East End Review

Category: BOOKS

Atlas of Improbable Places – book review: ‘informative and enthusiastic, scholarly and amusing’

Statuesque: Atlas shoulders the weight of the world at Portmeirion, one of the featured places in the book. Photograph: Travis Elborough

On the outskirts of Mexico City, we’re told, are “the last vestiges of a gigantic and ancient system of canals, terracotta aqueducts and tens of thousands of man-made islands… called chinampas”, one of which has become known as the Island of Dolls.

This “terrifying attraction” was formerly home to a lone hermit, Don Julian Santana Barrera, who one day discovered the body of a young girl drowned in the canal.

The next day, the recluse found a doll washed up on the shore, which he believed must have belonged to the girl, so he attached it to a tree in her memory.

When another doll arrived, the “one-off tribute [turned] into an obsession and before long Don Julian was fishing about in the canal and scouring local rubbish dumps for more dolls to place in trees and to furnish his makeshift abode”.

The loner died in 2001, reputedly drowning in the same part of the canal as the girl, and the place has since grown into a gallery of hanging dolls, with visitors travelling to add to the collection. Oddly, “the life cycles of these anthropomorphic creations” are “alarmingly similar to our own”. It’s a curious and delightfully eerie tale.

Stoke Newington author Travis Elborough’s Atlas of Improbable Places is a collection of short essays describing some of the strangest and most historically-obscure locations across the globe. Split into six sections – Dream Creations, Deserted Destinations, Architectural Oddities, Floating Worlds, Otherworldly Spaces and Subterranean Realms – the peculiarities contained in this somewhat bizarre book are manifold.

Author Travis Elborough

From the aforementioned Isle of Dolls to a squatter metropolis in California, Ireland’s bloody and haunted Leap Hall, and media tycoon William Randolph Hearst’s never-completed mansion, there’s plenty of interest to explore.

Among the highlights is a fascinating account of the formation of a subterranean network of tunnels in the Canadian city of Moose Jaw, where a community of Chinese workers – who arrived to work on the Canadian Pacific Railway – were driven underground as scapegoats when the country slipped into recession.

And then there’s Wrangel Island, on which herds of woolly mammoths thrived while their kin were elsewhere dying out.

Elborough seems particularly intrigued, though, by the geographical remnants of the Soviet Union, and the articles resulting from this are invariably captivating.

He writes of a once closed Soviet city that could now “be taken for a vintage Soviet theme park”; of the Darvaza Crater, or Door to Hell, in Turkmenistan, where a team of Soviet geologists drilling for natural gas in 1971 “blundered and created a deep sinkhole oozing potentially poisonous methane vapours”, which they proceeded to set alight; and then also the acutely symbolic Hill of Crosses in Lithuania.

The release of Atlas of Improbable Places follows Elborough’s excellent A Walk in the Park, and it’s most certainly welcome. It’s informative and enthusiastic, scholarly and amusing. While it might seem tempting to pop this book in the loo and flick through it in short bursts, it’s best read in one or two long stints – not least because once started it’s nigh on impossible to put down.

Atlas of Improbable Places: A Journey to the World’s Most Unusual Corners is published by Aurum Press. ISBN: 978-1781315323. RRP: £20

October 6, 2016
London’s Olympic Legacy – book review: ‘spruced up field notes’

Author Gillian Evans outside the Olympic stadium

What lasting benefits did East Londoners seek from the 2012 Olympics? What were we promised? What have and will we receive? These are questions that have been pondered ever since planning for the Games started in 2000.

Sixteen years and two mayors on – and four years after the Games themselves – it is possible at last to begin to take stock and patch together a verdict.

The London Olympics were from the start sold as an opportunity to regenerate East London in a sustainable and inclusive manner.

In 2007 Tessa Jowell, then minister in charge of this mega-event, promised to “make the Olympic Park a blueprint for sustainable living”.

Mayor Ken Livingstone, for his part, maintained that “the most enduring legacy of the Olympics will be the regeneration of an entire community [East London] for the direct benefit of everyone who lives there”.

Little by little, however, many of the idealistic goals that motivated those involved the early phases of legacy planning were eroded in the face of a sharp economic downturn, government cuts to public spending and a change in the political complexion, first of the London mayor and then of the government at Westminster.

Gillian Evans’s volume London’s Olympic Legacy: The Inside Track provides an account of this process based on participant observation.

