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
“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.
The cast of Alleycats. Photograph: Christina Solomons
The East End Film Festival got off to a start last month, with the world premiere of Ian Bonhote’s debut feature, Alleycats.
It begins with trendy bike courier Chris speeding through London, weaving between traffic and capturing the city on a shaky GoPro camera strapped to his helmet.
When he stumbles upon an ultra-corrupt politician (John Hannah) leaning over the dead body of a young woman, he becomes embroiled in a blackmail plot that unfolds on two wheels in the streets and back alleys of the capital.
As things take a turn for the worst, Chris’s sister Danni gets behind the handlebars and steers the film on towards catastrophe.
With a hint of the Dogme 95 spirit about it, plus a decent soundtrack, there’s some promise early on, but a flimsy narrative, reams of clunky dialogue and a precocious but uninteresting approach to style render it ultimately flat.
Hannah brings something of a demonic-Malcolm-Tucker feel to his role and copes well with what little the script offers, but just about every other member of the cast gets it wrong, in this failed fusion of Guy Ritchie, Skins and the 90s cartoon series Biker Mice From Mars.
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.
Places to go: busy office workers make strides. Photograph: Nicholas Sack
Photographer Nicholas Sack’s Lost in the City is a collection of images exploring London’s financial district.
The series positions the people of this strange world – generally office workers, occasionally stray tourists – against the imposing architecture, creating a sub-reality that on first impression is alien and oppressive, but captivating, nonetheless.
When I reviewed the book back in January for the East End Review, I described the images as “cold and clinical” and commented on how the patterns and symmetries in the buildings mirror the repetitive routines of nine-to-five commerce.
I was impressed by the geometry, the meticulous and rigid order that Sack arranges within the viewfinder. But most of all, I found the volume detached, harsh and haunting.
But on meeting the photographer and discussing his work, I quickly realise that my initial perceptions only skimmed the surface of what is a complex and multilayered project.
Sack has been photographing the City of London for 30 years and there’s more to this latest assemblage, taken from the last decade, than first meets the eye.
Under construction: building site in financial district. Photograph: Nicholas Sack
Drinking beer in the Crosse Keys on Gracechurch Street, a striking old banking hall built on the site of an ancient coaching inn and since taken over by JD Wetherspoon, Sack runs me through a selection of his black and white prints; some are from the book and others are not, but the subject remains the same.
“I find some of these human gestures, these angles, the way people sit and stand, very interesting… there’s a sort of vulnerability or unwitting disclosure,” he says, describing what he likes most about a shot of three people eating lunch on a concrete bench.
“I’m not looking for car crashes or great dramatic events. It’s really just the tiniest gesture that can look most interesting.”
He points his pen at one lady’s foot, which has slipped out from her shoe and is caught in a surprisingly elegant pose. This tiny detail, which I miss at first but is clearly the main focus for Sack, warms the image significantly.
Whether it is through discomfort or ease, the subtlety makes the composition less symmetrical, more familiar and ultimately more human.
Many of the pictures in Lost in the City contain such minutiae: there’s a pointed finger, an open purse, a splayed hand resting against bare shin, for example – all of which show Sack to be a sympathetic photographer.
Amidst the stark, difficult landscape, he finds spontaneous moments of simple beauty that inject life into the icy scenes.
Of an image of five men in crisp white shirts marching past the Bank of England, he explains: “This is a feature of the camera catching things quickly; while these men are clearly affluent, working in high finance, they also reveal a physical delicacy.
“Those heels that are on the floor with the toes pointing upwards strike a balletic pose that doesn’t quite fit with the image of the thrusting alpha male.”
All of a sudden, the men are no longer marching; they are breezing through the City.
This new perception adds an ethereal quality that intensifies the juxtaposition between the looming buildings and the figures below. Whilst the contrast could suggest a political stance on Sack’s part – criticising the capitalist regime – he insists that despite his staunchly socialist upbringing this is not the case.
