‘Piercing through veils, and passing things more and more precious – the links of the eternal chain are known but not seen. The last and uppermost flights, through a vaulted depth, are voiceless and sublime.’ He wrote. And burnt.
Cornering out of Parkholme Road, negotiating a complicated junction that did its best to cull pedestrians reckless enough to attempt the tight mouth of Dalston Lane, Patrick picked up pace; he had left some weight behind in his former London life, the era of entertaining and media lunching, career grazing. In autumnal colours, a burnt‐orange polo shirt and loose slacks, he revisited a previous self, a hungrier eye. The bounty hunter of A Journey through Ruins now demonstrated an ironic affection for the exhausted strip he had made into a symbol of the defeated Welfare State. He noticed insignificant details that dropped him right back into that earlier narrative.
I NEED A RIOT.
SAFETY HELMETS MUST BE WORN.
WHAT’S GOING ON?
Small shops were carbonized shells, held up by layers of fly‐pitched posters and council warnings. Patrick’s 1992 expedition was as distant as the pastoral visions of Calvert’s pilgrims. The past, as we age, becomes so personal, at the mercy of unreliable witnesses. I asked Patrick to prompt Emanuel Litvinoff for anything he could recall about Roland Camberton. David Hirsch, Camberton’s alter ego in Rain on the Pavements, learning chess, tries to fix the layout of the board as firmly in his head as the geography of familiar Hackney streets. He haunts Dalston Lane, this corner, on his way through to Ridley Road Market. It is an anchor for memory.
‘Litvinoff was totally dismissive,’ Patrick said. ‘Those two Camberton books, he felt, had nothing to do with the East London he had known as a young man. They were opportunistic, banal. He preferred to remember Wolf Mankowitz, who hovered at the back of his mind as an impossibly conceited but likeable fellow, running a productive antiques and porcelain business. The man knew how to make money.’
In the slightly desperate atmosphere Patrick captures in his book, all kinds of hopeless scams surfaced in Dalston Lane. We ate in a restaurant, run by an elegant young black woman, that was spectacularly in the wrong place. You had to get your order in fast, on the understanding that the chef might decamp before the main course was served. Bailiffs doubled as waiters. Pamela’s it was called. (Anna remembered it as: Paradise. A large man coming out of the kitchen, bottle of champagne under one arm, ice bucket in hand. To celebrate the only customers.) Pamela Hurley had trained in New York. She was determined to sell upmarket Barbadian cuisine to the City speculators who must surely one day arrive – when promised transport‐hub services materialized. The restaurant vanished before Patrick moved to his Cambridgeshire village. The next time we ate out was in a Turkish café where they invited you into the kitchen to poke at bubbling pots: a feast for a few pounds.
The more insistent the wreckage, the more Patrick was inspired to excavate cultural counterweights. He came across Sheila Rowbotham, both of them jobbing on the academic circuit, and was interested to hear what I’d discovered about the Montague Road commune and the visit of Godard. In his turn, he had tracked down Andrew Holmes, who photographed every property on Dalston Lane, a full record, just at the time when A Journey through Ruins appeared.
‘Sadly,’ he said, ‘the film was sent to Joe Kerr, who appears to have lost it.’ Kerr taught at the Royal College of Art and was coeditor of a useful book: London: From Punk to Blair. To which Patrick had contributed.
‘The street is really a clogged river of junk flowing through the city,’ Patrick wrote. Sixteen shots survive from the Andrew Holmes traverse: architectural detail, close‐ups. If you want colour or passion, Patrick suggested, you have to go back to Leon Kossoff.
‘That painting, the big oil, Demolition of the Old House, Dalston Junction is truly impressive. I wanted to get it into my book. It’s worth a trip to the Tate depository in South London to see it. Thick layers of paint denoting, more or less, the ghost presence of the old house, and then – barely visible – lots of scurrying figures pulling at the bricks and plaster without much assistance in the way of tools or scaffolding.’