Though Evans – an academic anthropologist at the University of Manchester – has published the book with an academic imprint, it is written in an engaging narrative style as a chronicle of her insider view of the planning process.

Evans was embedded in the bodies responsible for legacy design from 2008 to 2012.

She recounts both the ebullience and commitment of those involved in developing plans for the Olympic Park and surrounds after the games, but also their frustration as governing structures (‘delivery vehicles’) changed and swerving political priorities unstitched years of work.

Though the volume is compelling in the dramatic style of its presentation, which is quite atypical of most academic monographs, it is in many ways an intensely frustrating book, as it reads more like spruced up field notes than a coherent analysis.

The study lacks the conceptual framing that might help readers make sense of the broader social and structural forces that shaped the evolution of legacy thinking, or the norms and role understandings that informed individuals’ visions of what they were trying to achieve.

Another underwhelming aspect of the volume is that the main narrative ends abruptly in 2012, before legacy delivery had got underway in earnest. The brief ‘afterward’ provides a sketch of the some of the achievements and failures of the delivery process, but not an overall assessment of the extent to which the original promises were kept.

This worm’s-eye view of someone working alongside Olympic legacy planners has produced invaluable documentary evidence of the evolution of thinking about how East London could and should be reshaped in the post-Olympic period, but it would have benefited tremendously from more in-depth analysis.

London’s Olympic Legacy: The Inside Track is published by Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN: 978-0-230-31390

August 23, 2016
An Unreliable Guide to London – book review

“Top-notch city writing” – An Unreliable Guide to London. Photograph: Influx Press

An Unreliable Guide to London looks and sounds like a bit of a gimmick. The title positions it as a humorous alternative to the city’s latest Lonely Planet publication, while the front cover – laden with hackneyed London graphics and brandished with the tagline “bad advice – limited scope – no practical use” – is the type you might expect to find attached to an unwanted stocking filler. The content, however, is of an altogether different nature.

The idea for the collection, which contains more than a few exceptional stories set in some of the capital’s lesser-known locations, arose during a conversation over meatball subs at a Tottenham retail park. Editors Kit Caless and Gary Budden of Influx Press sat together wondering why publishers weren’t printing books about the parts of London they knew and interacted with on a daily basis. “What novels had we read set in Hanwell, Cricklewood or Barking?” they asked.

Inspired, they brought together 24 diverse contributors from across the city, before launching a successful Kickstarter campaign to give new literature to a London “that exists on the periphery of the imagination”.

An Unreliable Guide… is divided into four sections – West, North, South and East (in order) – and draws on areas as far apart as Wormwood Scrubs and Exmouth Market, and then further again. Aki Schilz gets the collection off to a great start with “Beating the Bounds”, but it’s Eley Williams’s bizarre and brilliant “In Pursuit of the Swan at Brentford Ait” that really sets the work alight.

Williams delves into the rich, ambiguous world of cryptid research, painting a mythological history of an over-grown swan believed to have long terrorised local riverbanks, with a plumage reported to be “dim smoky purple or a vivid electric pink”. She describes Brentford FC football chants that pay credence to the beast and details umpteen dangerous encounters stretching back centuries. It’s a stunningly strange tale.

Budden’s own “Staples Corner (and how we can know it)” – about a trip on the 266 to Currys and PC World, dropped off amid a “web of underpasses and roundabouts, of concrete walkways and steps to nowhere… trapped in the fevered dying dream of a brutalist architect” – is another of West’s highlights, while Chloe Aridjis kicks off the North section with an evocative exploration of night, shadows and optical illusions in N1.

Though M John Harrison’s “Babies From Sand: A Guide to Oliver’s Island, Barnes & the St Margarets’ Day of the Dead” is one of the weirdest, most-inspired pieces of short literature I’ve come across in a while, it’s the assemblage from East that is, for me, of most interest (primarily because I know the territory so well).

The poet Tim Wells lyrically laments the loss of wanker-free record stores in Hackney, where back in the day he’d purchase reggae, drink beer and chat with mates, before moving on to get his fill of pie, mash, liquor and slippery eels at Cooke’s on Kingsland Road. Nikesh Shukla makes fine work of Tayyabs, the famous Whitechapel curry house, while Irenosen Okojie brings a dizzying, Borges-like tale of time travelling monks to Barking.

