Margaret visited my London Fields studio. She might have been out to the Roman Road factory with Piers Gough. But she was in my studio, definitely. There are so many artists in Hackney now, and the art parasites, the middlemen and operators; so many galleries and merchandisers. I know some of the Young Turks. If you can’t beat them, join them. I had my last gig in a car showroom on Cambridge Heath Road.
We lived next door to the police station. All the television people were out there. Susie said, ‘That’s because Margaret Muller’s father has been to Bethnal Green police station.’ It was then that I felt as if the carpet had been pulled out from under me. My two worlds had been ripped apart. It was later that year that I left the Slade. Now I hardly go to the West End. I feel as if I’ve been cut loose by Margaret’s death.
I went around to the Slade afterwards, open‐mouthed with shock. The Slade was getting on with its life. They don’t live over here, in Hackney. The professor of the Slade lives in Crouch End. Most of the teaching staff would hardly have known Margaret.
There was another student, she got run over and killed, on her bicycle, around the same time. In this area, the Old Street roundabout. She had a studio in Cremer Street. By Hackney Road.
There are so many young women out there, jogging in the park, cycling. It worries me. I’m not sure about anything any more. Property is the only security. You can live off borrowed money. Painting is a precarious career. Last year I went eight months without selling a thing. When you get to my age, you’ve got something in all those public collections and institutions: the Ashmolean, the Tate, the V&A, the British Museum, even the National Gallery. I’ve got something in the bloody Imperial War Museum. And the provincial ones: Glasgow, Manchester, Birmingham. Now they wouldn’t buy the skin off my shit. I’m not fashionable. I’m fifty‐five years old. It’s like trying to be a geriatric pop singer. When Lucian Freud was fifty‐five, he was quite obscure.
Some Hackney painters – Leon Kossoff, for example – are top‐flight. Kossoff is up there with the powerful galleries. You get known when you’re quite young and you manage to survive pop art, conceptualism, Schnabel. Kossoff gets a one‐man show at the National Gallery, drawings of Spitalfields.
I muddle through. I haven’t got an international reputation. Cracking America is impossible. If Midwest museums feel they have to have your work in the collection, that’s great; you’re in a different category to some little cunt like me, who fiddles away with observations on the tatty fringes of a great city.
You learn to live with fear. ‘Fucking hell, I’d better make sure this shit is properly documented before it’s taken away, bulldozed, burnt to the ground.’ I feel that acutely and I always have. Remember the ginger hare in my studio, the one from Hackney Wick? I’ve not only got the dog, I’ve got the fucking rabbit as well.
Old Ford
‘Is crazy, Mr Sinclair,’ Mimi said, ‘is completely crazy.’
I met the Sicilian photographer, a Wick resident, at the Napier, knowing the work he had done on Mafia families, back home, but unaware, until he showed me around his studio the next day, of the project based on Italian cucumber growers in the Lea Valley. A well‐established enclave who imported the old ways into Enfield, Broxbourne, Ware: Wednesday‐afternoon meals at long tables, then dancing; religious processions carrying their saints down to the river; established dons of the green‐vegetable business, unlanguaged newcomers in caravans. Feasts for Sicilian pensioners organized by priests and nuns.
‘Like The Sopranos. On the edge of reality: superstition, poverty, gold under the bed. They have their own words. Like “capita”: cup of tea. “Coroom”: fridge, cool room. Is crazy, Mr Sinclair.’
Mimi Mollica was a welcome infiltrator of this territory. He shared the first‐floor room in a warehouse on a street of Russian clubs and supermarkets. On his shelves were books by Plato and Adorno. His large black‐and‐white prints could be viewed from outside, an exhibition of marginal lives and occupied faces: the urban poor of Brazil or Brixton. ‘Rough boys,’ Mimi said. In Africa he argued with Don McCullin who confessed that he paid his subjects to be photographed. Mimi will teach his rough boys how to use a camera. His windows are dressed with permanent cobweb cracks.
