East End Review

Tag: East London

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
Field Day 2015 – review: festival fun under East London skies

Patti Smith at Field Day. Photograph: Carolina Faruolo

Tights were joyfully stripped from sun-starved legs, sleeves rolled up and dungarees donned as a week-long smudgy cloud hanging over East London made way for glorious blue sky to welcome Field Day to Victoria Park.

Acoustic treats greeted punters as they flowed into the festival to the pacey parp of trumpets and trombones from local lads Hackney Colliery Band, kicking things off on the main stage. They were later followed by father and son duo Toumani and Sidiki Diabaté from Mali, playing the kora – a traditional West African instrument.

Glamorous hordes swanned by as a couple lay face down on the grass near the stage, their cheeks pressed against a cling-wrapped copy of Saturday’s Guardian, the sound of the world’s best harp players the perfect lullaby for a quick power-nap.

So far, so sedate. But as the sun began to set as dancing feet tossed dust into the air. Some reckless rapping from teenage hip-hop trio RatKing, who have been touring with Run the Jewels higher up on the Field day bill, got bodies shifting on the i-D Mix stage.

Ratking (not to be confused with Rat Boy, another Field Day act). Photograph: Ella Jessel

Sneaking under the awnings of the Shacklewell Arms tent came the bewitching vocals of Tei Shi, moniker of New York-based but Bogota-begot singer/songwriter Valerie Teicher. Her atmospheric electronic R&B left the crowd shouting for more.

But as with previous years, bigger acts seemed to struggle with sound. In the Crack tent, Chet Faker could hardly be heard, though the crowd seemed more than happy to sing blithely along to ‘No Diggedy’ all the same.

Punters crammed the main outdoor stage eager to hear Caribou – the perfect choice for the headline slot. But the sound on the Eat Your Own Ears stage was also weak. “I feel like I’m watching this on TV”, one chap said to his friend, staring glumly up at the video screens beaming images of crowd-surfers and girls hoisted on shoulders.

Sunday

If Saturday night was all right for partying, then Field Day Sunday put music firmly back in focus. A more seasoned festival crowd gathered to see the likes of Patti Smith, Ride and Mac Demarco on the main stage, with the weather gods once again looking kindly on proceedings.

Feeling disorientated in your local park by the array of tents, stalls and stages is a strange sensation at first, though wandering between them all to discover new acts whilst grazing on some of the stellar street food offerings is no bad thing.

Gulf were an early find, a psychedelic guitar-pop group from Liverpool playing to a modest crowd in the Moth Club tent. For a new band, festivals are like a shop window, a place to find new fans, and Gulf’s lilting, melancholic melodies and full-throttle guitars are sure to have won them friends.

Walking between stages it was surprisingly easy to be distracted by the sight of adults sack-racing, or in the words of the bawdy announcer, showing “athletic prowess in the sack”. Silly but actually rather fun, the ‘Village Mentality’ area is an enduring feature of Field Day that makes it stand out from its festival brethren.

Napping: A couple snooze while revellers flit between the bands. Photograph: Ella Jessel

Packing out the Verity tent were Leopold and His Fiction, who wowed the afternoon crowd with a high tempo set of vintage rock, complete with singing drummer. “This song is about Detroit,” declared frontman Daniel James, the crowd roaring their approval. “Has anyone ever been to Detroit?” he followed up, to a more muted response – though enthusiasm for this all-American blend of Detroit rock and soul was well placed.

In an early evening slot, Patti Smith and band played Horses in full, with punk poet Smith showing she’s lost none of her energy or stage presence in the 40 years since the album was released. From the snarled opening line of “Jesus died for somebody’s sins, but not mine,” it was clear Smith meant business.

Smith railed against governments and corporations and implored everyone to be free, to whoops and cheers. By the end, audience members were calling out the names of lost loved ones during an emotional rendition of ‘Elegie’, dedicated to all those people “who we have loved and are no longer with us”.