“I’m looking at things purely from a visual point of view,” he says. “My feelings about what these people are doing are quite separate – they really don’t intrude at all. In fact, I like to get to the stage where the real world becomes abstract – I’m a formalist in that way.
“People assume that I think the City and Canary Wharf are sterile and repetitive and monotonous, which is not true – that’s not the way I feel. I find the regularity and uniformity rather exciting.”
Harsh beauty: man on walkway in East London. Photograph: Nicholas Sack
Sack’s artistic education was diverse, but in its way perfect for his chosen topic. Born in Sussex and raised predominantly in Greenwich, he studied urban planning at Aston University, before returning to London to do a postgraduate degree in journalism.
At the same time as working an office job, he played the drums in rock bands, which he says contributed to his appreciation of rhythm and structure.
“I think that being a drummer relates to some of this love of order. There’s a metronomic steadiness to things that I appreciate visually, so there may well be a connection.”
He didn’t pick up a camera, however, until his mid-20s, when a fellow student introduced him to the darkroom.
He was instantly hooked. “I ended up photographing freelance for 30 years, mostly for business magazines and corporate clients. So it wasn’t pre-planned and I’ve had no formal training, which is to my detriment in many ways, because I’ve picked up bad habits and I’ve had to work pretty much intuitively.”
Though he’s photographed abroad and on regular long walks in the countryside, Sack hasn’t strayed too far from the capital.
As such, he’s become something of an authority on the territory; he’s also been influenced over the last decade by the roving methods of his literary hero, Iain Sinclair, who provided an insightful introduction to Lost in the City.
“The fact that I’ve lived in London all my life and I’ve done it on foot, because I’ve never had a car, means that I know all these cut throughs and alleys… I love that. It’s as though I’m a tourist but with privileged information, an inside knowledge.”
Nicholas Sack. Photograph: Timothy Cooke
Despite the technological advances of recent years, Sack has remained dedicated to film photography. He shoots in black and white, he doesn’t use a tripod and he refuses to crop any of his images, relying entirely on his skill to perfect the frame in the field. He describes himself as a dinosaur and explains that he loves the craft process.
“I enjoy the interregnum, if you like, the hiatus – the time between shooting the picture and knowing what’s there on the film. I enjoy the period of not knowing. It’s my stand against instant gratification. It might be months before I see what’s on the film, and then it may be years before I print what’s there. I enjoy that – it’s part of the mystery and beauty of photography.”
There’s a level of intensity to Sack and his approach that as we chat becomes more apparent. He seems to aspire to a state of heightened awareness, which, he says, allows him to almost anticipate what’s coming around the corner. Moreover, he doesn’t own a TV, is a serious collector of books and photographs, and he prints his images in month-long stints. There’s a discipline here, an august devotion that serves him well.
But it’s his enthusiasm for the medium that leaves the strongest impression: “This is what’s special to photography. In painting you could make all this up, couldn’t you, through your imagination. For me, the glory is in seeing it, actually being there and witnessing real life. And often not realising the significance until later, until I see the pictures in the darkroom.”
Lost in the City is published by Hoxton Mini Press. ISBN: 9781910566039. RRP: £12.95
At 15 and a half, having bunked off most of his final year at school, Mick Hugo ‘skinned out to sea’. In other words, he gave in to the nagging urge to ditch his native Hoxton, and joined the merchant navy. It was the early 1960s and he was leaving behind the unlikely prospect of a chance career in the film industry, in favour of ‘horizons’.
Half a century on from leaving the service, Hugo, now a builder by trade, has written 100 or so pages about his time working on the world’s oceans. His thoughts on various aspects of the seaman’s experience, which have remained roughly etched in his memory, represent a kind of challenge to conventional literature.
He writes in a raw, rugged style, untamed by any pretentious notions of a burgeoning literary life. As a result, Skinning Out To Sea is fresh and bracing, delivered in a manner befitting a boozy pub chat. Its sentences are often long and can feel unchecked, which, though occasionally jarring, contributes to a rambling style that’s lifted by Hugo’s clear knack for poetry.