From the studio to which Kossoff travelled, down the North London Line from Willesden Green, he looked west: the fleshing sheds of Ridley Road, the railway. A torn‐out spine on a bed of yellow clay. The German Hospital directly behind him. He watches, participating by default, as men in blue overalls take down an old house, starting on the roof. Blood reds, chalky greens, a marine sky threaded with lint. Black slashes, diagonals. A kaddish for railway stations, concrete islands and retail archipelagos.
Stormy Summer Day, Dalston Lane. 1975. Unknowing, we pushed a buggy, hung with plastic bags, back from Ridley Road Market: past the building in which Kossoff worked.
A strange thing: that Edward Calvert, shifting east from Parkholme Road, took a house on the far side of Mare Street: 11 Darnley Road. Where he died on 14 July 1883. Darnley Road is where Kossoff lived as a child. And where the photographer Stephen Gill lodged when I came across his work for the first time.
I left Patrick at the bus stop. It was not so much a question of standing about in the vague hope that something would appear, but of waiting for one of a fleet of gridlocked buses to move. They were nose‐to‐tail, these bendy monsters, from Graham Road to the Junction: a stalled travelator. Everything behind the bus stop was hidden by a recent fence. Cancelled views. Excavations begun and abandoned.
A woman at the German Hospital event told me about a strange discovery in the cellars of 16 Dalston Lane, beneath the offices where she worked: shelves of primitive contraceptive devices, coils, diaphragms, yellowing pelvises like sculpted scrimshaw, untouched since the 1920s. A surrealist museum designed by a follower of Marie Stopes.
I crossed the road for my appointment with a solicitor at Dowse & Co. Bill Parry‐Davies, who I’d met at the Boas Society, was prepared to give me an interview: the background to the demolition of the Labyrinth building and the suspicious Dalston Lane fires. Parry‐Davies was an activist, a man of the community, the guiding light of OPEN Dalston, a group campaigning for the retention of historic structures. For local pride. Against mindless futurism, computer‐generated fictions. The Olympic backdraught, that tsunami of dodgy capital, had united the warring factions among politicians, planners, development quangos and City Hall fixers. And the effect on the landscape was monolithic, devastating.
Buzzed through and pointed up the stairs, I met Bill, a tall man in a modest office, who led me first to a window that overlooked Dalston Lane. This was no Kossoff epiphany. We were staring down on affronted dust: the blank rectangle where the North London Colosseum and Amphitheatre once stood. The darkened hulk that had been the Four Aces and the Labyrinth. I took a few photographs of whatever was no longer there.
Then we went through to the office. Bill’s window was open. It was a hot afternoon. I sunk low into my chair, which faced a large desk, on which were perched two plastic tumblers of water. In my enthusiasm, the heat of the questions, I drank them both. Bill was an eloquent and easy‐paced talker. He had a tale to tell.
We moved to Hackney in 1984. I was working at that time in the Law Centre at Mare Street. I wanted to be able to walk to work. We live in Cecilia Road. It was my aversion to queues and public transport that brought us here. My approach, as a solicitor, was that I’d rather work in the community where I was living. You develop close relationships.
In the mid 1980s tenants from Holly Street came to see me with allegations of a corrupt relationship between Hackney Council officers responsible for repairing the estates and private contractors. I employed an independent architect to inspect all the work. We found that there were overpayments in 75 per cent of cases, sometimes even before the work was officially ordered. Bills were being paid before the work was done. They said that two surveyors were supposed to inspect £5 million‐worth of work a year. Allegations eventually reached such a high profile that the council had to appoint a QC to conduct an inquiry. Just before th
e report was published, the chief finance officer of the council, the head of maintenance, the head of building works, and others, all resigned. No one was convicted or even charged, to my knowledge, but these officers had presided over a systemic failure that had cost Hackney residents millions. Corruption in Hackney was and is a recurring problem – you have to keep weeding the garden.
Back in the 1980s, there were dreadful examples of corruption. Housing officers were renting out council flats privately. There were serious housing‐benefit scams, payments being made to council officers’ private bank accounts. There was clearly a problem in Hackney.
