London

The suburbs
Our house was the first built on its site. This is in 1840; before that it was open fields and gardens. It was a suburb of the City of London and it’s becoming one again in a different way: a suburb inside a village inside a city – it’s turning inside out.

The energy of the area came from being just outside the city. Just outside the established walls of the Roman city. There were asylums and there were religious houses – monasteries. The actual city – the financial City – has sealed itself off. It’s got its own barriers, its own police force and its own surveillance.

When I first moved here in 1969, there was a post office, two greengrocers, a butcher, a fish shop, a café – all now gone. It’s now sort of a no-man’s land, rather bleak. All the local pubs have gradually disappeared. That culture is completely gone. In its place they have tried to revive places like Broadway Market with new flower shops and retro-clothing boutiques, wine bars, Pilates classes… It’s becoming gently what Brick Lane has become. You choose here between whether you think you live in North Shoreditch or East Islington… you’re not Hackney. Feature continues

Surveying graffiti

Graffiti
You still see the tags I wrote about [in ‘Lights Out for the City’] here in Hackney. In Whitechapel they have changed – they’re all done by artists. Once upon a time the graffiti was like ‘George Davis Is Innocent’ and ‘Free Reggie Kray’. It’s all painted out, and now it’s ironic – ‘Please drive carefully in our village’ – a joke. It’s all irony; the whole city has become ironic.

Gangsters
The Greek Cypriot family called the Lambrianous moved into the flats by the Regent’s Canal, in the way that there was immigration right after the war. The father worked in kitchens and restaurants, but the sons, Chris and Tony, were brothers who became associates of the Kray twins and were both involved in the murder of Jack ‘The Hat’ McVitie, who was killed up in Stoke Newington in 1967. They had the job of getting rid of the body. So they came back here, they lived just over there, and went by that bridge and threw the knife and the keys of the flat right where they lived. So when the police came, they didn’t have to go more than 20 yards from the door; they dredged up the river and found the weapons. It wasn’t very bright.

Sinclair by the Regent's Canal

Then they had the body wrapped up in a carpet in the boot of the car, they drove over the river and left it on the other side for south London gangsters to get rid of. The body was never found; it was taken out to sea.

It’s a fairly typical story of trying to survive as an immigrant in this area. You either went into crime or you worked for the breweries or whatever was there then. All of these have gone now except the crime, but it’s more industrialised now.

Some days I’ve walked from my house in Hackney to Victoria Park and I don’t hear a word of English. It’s not like immigrants; it’s more tourists – French or German or Dutch spoken by people who think the canal is picturesque and worth photographing. The fishermen who used to be there have not vanished, but are nearly all gone. It’s an exhibited landscape in a funny way.

An original Hackney resident

Changing faces
There’s a network of people in Hackney now who don’t even know they are living in Hackney. Media people have bought houses because they can’t afford Islington. They don’t even know what’s in Hackney. They’d never eat a meal in Hackney, they’d never walk on the streets. It’s just that they convene in a place to have a reasonably nice house. I think there are a lot of people who use it in the sense of a suburb. It’s a dormitory and you go away and you work somewhere else.

When I came here, people would have always lived in the area, in the sense of working somewhere near at hand, children playing in local parks, going to the schools. But that doesn’t happen any more. They send the children to private school elsewhere. Look at the cars. Range Rovers, collectors’ Mercs, little electric pods.