Comprised of 20 short chapters and accompanied by a series of the author’s own evocative, if scruffy, sketches, the book covers myriad subjects. It details raucous exploits in far-flung ports, the day-to-day grind on deck, the social structure of the ships’ crews – which operate almost like allegorical micro-societies – and, of course, the wild exchange of pranks.
Portions of the text that stand out include recollections of when a troubled crew mate, Brummie, threw himself overboard into the black waves, and of a charismatic man-about-town, Lenny, who, it turned out, was in a relationship with a rather more unkempt male steward. The former description, which is accompanied by the original logbook account, offers stark insight into what was at stake for some at sea, while the latter is handled with a confident balance of humour and sensitivity.
Moreover, Hugo’s equating of the initial arrival of British sailors in blissful Tahiti centuries ago with taking acid for the first time is worthy of considerable praise.
While you might expect an abundance of tales of ill health and strife from a book of this sort, Skinning Out, for the most part, provides the opposite. Other than a period spent locked up in New Zealand – for reasons that remain unclear – Hugo’s personal experience comes across as largely positive and full of wonder. It was a chance to see the world, which for a working-class lad from the East End in those days was otherwise rare, and he relished it.
He describes the pleasure of jobs that entailed weeks at sea without respite: ‘If it were a longish passage, work would settle down to a relaxing pattern of day work, watch keeping and sobriety. No TV, no radio, no newspapers, regular meal times, sufficient sleep… and predominantly tropical weather with constantly changing astronomical night skies, no family responsibilities, no bills to pay… Aye, ‘twas hard!’
There is, however, a political undercurrent tracking the decline of the merchant fleet, touching on events like the seamen’s strike of 1966, which arrived in tandem with Hugo’s own political coming of age. This episode pretty much marked the end of his nautical career; but for a brief comeback with the highly desirable Australian merchant navy, he resigned himself to a life on land.
At home, Hugo would “slip back into the fold” and take his place “among the huddle on the corner”. He applied some of the skills he acquired as a seafarer to decorating for his money, but he always harboured creative ambitions, painting and sculpting away in his parents’ council flat. Now, at 70, he’s produced something special: Skinning Out To Sea is a modest triumph.
Mick Hugo will be in conversation with the writer Ken Worpole, and will also read from his book, on Thursday 10th March 2016 at 7pm.
The event will be held at Brick Lane Bookshop, and is free (including a glass of wine) but booking is essential – click here for more information and to book a place.
Skinning Out to Sea is published by Bowline Books. RRP: £10. ISBN: 9780993429507
Five men in black suits and crisp white shirts stride with purpose along a pavement, casting shadows between the monumental columns of the Bank of England. A photographer lurks in full view – beyond the frame, of course – and freezes the image in time. A newspaper twisted on the floor is the only trace of discord in this clean, colourless shot.
Nicholas Sack has been photographing London’s financial district for 30 years, and his new book, Lost in the City, published by Hoxton Mini Press, is a striking collection pulled together from the last decade.
The project shows office workers moving uniformly through the streets, or taking a brief break, while the City’s architecture looms oppressively behind and above. The figures are like characters in science fiction – a matrix of the capital.
Sack captures a vision of London somewhat unfamiliar to those who have never worked in the City; there’s an ethereal quiet, both cold and clinical, with little of the warmth of, say, the photography of Bob Collins.
Instead, Sack’s work is an arena of alienation and testosterone, charged almost like advertisements for corporate fashion. Faces are generally turned away, expressionless or otherwise lost, and interaction seems relatively rare, but for those clicking into the digital world.
Previously a rock drummer, Sack finds musicality – a rhythm and beat – in the corridors and caverns of the territory. Typically shooting at lunchtime, when the sun is high, he sees patterns and symmetries in the buildings and their shadows, which mimic the repetitive routines of nine-to-five commerce. Although the voyeuristic images hint at a degree of impulsiveness, many will have demanded extraordinary patience.