As if that’s not enough, Marshman Gareth E Rees delivers a typically fun and enlightening account of a walk around Leyton Mills Retail Park – the car park, specifically – and co-editor Caless finishes things off with a probing series of politically-loaded vignettes dedicated to the forces tugging away at Exmouth Market; there’s spiced lamb, adulterous office sex and a bronze bust of Vladimir Lenin.

Despite appearances, An Unreliable Guide to London is a formidable anthology of top-notch city writing.

July 28, 2016
Post-war poignancy: a photographic elegy to 1960s East End

London docks, 1964. Photograph: John Claridge

East End is a stylish collection of more than 200 black and white photographs that captures all the grit and poverty of post-war East London and turns it into an elegy for a lost world.

Plaistow-born John Claridge, one of the most prolific photographers of the 1960s, had a typical East End childhood, playing in bombsites, boxing and falling asleep to the sounds and lights of the nearby docks.

Claridge knew he wanted to take photographs after seeing a camera at a funfair and took photos everywhere he went – whether it was the docks with his father or the shops on a Saturday with his mother, developing the photos in their outside toilet. The result is an intimate look at the East End through the eyes of one of its own.

Outside the Anglo Pak Muslim Butchers in 1962. Photograph: John Claridge

The photographs are a glimpse into an East End that is no more. In one picture a horse stands in a field framed by the Truman Brewery in the background, the chimney standing tall in a sky that has no skyscrapers. Others show shops with hand painted signs and broken windows, and a cobbler in his workshop.

The book progresses to show a changing East End. There are building sites and older faces, graffiti on a metal walkway and hollowed out factories, signifying the end of Claridge’s work in the area. As he mentions in the book’s introduction: “My East End was gone…I never expected it to go and then all of a sudden it was gone.”

The photographs rarely show any indication of a specific place such as a street sign – yet it is so distinctly the East End. From misty views of the Thames at dawn to close up portraits of boxers, the location is constantly signposted by the photographer’s familiarity and warmth to his subjects.

East End begins and ends with photographs of London’s docks and wharves, cementing the connection between Claridge’s childhood experiences there and his career: “I used to get up with my dad before he went down the docks…I really wanted to go to sea and see the world, but I did it through people sending me around the world to take photographs.”

East End by John Claridge is published by Spitalfields Life Books. RRP: £25.00. ISBN: 9780957656994

Mr and Mrs Jones, 1968. Photograph: John Claridge

July 19, 2016
London Fog – The Biography: how air pollution changed the nature of city life

Exposure: East London has historic links to air pollution. Photograph: David Holt

Air pollution at 66 Tower Hamlets primary schools breached EU limits for nitrogen dioxide in 2010, a report published earlier this year revealed.

Setting out figures for each London borough, it found that deprived parts of the city, such as Tower Hamlets and Hackney, suffer greater exposure to air pollution than richer neighbouring boroughs.

Looking back to Victorian times, with East London the centre of heavy industry and the greatest concentration of slums, one might say it was forever thus. But back then, and until the early 1960s, air pollution in the form of fog was a more visible and pervading presence in the lives of Londoners.

Dr Christine Corton of Wolfson College, Cambridge, is the author of London Fog –The Biography.

“The wind direction in London tends to be from west to east, so the East End had a lot of industry puffing out smoke and houses that used open fires. But it was also getting the smoke from the West End because of the wind direction,” she says.

Corton tells me how London’s fogs changed the very nature of city life, creating worlds of anonymity and providing cover for crime.

“The East End was very much seen as the dark continent,” Corton says.

“It was much easier to pick a pocket back then. There’s stories of ladders being put up the side of buildings, and burglars making their way up, stealing whatever is inside and escaping without being seen.”

Fictional depictions of events such as the Jack the Ripper murders always seem to be shrouded in fog, even though none of the murders took place on a foggy night.

“Film productions of Sherlock Holmes generally open with a fog,” Corton says. “It’s an immediate signifier of a murky crime-ridden scene, but in fact there wasn’t that much urban fog in Conan Doyle’s books.”

The fog was a versatile metaphor for writers, appearing in the works of T.S. Eliot, Oscar Wilde and Charles Dickens as well as in paintings by Whistler and Monet.

“Dickens uses it in Bleak House for the obfuscation of the law and it pervades the whole of the first chapter where everyone is in a fog. And in Our Mutual Friend, he uses it to show people’s character, so the villain Fledgley comes out into fog and the fog sucks him in – it’s like he’s part of that corruption that’s created by society.”

The fog’s various nicknames – ‘London Particular’ or ‘pea-souper’ – prove that it captured the general public’s imagination too.

Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds and other industrial cities also had smoke problems, but only in London did residents actually feel quite proud of the fog. A smoky street was a sign that industry was booming and that people could afford coal on their fire – which through most of 19th century was most people’s only source of heat and light.

“Whenever I talk to people who remember the 1950s fog there’s also nostalgia that somehow the London Fog created a warm reassuring environment,” Corton says.

“The smell, although sulphurous, felt somehow nutritious, which is why fog is often talked about in food terms.

“And there are also stories of lovers who couldn’t see each other in their own homes meeting in the fog on a bench holding hands or kissing. So it could actually create this almost domestic space for them.”

This ambivalence towards the fog contributed to its staying power. Corton says that, starting from the 1820s, unsuccessful attempts were made every decade to clean up London’s air.

“Although people detested the fog and knew it killed them they thought it represented something very special about London. And it was partly because of that the legislation passed was always weakened.”

The smog of 1952 was the real catalyst for change. Labelled the Big Smoke, this severe air-pollution event lasted five days and was the cause of 12,000 premature deaths, according to a recent study.

“People had just fought a World War and I think they said we didn’t fight a World War in order to kill ourselves with the air we breathe,” Corton says.

The fog began to dissipate after the 1956 Clean Air Act was passed, introduced as a private members’ bill by the Enoch Powell-supporting Conservative MP, Gerald Nabarro.

It was strengthened in 1968 by another Act of Parliament, this time sponsored by Robert Maxwell.

But whilst the fog might be a very distant memory to some, air pollution in East London today is a present – though less visible – threat to public health.

“They reckon now that 9,000 people die every year from London air pollution,” says Corton.

“For 150 years at least, people knew the air they were breathing was bad for them. I would take that and say let’s look at the automobile, which we now are so in love with that we can’t envisage using all the time. In a way it’s a parallel to our love of the coal fire.

“It hasn’t entered the artistic imagination as the yellowy green smog of yesteryear, but it’s a situation that fundamentally hasn’t changed. Only today it’s just a different type of air pollution.”

London Fog – The Biography is published by Harvard University Press. ISBN: 9780674088351. RRP: £22.95

July 11, 2016
London Life – book review: a wonderful photographic celebration of the city

Touch of frost: Regent’s Canal freezes over. Photograph: Colin O’Brien

Photographer Colin O’Brien’s book London Life may appear at first glance a series of beautiful yet somewhat random photographs, but is in fact a narrative of London and his own life.

The book begins in Little Italy, Clerkenwell, where O’Brien grew up. The early photographs are box camera negatives that O’Brien came upon by chance when clearing out his house. Looking at a photograph of two friends leaning against a car in Hatton Gardens in 1948, O’Brien says: “I love the way they’re posing. They were Italian, very confident and very cheeky.”

O’Brien’s early photographs show an interesting contrast of tenderness and violence. On one page, a girl is being taken to a birthday party in her new dress on Clerkenwell Road; on another, we see a car accident on the junction of the very same road.

There is a sense of loss in O’Brien’s photographs. He says: “I took lots of pictures of ‘last things’: the last tram, the last trolley bus, the last day of Woolworths, the last day of smoking in parks.”

Horse and cart in Hackney

Looking at pictures of Westminster Bridge and Trafalgar Square in 1954, O’Brien notices that even the light has changed. The air back then was dirty: “I remember going to the cinema and getting our money back because we couldn’t see the screen.”

It is not just the faces that are changing, but also the very nature of photography in the city. In the first half of the book, the photographs seem lonelier, the city more vast. In the 70s, however, the photographs are more populated with people and cars.

Flattened: High-rise flats are demolished at Hackney Downs. Photograph: Colin O’Brien

Every photograph has its own personal story. O’Brien turns to a photograph of Jim’s Café, on Chatsworth Road, taken in 2008. The proprietor is standing in the doorway.

“I took his picture, went back a month later with the pictures and his wife started crying and said he died last week. I said do you want the pictures and she said if she wanted them, she’d get in touch. She never got back.”

London Life is a wonderful celebration of the city, of people together and of tragedy. “I just take what’s in front of me,” O’Brien says, and it is this openness to experience that has taken O’Brien from the Victorian dwellings of his youth, and made him the London photographer that we know today.

London Life is published by Spitalfields Life. RRP: £25.00. ISBN: 9780957656956.