We decide to walk down to the southern boundary of the Wick. To Fish Island. Once it was a place with respect for a tradition that went all the way back to the marsh people, who got their subsistence living from a lake beneath the high ground where the Olympic Park was being constructed. Among rubbled ruins, scavengers trawled for wire. Conceptual artists furtively captured their incursions or logged signs and peeling flyers. Gold was solicited and empty boxes offered, a poor exchange. Fish Island, like Hackney Wick, was now a destination for buses travelling to a terminal that no longer existed. The Wick was the second most popular endstop in London. Second to outer service, the place confused newcomers always enquire about. ‘Please, where is Outer Service?’ The more often a bus boasts of going somewhere, the greater your risk of stepping into an unmapped nothing. Into whiteout, erasure. A blue fence.
Mimi spoke of his life in this part of London.
I moved, six years ago, to Hackney Wick. Felstead Street. One of the old warehouses. The landlords were a group of orthodox Jews. They made a good deal because I was a photographer. They wanted artists to come.
There was water everywhere, Mr Sinclair. It flooded whenever it was raining. It was wild west. Every day the window was broken from kids throwing bottles. Or Russians. Drunk. Below my building was a Russian cash and carry called Katyusha. They threw Russian bottles of beer. I thought, ‘That is interesting, multicultural.’
Every week, at least once, a car exploding. Cars stolen for joyriding. Russians, gypsies. Black kids, white kids. I called the police I don’t know how many times. They never came. Always cars, explosions. It became famous. While I was having parties, dinner parties, the people eating: Blam! Bloor! Like Beirut. Good thing to talk about, very exciting.
From four‐thirty until five‐thirty, in the early morning, there was illegal rubbish dumping, vans. They were coming and dumping mountains of waste. Not one: six, eight. You know when a car has to slow down for a police check? This is Hackney Wick, exactly. A war zone. It was scary but beautiful. I felt privileged to be in the front line.
An island, Mr Sinclair. Like Sicily. Hackney Wick is the door to London. It is visible and invisible. There was a café just behind my building. A low café, sausage and egg, old working food. Probably good. All the lorry drivers are stopping there. I thought that in ancient times there were coaches with horses stopping at a pub in Highgate. Here is exactly the same. Lorry drivers arrive from every part of Britain. Incredible.
And then the market, the Hackney Stadium Market. The idea of a Sunday fair. You had everyone selling everything. Desperate people selling to desperate people. The poor trying to make some money. It worked perfectly, everybody needs something.
It is sad to think that Hackney Wick will change, without any grounds for change. There is no reason, Mr Sinclair. So many social problems in Hackney. You cannot tackle them by imposing new rich people, City people, new things from above. I’ve talked to people in Hackney Wick, very local people. They have an immediate response: ‘Ah yes, it will change for the better.’
In a few years the same person will tell me, ‘It’s not better.’ Somebody else will live where they are now, in their houses. They will be gone, lost in Essex.
I made my own bed. I had to buy the wood from the small hardware shop down the road. I produced the catalogue of my exhibition here. I went to the local printer, Mr Schwarz. I use all of these things. I saw the Turkish shop downstairs go from an empty place to a little business, then a bigger market, like Costcutter. I had a fantastical pub, the Queen Victoria, now gone. Is sad.
The Lord Napier, when it first started, I had an exhibition there. But the people changed. It became a squat. Another pub was the Lea Tavern, really beautiful. With a painting on the signboard, of the countryside:
beautiful. I used to go there, very old people coming back from Hackney Wick Market on a Sunday. A bus stop full of people with blue bags.
I did a project on the 30 bus. I was taking pictures of the route, five days after the bombing. I was away when it happened. My sisters, my friends, everybody was here. I was very upset. I decided to take pictures along the route of the 30 – of people waiting for the bus. It was really moving, because for the first time I had positive responses when I was taking pictures. Very unusual in London. I learnt to look deeper and deeper into who was living in Hackney, who was taking the no. 30 bus. I started in Hackney Wick and finished in Marble Arch.
The bus. That was the talismanic photograph, in colour, in the newspapers. Not Mimi Mollica. Before Mimi began his project of restitution and recovery. The crumpled wreckage of the bombed bus with its visible destination window: HACKNEY WICK. Which stood, not just for the destruction of an everyday vessel for transporting preoccupied Londoners, but for the sentence of death passed on a redundant strip of land. Those two days in July 2005 connected the two events, indissolubly: the hysterical celebrations of the great Olympic deal and the response of disenfranchised fundamentalism. Dancing in the studios, weeping in the streets. Laurel wreaths for the victors. Carpets of cellophane flowers. Portraits of the missing pasted to fences around building‐site stations.