In one shot, of a woman walking beneath an office block fronted by rows upon rows of large windows, a shard of darkness slices through the centre of the building; it’s a perfect composition, meticulous in its geometric alignments and typical of the wider body of work. I imagine Sack waiting all day for it.
Others images catch the city’s relentless urge to plan and build on top of itself, with scaffolding climbing into the sky and posters displaying a computer-generated future.
Photograph: Nicolas Sack/ Hoxton Mini Press
In his introduction to the volume, Iain Sinclair draws a comparison with Robert Frank’s 1951 City of London exposures; this is a spot-on reference that pays dues to the haunting, unreal quality of the prints. Other influences include Garry Winogrand, Lee Friedlander and Henry Wessel.
As much as Lost in the City is a document of a strange place and its people, it is also one of the photographer’s own journeys through, and complicated relationship with, his chosen zone. The title illuminates this duality, pointing to both the photographer’s urgent need to shoot and his subjects’ ultimately aimless wandering.
Lost in the City is published by Hoxton Mini Press. RRP: £12.95 ISBN: 9781910566039
Barbara Windsor in the recently restored Sparrows Can’t Sing
Mother of modern theatre Joan Littlewood’s only foray into film came in 1963 with Sparrows Can’t Sing. It was an adaptation of a play of almost the same name – simply replace ‘Sparrows’ with the Cockney translation, ‘Sparrers’ – penned by Stephen Lewis, who would later find TV fame with On the Buses and Last of the Summer Wine. Newly restored for Blue-ray and DVD, it is a masterpiece of early East End cinema and a gorgeous record of everyday life in post-war London.
Littlewood, whose theatre credits include a successful 1955 production of Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children, directed the play in 1960 at her renowned Theatre Workshop at Stratford East. Well received, Sparrers found its way to the West End in 1961, before the director took her talented cast into the streets of Stepney, Limehouse and the Isle of Dogs to remake it for the screen.
The film stars James Booth, a year before his iconic turn as Private Henry Hook in Zulu, and a 26-year-old Barbara Windsor, whose sprightly performance garnered the only BAFTA nomination of her career to date. Roy Kinnear, Murray Melvin, Avis Bunnage, George Sewell, Lewis himself and the Kray Twins – who reportedly hung out on set – also feature, albeit a fleeting appearance by the notorious gangsters.
Booth is Charlie Gooding, a cheeky boozer with a penchant for playing the field. Sparrows begins with Charlie’s return from two years at sea and follows him as he marches home to reclaim the beautiful wife he left behind. He finds his old house in rubble on the ground and learns that Windsor’s character Maggie has relocated but is still about.
What he doesn’t know is that she and her young child are shacked up with a local bus driver, enjoying a rare spell of domestic bliss in one of the new high-rise tower blocks that have begun to pepper the skyline.
Charlie settles down in the Red Lion pub while news of his arrival spreads over town, and soon enough Maggie is on her way. Their re-acquaintance is fraught with complicated history, and as the husband works his charm on his estranged and resistant wife, an underlying control, even violence, unsettles the comedy – which is considerable throughout. Charlie’s chirpy, larger-than-life exterior is chipped away to expose a deeply flawed, real character within.
What follows is a disarmingly bleak, occasionally warm and always brilliant portrayal of a knotty romance. Littlewood prods at the absurdity of the decisions we make and at the same time immortalises a diversifying, fun-loving and morally-questionable community of a bygone era.
I make it to Foyles at 6.30pm on the dot to find a queue spilling from an excited throng in the auditorium. The line runs down the stairs and out into the cafe, where a second – non-priority – queue begins. “It’s the busiest book signing I can remember,” a flustered employee tells me.
The heaving crowds have turned out in force to pick up a copy of street artist Stik’s eponymously-titled new book and get it signed by the mysterious man himself – who, perched on a raised platform, is donning a paint-spattered shirt, dark shades and a black leather cap.
His heavy, rose-coloured publication documents a curiously affecting, politically-motivated body of work that relies primarily on basic stick figures. It’s a portfolio, so to speak, that first started to appear on Hackney’s walls more than a decade ago and has since spread across the globe.