Those who left after Patti Smith must have felt there was no room for improvement, but the remaining faithful were rewarded with a serene set from headliners Ride. Playing songs from across their four albums and various EPs, the reformed cult act and original ‘shoegazers’ have lost none of their intensity, their guitar ‘wall of sound’ thankfully still intact.

With cruel punctuality the curfew was reached. Happy, sunburnt and a little worse for wear the crowd filed out, leaving only glimpses of grass under a carpet of plastic cups, broken sunglasses and crushed cans of Red Stripe.

Could the sound have been better? Probably. But Field Day has all the elements for a great party and emerged with its reputation for devising an eclectic line-up unscathed, though a few decibels short of fever pitch.

http://fielddayfestivals.com/news/

June 11, 2015
George Orwell’s East London footsteps

George Orwell. Credit: public domain

In the not so distant past, London’s East End was a place to be forgotten, an area readily associated with disease, overcrowding, alcoholism and crime. Either you had the misfortune of living in one of the area’s slums, or you simply stayed clear.

Or, if you’re George Orwell, you quit your steady well-paid job and hit the streets.

In 1927, after five years serving the British Empire as a police officer in colonial Burma, Orwell traded his uniform for rags and spent a few months living a life of abject poverty in two of Europe’s grandest capital cities. He recounts his experience in Down and Out in Paris and London, published in 1933.

In many ways, this experience defined Orwell’s writing career. The poverty he witnessed in London’s own backyard came as an eye opener after years of service in the Imperial Indian Police. Here was Great Britain preaching enlightenment to all corners of the globe, yet in Spitalfields and Whitechapel the living conditions were as bad as in the slums of Calcutta.

The seeds had been sown. Over the following two decades Orwell would use his words to fight social injustice and imperialist and authoritarian rule. His righteous causes would be developed novel after novel, and ultimately culminated in the publication – sixty five years ago next month – of 1984.

So what has changed since the time of Orwell’s writing? What has become of the East End lodging-houses that played such an instrumental role in his writing career?

The simple truth is that most of the squalor he experienced no longer exists here. Many of the buildings, however, do still stand – though under a very different guise.

The Providence Row Night Refuge “for deserving Men, Women, and Children” on modern day Crispin Street used to provide accommodation for more than 400 destitute people, and did so from 1860 until as recently as 1999. Inmates would get a bed for the night, as well as a ration of cocoa and bread. Nowadays it’s a student residence for the London School of Economics. Students may not have much money but it’s fair to say these are two very different levels of poverty.

Then: Providence Row Night Refuge in 1902. Credit: Bishopsgate Institute archives

The Brune Street Soup Kitchen for the Jewish Poor opened in 1902 and as it its name suggests used to provide nourishment for the Jewish community of Spitalfields. In the 1960s it was still regularly feeding 1,500 clients. The establishment has now been divided into expensive flats.

Fieldgate Street’s Rowton House, also erected in 1902, offered 816 beds. It is known for a fact that George Orwell stayed there, as did Soviet revolutionaries Maxim Litvinov and Joseph Stalin when they attended the London conference of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in 1907. American author Jack London called it the “Monster Doss House” packed with “life that is degrading and unwholesome”. Today it is known as Tower House and offers a vast array of luxury apartments, some worth more than £1 million – a far cry from the shilling Orwell had to pay for a night’s rest.

These are but three examples of the many East End establishments that have gone from rags to riches in less than a hundred years. Back in Orwell’s day these institutions existed to assist the poor, now the buildings they were housed in serve a wealthier class of person.

But times have changed and so has the area. Would Orwell roll over in his grave at the thought? Perhaps not. In many ways we have people like George Orwell to thank for this progress.

Jack the Ripper’s infamous murders in 1888 made international news and the area saw unprecedented regeneration thereafter. Orwell’s work brought East End misery back to the forefront of social agendas and ensured the regeneration triggered by the Ripper years didn’t stop there.

Whereas people used to avoid the area and even fear it, nowadays people of all walks of life flock to the area to tour the sites – a celebration of immigration, poverty and murder if you will. Thanks for your help George.

@raisimpson

May 20, 2014