A time of fugues and forgetfulness: post‐traumatic wanderings from the epicentre of the blast. The driver of the bus, so it was rumoured, walked through the rest of the day, out to the western suburbs; before he recovered himself. In Hackney, a couple of years later, the skeleton of a woman called Shirley Slade was found in a ditch near the motorway: Temple Mills Lane, Hackney Wick. She had been with her husband, going for breakfast to a café on Kingsland Road, when she disappeared. He was a little ahead of her on the broad and busy pavement. He turned around, she was gone. The coroner’s verdict was that she had succumbed to hypothermia: ‘becoming more and more confused and disorientated as a result of the cold’. Mrs Slade grew up in Dalston. It was not clear how or why she had walked three or four miles across the borough, to the edge‐lands ditch where her remains were discovered. Stripped of flesh. White bones in mud exposed by surveyors of the development site.
A passenger, known as ‘M’, on the bus ahead of the fated 30, said that he lost all sense of time, place, identity. He tramped, ‘in a daze’, to Shepherd’s Bush. ‘I think the 30 bus should have been renumbered,’ he said, ‘without anyone knowing. Every time I notice one of those buses, it is a painful reminder. I wish I had been physically injured that day because at least people would be able to see that something was wrong.’
*
Without discussing it, the destination of our walk becomes clear: Old Ford Lock. Strolling with Mimi, the war‐zone photographer, through the contradictions of Fish Island, it is obvious we have reached a parting of the ways. Arriving from everywhere, constantly on the move, Mimi belongs here. My forty‐year Hackney residency disqualifies me from this virtual playground. Ambling through shadowy chasms between warehouses, we are schizophrenic: post‐traumatic tourists in a pre‐traumatic landscape. Bad things are coming over the horizon very fast. To devour a stubborn rump of holdouts who are slightly deaf and rubbing sore eyes. Mimi is concerned about the way evangelical missions are colonizing the ruins. Sunday‐morning fleets of shiny black cars. Rapping missionaries in white suits. Mimi saw how they operated in Brazil. Now an organization called American Truce has arrived in Hackney with a determined homophobic agenda. Their website asserts that ‘being homosexual is as much a handicap as being hooked on junk’. The Truce people were invited here as ‘a strategy to tackle gang activity’. They were funded by a £20,000 grant from our Safer Communities group.
At Old Ford, the former media zone, you can see the lock‐ keeper’s cottage that became the television set for The Big Breakfast Show. You can find red markings in wild orchards that confirm the extension of the Olympic Park. You can watch a dredger scraping off a green carpet of scum. You can identify the point where the buried Hackney Brook gushes into the Lea.
We have just passed Percy Dalton’s historic peanut factory, with its powdery‐hot stink, when a scrawny white youth with a rucksack bouncing on his back runs towards the lock. He is overtaken by another youth, wobbling on an unfamiliar bicycle. They are pursued by a black guy in the overalls of a Percy Dalton labourer. We were reluctant to take a photograph at the works gate: sunshafts through dust, yellow sacks being humped into a blue van by black men wearing bright orange. Cameras are put aside. The man’s bicycle, his only means of transport, has been stolen by the two white boys.
Mimi offers to call the police on his mobile. I chase after them, as far as the lock, but they’re gone. A choice of directions: to the Marshes, Three Mills, the Sewage Outfall. The Dalton labourer does not want to get involved. No police, no phone. A woman with a small child tells us that she witnessed the entire episode. It’s astonishing. All these interested parties, so suddenly, in a deserted street. Between a working peanut factory and the other part of the building, which now features the Bridget Riley studios.
The bereaved black worker is wearing a red hairnet. He wants to be sure that I haven’t made a record of the crime or the workers – who carry on loading their truck. Peanut shells crackle underfoot. I promise the man that I’m no photographer. A storyteller. Nobody believes a word that I say. Without evidence, this never happened.
