowledge there were other players on the park. One of them was offloaded to Dagenham and Redbridge (where he warmed the bench) and the other died, two weeks after the end of the season, from leukaemia.