July 8, 2016
Adrift: A Secret Life of London’s Waterways, review – ‘serious and fascinating’

Nomadic existence: author Helen Babbs documents 10 months living on a boat in her new book Adrift

If you’re given to walking, running or cycling around Victoria Park, or strolling from Mile End to Broadway Market on a Saturday morning, you’ll be familiar with stretches of the Hertford Union and Regent’s Canals. You’ll no doubt have noted the motley rows of eclectically-named barge boats, and you’ll probably have peered through the windows at the micro-homes within, wondering whether or not a life on the water could be for you.

Whilst most of us tempted by that nomadic, challenging existence will do nothing but imagine, Helen Babbs, acclaimed author of My Garden, the City and Me: Rooftop Adventures in the Wilds of London, has taken a more proactive approach. She traded in the comfort of central heating, mains electricity and community roots for a narrow boat called Pike and decided to document a 10-month period of her new life, travelling from the capital’s east to west in 2014.

Adrift: A Secret Life of London’s Waterways is made up of four seasonal sections split into poetic and informative vignettes. Thoroughly researched, it covers the disparate histories of the canals, the surrounding landscapes and natural habitats, and the unrelenting presence of development. As well as mulling over the wider social constitution and the reasons why someone might opt out of living on land, Babbs records the personal, day-to-day trials and triumphs onboard.

But not just about the anatomy of the city’s waterways, it is also a book about literature, and for those interested in nature writing, psychogeography and the literature of London, Adrift will be a treat. It offers a compendium of great works to discover and revisit. Babbs, clearly a well-informed and voracious reader, touches on figures such as Penelope Fitzgerald, Thomas De Quincey, Dickens and Virginia Woolf – mentioning the latter during a delightful musing on truth, perception and the capricious nature of place.

And then there are the many writers still working today with whom she shares themes and concerns, and from whom she appropriates various methods of dealing with her material. While literature has long been associated with travel and journeys – The Epic of Gilgamesh is at once arguably the first travelogue and the first work of literature – great British authors of recent years in particular have made use of a roving, fluid practice, writing beautifully about the landscapes they come upon and get to know.

Babbs’s use of the word “territory”, for instance, recalls Iain Sinclair’s – loaded with passion and politics – and her close, enthusiastic examination of the natural environment, albeit in an urban setting, has something of a holistic quality akin to the works of Robert Macfarlane and Richard Mabey. She references these writers – Sinclair and Mabey on numerous occasions – and nods superbly to Michael Moorcock’s Mother London in the final stages.

Perhaps less overtly, there’s something of George Monbiot’s Feral, and the re-wilding movement, running throughout. In a nice section dedicated to the Middlesex Filter Beds, she details the evolution of an old waterworks, from its original cholera-related purpose during the Victorian era to derelict, overgrown tranquility and on to official nature reserve. The book gives the reader a sense of the possibility, with the right management, of a more verdant London.

Style-wise, Babbs’s effortless prose is tight and lyrical, moseying along at a calm, steady pace, but there are moments both barbed and cutting. Here she is on the 2012 Olympics: “The mania of the sporting event long gone, the left-behind landscape is entirely altered. What came before has been comprehensively erased – the allotments, the dog track, the silty tides, the marooned boats. Mad old London running to the wild. We are a city that easily forgets.”

Adrift is a serious and fascinating book, and I’ll be sure to read whatever its exciting young author produces next.

Adrift: A Secret Life of London’s Waterways is published by Icon Books. RRP: £16.99. ISBN: 9781848319202.

July 6, 2016
A Walk in the Park: The Life and Times of a People’s Institution – book review

At leisure: a man cycles in Clissold Park

We all know the benefit of ‘fresh air’, even those of us who spend the majority of our urban lives hunched over computer screens or sprawled across sofas.

This common sense approach to the great outdoors is backed up by recent scientific research showing that exposure to green spaces reduces cardiovascular disease, mental health problems and overall mortality. What most of us don’t know is how our greens came to be what they are today.

Living in the city, you probably inhale most of your fresh air in a park, but in this you are lucky, for it is only relatively recently that urban greenery has been freely available for all to use.

In A Walk in the Park: The Life and Times of a People’s Institution, Hackney writer Travis Elborough charts the fascinating history of the little pockets of nature that most of us now take for granted.

We discover that the parks have their origins in blood sports, as the forebear of the curated modern green space was the medieval private game park. Virtually all early urban parks – or ‘pleasure gardens’ – were also private places, to which the masses were admitted only on payment of a fee.