After the 7/7 bombings, carrying a camera was seen as a provocative act; mobile phones impregnated by the smoke of Underground tunnels, passengers shuffling towards daylight. The writer and academic Bas Groes reported that his wife had been prevented, by unusual circumstances, from taking the Piccadilly Line train that was blown up. Two of her colleagues were aboard, but survived. Bas was arrested, later that day, filming near a police station.
‘After handing over the tape, I met a person claiming to be a Professor of Languages at King’s College. He said that he was on his way to the British Library for a meeting on the Future of Languages and Mankind. He bought me a pint and talked for an hour. About Gerald Kersh’s novel, Fowlers End. And about how he had lost his sister during the Blitz. He was convinced that Tony Blair had organized the attacks. Subsequently, I tried to track this man down, but have been unable to find any trace of him. I still don’t know whether he exists or not.’
I sat down with Mimi in a new bar called Lighthouse that had appeared out of nowhere in Wick Lane. It was air‐conditioned and empty. The barman gazed at a silent golf course, with palm trees and blue water, on a giant plasma screen. Mimi recalled another drinking spot, on the edge of the Wick, close to where the road sweeps you away towards the Blackwall Tunnel.
Another element in my life out here was Geneva, the black Jamaican club under the motorway bridge. Coming back to Hackney from Brixton, I was always stopping to have a beer in Geneva. I was the only white man. They looked at me with suspicion. They think I look like a cop, but when I open my mouth they know I could not be anyone like that. I like the music so much. The club was another source of shootings and stabbings and violence. The area was crazy, dangerous but exciting. Really beautiful. I asked one of these guys to give me a lift to the other black club, in Clapton, by the roundabout. When I stepped outside, they jumped on him, my driver, and beat him with a metal post.
And the religions. Unbelievable! All black, African. Incredible. It’s very sad, this evangelical reality. Mr Sinclair, it’s a power religion. Is crazy, crazy, but very beautiful.
The Russians came to Hackney Wick because it is the edge of London. It’s cheap to live, to buy stuff. You can make whatever you want to make. Black jobs, disappearances. Nobody asks any questions.
Revolution? The ground for revolution should become a bit bigger. In Hackney Wick the invisible will become visible.
The first time I am here I ask a bunch of people waiting for a bus, a ghost bus that never comes, ‘Excuse me, where is Hackney Wick?’ They looked at each other and then t
hey look at me. ‘You’re in Hackney Wick!’ This was very strange. Being in a place and not knowing where I am.
The trains, the buses, until last year, all were free. The platform at Hackney Wick was deserted. Nobody buys a ticket. All travel free. I travel east. I wanted to see the area. People go to Stratford for different reasons. I walk down what is left of Carpenter’s Road, where all the garages used to be. This is the first thing that disappears, the garages.
Old Ford, out of Fish Island, was a numinous locale in London’s deep‐topography: the crossing place on the River Lea – which was a major obstacle, a much broader stream. Here was a border between cultures, between Vikings and Saxons, pagans and Christians, travellers and fixed citizens, the living and the dead.
The critic John Adlard, back in 1973, had the interesting idea that William Blake confused Old Ford with old Stratford. Blake’s south‐eastern sweep, from Plate 31, Chapter 2 of Jerusalem, directed my reading of London, anticipating every move I made.
He came down from Highgate thro’ Hackney & Holloway towards London
Till he came to old Stratford, & thence to Stepney & the Isle
Of Leutha’s Dogs, thence thro’ the narrows of the River’s side,
And saw every minute particular: the jewels of Albion running down
The kennels of the streets & lanes as if they were abhorr’d . . .
‘Highgate thro’ Hackney’ was the journey of our lost river, the Hackney Brook, trickling down from the foothills to flow into the Lea at Old Ford. With Mimi I searched out the point where the stream bubbled into the sluggish river. There were two possibilities. One, right alongside the lock bridge, was the more fierce. But a closer examination of nineteenth‐century charts inclined me towards a mean dribble, a little further downstream, where the pipes carrying London’s sewage cross to the east bank, the Olympic Park. A new development, dark glass, balconies, has infilled the space behind us. A folded set of wings. A luxury prison.
Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire Page 53