Now, with the current development here in Dalston Lane, we’ve moved into a new phase: the age of the fire. There have been eight fires. My involvement began with that little terrace of shops. They came into council ownership when the GLC was abolished. And Hackney did nothing about them. They continued to collect the original rent, but they didn’t renew any of the leases. The traders lost any long‐term security. When the landlord says, ‘I need these properties for redevelopment,’ that provides grounds for possession. Unless you’ve got a lease you are vulnerable. Those shops have been there a very long time. The music shop is second‐generation. The Star Bakery has been there since the 1930s. They are long‐standing family businesses.
Hackney had this huge crisis: £70 million in the hole. The debt emerged in 2001. They decided to put everything on the market. All the property surrounding Broadway Market, Dalston Lane, Well Street, Morning Lane, Kingsland Road. Government said to Hackney, ‘Either you close the gap in your finances or we’ll move in.’ So the chief executive of the council said: ‘Sell.’ And that’s what they did.
This is the crux of the scandal: council standing orders state that when you have tenants in occupation, you are required to offer the property, in the first instance, to those tenants. Before putting them on the open market. In Dalston Lane they put the portfolio up for private tender: as a block, all sixteen houses. Unless you can come up with £2 million, you can’t afford to buy.
Some of the traders rang the council: ‘We’d like to make an offer.’ ‘Fine. Put your offer in.’ They were ignored. The property went into auction. That was April 2002. The portfolio was bought by an offshore company called Dalston Lane Investments Limited, a company based in the Bahamas. If you’ve got an offshore operation nobody can find out who is behind the company name. It’s almost impossible to identify what the real financial interests are. We know one name, but, generally speaking, it is very secretive. And they don’t pay tax.
They bought, at auction, sixteen Georgian houses in Dalston Lane for £1.8 million. They also bought a load of properties in Broadway Market. Broadway Market Investments Hackney Limited. Different names, same people. The finance is mainly from Dubai. Al‐Hilal Investments Limited. The prospectus put out by Hackney for Dalston Lane stated: ‘Although these buildings are of historic interest, if they can’t be refurbished, if it is not financially viable to refurbish, we will consider another scheme.’ The landlords put in a proposal to demolish the lot. What they did was to divide the buildings. Dalston Lane Investments retained some, then they split the portfolio. The reason being that if you have one big development you are required to provide a certain proportion of social housing, public affordable housing. If you make the split, each separate development is smaller and there is less requirement to provide public affordable accommodation. Both of the companies involved with Dalston Lane put in planning applications to demolish the lot.
One of the applications to demolish was refused, the other was withdrawn – and, while the appeals of the tenants were still in the system, two of the houses burnt down. The appeals had been made on the basis that these buildings were of historic interest. I got the English Heritage people to come down and take a look. They said, ‘These are really well‐preserved Georgian houses, in rather poor nick, but quite special.’ That bolstered the case for retention. But once buildings start burning down, that diminishes historic interest very effectively.
The fires have been investigated by the fire service and the police. They concluded that the cause was arson – but because the buildings collapsed on to the seat of the fire they couldn’t tell how the conflagration was started or by whom. In two houses, nos. 62 and 64, there were squatters. A few days before the fire, a couple of guys came to the back door and said, ‘You’d better get out. Now.’ Two days later the houses burnt down.
The Star Bakery was facing court proceedings for eviction. There was a conversation with the landlord from Dubai. A few days later the building next door went up in flames. The little Indian restaurant, the house next to that, also went up in flames. That’s four fires in one street. This building you can see from my window, Thames House, is a development site. That’s been burnt twice. There’s another site just down there, that’s the seventh fire. The eighth was the council’s own housing offices, at the back of the old Labyrinth Theatre site. That’s an odd one, because at the time the council was preparing their demolition contract. The contract was put together in April ’05. In May ’05 the housing offices burnt down. Eight fires. All of them on sites that had applications for redevelopment. There hadn’t, before this, been a fire on Dalston Lane within living memory.