Though that fee typically entitled park-goers access to a smorgasbord of lavish amusements and decorations; in 1742 even Mozart performed at one such venue, Ranelagh gardens in Chelsea.

It was only in the Victorian era that the notion of the open access park took hold, with the young princess Victoria herself opening the first free park in Bath in 1830. The latter 19th century was the heyday of the urban park, as the recreational and ‘improvement’ needs of the industrial proletariat began to be recognised.

More parks were built between 1885 and 1914 than during any period before or since, and they benefitted from the period’s Arts-and-Craft style.

With its lake and pagoda, Victoria Park in Tower Hamlets was one of the most lavish of the royal parks laid out in London at that time. And famous 19th century arboretums at Loddiges and Abney Park in contemporary Hackney were widely-emulated models.

The nadir of the modern park was undoubtedly the period stretching from the post-war housing boom of the 1950s to the 1980s, when public places was gobbled up for redevelopment at an alarming rate.

Investment in open space also fell, and by the early 1990s many urban parks were dangerous, decaying relics.

A major 1994 report co-authored by Hackney historian Ken Worpole marked a turnaround in this trend, and parks enjoyed somewhat of a renaissance during the subsequent two decades on the back of National Lottery funding, only to fall victim to the austerity politics of the contemporary era.

With council spending on parks plummeting, land being sold for redevelopment and local authority grass increasingly being leased for paid events, parks are again facing a crisis that has prompted one call for all of London – 47 per cent of which is made up of green space – to be declared a national park.

In some senses this struggle is not new. One of the perennial moral and logistical challenges for park-keepers has been the surveillance of park use: who was to be allowed in, with what attire, and for what purpose.

The size and shape of men’s swimming shorts was a subject of regulation well into the 1930s, and the curtailment of sex in parks has been a losing battle from furtive couplings in Victorian pleasure gardens to wartime frolics in blacked out shrubbery to the hippy orgies of the 1960s.

Together with sex, politics has been one of the most consistent uses to which parks have been put down the centuries. From the 19th century open green space hosted electoral hustings, demonstrations and political gatherings of all sorts.

In 1948, Victoria Park proved a convenient place for Chartist meetings; on the eve of the First World War, Sylvia Pankhurst addressed anti-conscription gatherings there, and Oswald Mosley’s Black Shirts held rallies on the same grass in the 1930s.

Author Travis Elborough

Travis Elborough is known for his deft and quirky explorations of social history, including the Routemaster bus, vinyl records and the British seaside. This volume excels in this particular sub-genre; the prose is generally smooth, and often deliciously witty.

The book is also stuffed with fascinating titbits, such as the fact that Birkenhead Park near Liverpool was the inspiration for the design of New York’s Central Park, or that Alexandra Palace was used as an internment camp during the First World War, or that Victoria Park hosts the UK’s oldest continuous model boat club, dating from 1904.

So next time you wander over to your local park to soak in the summer sun, take along a copy of A Walk in the Park to show you how you got there.

A Walk in the Park: The Life and Times of a People’s Institution by Travis Elborough is published by Jonathan Cape RRP: £18.99 ISBN: 9780224099820

June 15, 2016
Stoke Newington Literary Festival – preview

Comedian Sara Pascoe

Now in its seventh year, the Stoke Newington Literary Festival returns this weekend with a big focus on local writers and publishers, music and food.

Some of the highlights from this year’s programme include Hackney writer Dawn Foster, who will be discussing her book Lean Out at 3pm on Saturday 4 June in the Unitarian Chapel.

The book looks at the rise of what it sees as a corporate ‘one per cent’ feminism that exempts business from any responsibility for changing the position of women in society.

Local independent publishers Influx Press are to stage author readings from An Unreliable Guide to London, comprising 23 stories about the lesser known parts of the city.

On Saturday evening, one of the festival’s music highlights sees ex-Ruff Sqwad grime MCs Roachee and Prince Owusu talk to writer Kieran Yates at 6pm in Ryan’s Bar.

Then at 11am on the Sunday, the legacy of the Harlem Renaissance – the artistic and intellectual movement that kindled a new black cultural identity in 1920s New York – is the subject of a memorial event for Eric Walrond, one of only two writers buried in Abney Park cemetery.

Fifty years after Walrond’s death, his biographer James Davis flies over from the US to talk to Diane Abbott MP, Colin Grant and Hackney writer Robin Travis about the writer’s profile in the UK and his work with Marcus Garvey.

On Sunday afternoon, Observer journalist Jude Rogers talks to punk musicians Gina Birch, Pauline Murray, Shanne Bradley and Helen Reddington about the impact of punk on women at 1pm in Abney Hall.

Shortly afterwards, the co-founder of the Quietus music website John Doran will join author Simon Mason in The Prince pub to talk about his experience of why the music business and drugs seem inextricably linked – one of the big topics of his 2015 memoir Jolly Lad from Hackney publisher Strange Attractor.

Alongside local writers and publishers, the festival also features a few big names: comedians Sara Pascoe and Robin Ince will be lighting up Stoke Newington Town Hall on the Saturday night, and novelists Jonathan Coe and David Mitchell will close the festival on Sunday from 4pm.

There are also a tonne of food events in St Paul’s Church. Weekend ticket holders can nab limited spots on a walking tour of Hackney bakeries, as food writer Xanthe Clay introduces gozleme and baklava experts at Hackney’s Turkish and Kurdish bakeries from 12.30pm on Saturday.

Perhaps the most curious event on the bill is a food panel featuring Stoke Newington resident Ed Balls. The former shadow chancellor will be appearing at St Paul’s on the Sunday, where anecdotes about sandwich faux-pas on the campaign trail will presumably give audience members much to chew on.

Stoke Newington Literary Festival
3– 5 June
stokenewingtonliteraryfestival.com

June 2, 2016
Juliet Jacques: ‘Being transexual has politicised my creative work’

‘The personal is political’: author Juliet Jacques

The world’s largest philosophy and music festival is currently in full swing – in a small market town in Wales. But HowTheLightGetsIn in Hay-on-Wye is “very Hackney”, I’m told.

Take from that what you will. It’s certainly true that a number of the impressive line-up of speakers and musicians hail from – or at least have resided in – East London’s (not-so-humble) borough.

According to its website the festival isn’t about “big names for big names’ sake,” though; it’s more about “ideas and wonder” and “the heretics of our time”.

One of the most heretical names, then, to be speaking at this hub of thinking and questioning is Juliet Jacques – a Hackney resident no less.

Jacques is a writer best known for writing the first serialised account of the gender reassignment process for a major British publication; in 2011 her Guardian blogs were long-listed for the Orwell Prize.

Last year, her memoir and analysis of transgender politics – Trans – was published to great acclaim. “Being transexual has politicised my creative work,” says Jacques, but, though her gender has inspired some of her work, her journalistic interests range from politics, to film, to football, and she is currently studying for a PhD in Creative and Critical Writing.

One of Jacques’s guiding principles is that “the personal is political”. In Hay on Wye she will be speaking at a debate entitled Strange Affects and Collective Emotions, which asks whether shared emotional worlds can be relevant – or even pivotal – in social and political change. It is clear which side Jaques will take – her own belief in the combined power of “the head and the heart” is unshifting.

As a trans woman, Jacques has “an acute sense of the unfairness of the world”.

“The political is personal,” too, she says. “The Tories’ attacks on the NHS, mental health services, unemployment and disability benefits, the arts and on alternatives to capitalism have felt like a targeted attack on me, my friends and everything I care about.”

And yet Jacques fears the power of “shared feelings [is] often better mobilised by the right than the left”. So a festival dedicated to philosophy, she believes could be a potential antidote. “Any counterpoint is crucial,” she says. “A dialogue of this size can lead to new ideas, which filter into society in unpredictable ways.”

Through the celebration of critical thinking – and the refusal to succumb to “anti-intellectualism”, which Jacques believes is “rife” – Jacques is of the opinion that festivals such as HowTheLightGetsIn hold “a genuine capacity for change”.

The high-minded debates will no doubt entail some ground-swelling and mobilising ideas – but Jacques is already committed to living out her convictions, even in her local loyalties. One of her favourite things about Hackney, she says, is having “so many good venues and art spaces nearby”.

Café Oto on Ashwin Street (once cited as Britain’s “coolest venue” by the Guardian) ”really is a gift”, she says, promising: “I will personally offer, here and now, to fight any future residents of those new flats on Dalston Junction who complain about the noise.”

HowTheLightGetsIn is hosted by the Institute of Arts and Ideas concludes on 5 June.

https://howthelightgetsin.iai.tv/.

May 28, 2016