You see a gradual decay. People lose pride in their environment and in themselves. ‘I come from a slum,’ they say, ‘a dirty place nobody cares about.’ This is what is happening to Hackney. So many people feel the same way. The developers want the old structures to fall down, so that they can build their rabbit hutches and make fortunes. They’re not interested in the fabric, nor the history of the buildings. Planning only looks forward. If you are going to invest a million, you need to get it back within ten to fifteen years. There is no past. Planners and developers see no value in the past. It would cost more to refurbish a building than to knock it down and build something new.
The site down there, immediately behind our offices, has been empty for four years. There was a time when we had twenty New Age vans and trailers on that patch. The travellers would stagger out at midday, blinking into the sunshine. After they were evicted, the carrion of society crept in. They stripped out the old bricks and took them away to sell. Now it’s crack dealers, desperate people, prostitutes. Eventually there will be some bleak stack of ten or fourteen storeys.
The theatre site we looked at on Dalston Lane is a quite separate issue. It is owned by public authorities, TfL and others. It had an amazing history that building. When the roof came off, they destroyed the fabric. Way back, in 1920, promoters spent millions and millions to convert the building into a cinema. All the latest things: air‐conditioning, beautiful lighting. State of the art. And the interior, so lavish! It was a great event when it opened, the grandest cinema in the British Empire.
Before it was a cinema it had been a circus. It was founded as a circus in 1886. The North London Colosseum. The major entertainment venue in North London. We had the railway too, that came in the 1880s. A prime position. The theatre attracted thousands and thousands of people.
After it closed as a cinema, in the 1960s, it became the Four Aces, an important centre for black music. And, finally, the Labyrinth. I never went to the clubs, but they meant a great deal to so many people. Lives revolved around that building. My neighbour met his wife in the Labyrinth. They have three kids now.
I think what’s going to happen to that site is that they’ll build 550 flats, twenty‐eight of which will be for social housing. The rest is up for grabs. The policy is that there should be 50 per cent for social housing. Most of the development will be buy‐to‐let investments, offshore finance. Loads of Russian money. Huge amounts of Russian and Irish money. Those flats will be let to poor families in Hackney who are presently living in desperately overcrowded conditions. Now they will get a new flat, which will be paid for by housing benefits. The tenants will move in and out constantly. There will be no community at all.
They can try and let to City types, but they
won’t succeed. There are already too many choices in the borough, down by the canal, closer to Shoreditch. The landlords will try and get the most they can for their units, aiming at young white professionals, the new Hackney. These blocks will be built five metres apart. The standard for Hackney is twenty‐one metres. The whole sorry business takes me back to the 1970s, Holly Street as it used to be.
Hackney transferred its entire sheltered‐housing stock to a private housing association. On 1 January this year they put in twelve planning applications to redevelop the estates, all the sheltered blocks. That’s what is happening, privatization. And what are they doing with the money? They’re spending £60 million on the Town Hall. They are spending countless millions on the Clissold Leisure Centre, which opened for a brief period before retreating into a limbo of allegations, law suits, prevarication.
They want a new big bus station on the theatre site on a huge concrete slab over the railway cutting. That slab cost £39 million. How is the slab going to be paid for? We’ll get planning permission to build a twenty‐storey tower block right there. We’ll get Hackney to give us half the value of the site, along with planning permission. And all this activity, this destruction, is to pay for a naked slab. So that TfL can park their buses and have a transport interchange. You have to build high to achieve a small footprint. High density, small footprint.
They say that the bus station is a strategic requirement for the Olympics, nothing must stand in its way. So you have to invent a method for getting clients from this new station to Dalston‐Kingsland, further up the road. Try walking there now. You can’t move. You can’t breathe in the crush. What is inevitable is more demolition. The Crown and Castle pub, on the corner, they’re talking about knocking that down. The finest building on the Junction.
Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire Page 22