A few days later, we chat on the phone and he’s as genial as he was with fans earlier in the week. “It was incredible”, he says of the event. “I was only supposed to be doing an hour, but in the end I stayed there for about three.”
A Child Watching Over a Sleeping Parent by Stik
Softly spoken and oozing enthusiasm, Stik is keen to talk about his connection with this publication’s sister title, the Hackney Citizen. Roughly half a decade ago, whilst living in St Mungo’s Hostel on Mare Street, he began a fruitful collaboration with the paper, which, he explains, gave him a structure that would eventually lead to his first book.
“I’d speak to the editors and we’d pick a local news story. I would find a specific place relevant to that story, do a mural and then I’d write a brief column explaining why that painting was there and what news issue it was relating to,” he says.
“Doing that monthly piece really made me think about street art on a much deeper level and what sort of impact I could have on the community – how I could represent my community through art. So that was the catalyst for the book.”
The original publications make for an interesting stand-alone project. The first he sends across to me includes an image of Pole Dancer, a 2010 piece scrawled outside a strip club in Great Eastern Street. The work portrays one of his signature black-and-white stick people swinging, eyes closed,
around a pole.
“That was in reference to Hackney Council’s move to clamp down on what they deemed indecent sex clubs,” he says. “They cut out a lot of the healthy, consenting adult subculture in Hackney under the guise of trying to curb sex trafficking… So, yeah, I did that piece to sort of celebrate the kink culture and just draw reference to what
was happening.”
Pole Dancer by Stik, published in the Hackney Citizen (November, 2010)
Other examples of Stik’s work that were produced during that time include Lovers, Waiting Room and Children of Fire; these were done in response to the council’s eviction of a Dalston Lane ‘queer squat’, cuts to the NHS, and the “civil unrest… triggered by the police killing of Mark Duggan”, respectively. He goes on to explain that, as well as conveying a wider social message, each mural contains a narrative personal to him.
Of Lovers, which shows two androgynous figures embracing against a red background, he says: “The squat was a safe house for people from oppressive regimes, for queer and transgender people who were not safe in their home towns or home countries… There was no real service like it within the mainstream infrastructure – this was something that was lacking.
“But it was also a place which I had a personal connection with. I belonged to that community, you know, that’s me in the painting. A lot of it is my story – it’s my experience of being marginalised, of being oppressed and how that relates to society at large.”
Climate Change, by Stik
It’s interesting that Stik describes his work as a means of telling his own story. Outside of his art, biographical details are sketchy. His email moniker is simply Stik Person and he stresses a set of “strict rules” when it comes to answering questions about his past – it’s not even known where he originates from.
He does, however, talk relatively freely about his time in Hackney, which, going by artistic evidence, began sometime around 2003. He explains that when he first arrived he spent time squatting in London Fields Lido, during the period leading up to its renovation and reopening in the mid-2000s.
“I used to live in the changing rooms there,” he says. “I slept in an art shipping case that I’d salvaged from Momart, the art shipping company. It was a plywood packing case that according to its label once contained a Kandinsky and was destined for, I think, Claudia Schiffer, somewhere in Hollywood.”
At this point, I’m not sure if he’s pulling my leg, but he goes on to describe what sounds like a dark, difficult and deeply informative period of his life.
“I was homeless for many years and I was very cold and hungry for a long time,” he says, “but I would always find abandoned buildings. I didn’t have any reason to sleep in doorways in Mare Street because I always managed to somehow get through the door.”
A Couple Hold Hands in the Street, by Stik. Photograph: Claude Crommelin
He refers back to the Pole Dancer piece: “It’s very personal to me. When you’re homeless you find all sorts of ways of making a living and I’ve had to make ends meet through all sorts of things. That’s why I identify with the struggle of sex workers in Hackney and the stigmatisation that they’ve had put on them.”
The more he talks, the more enigmatic and fascinating he becomes; the more complicated his work is. He describes with zeal his many experiences painting abroad – the highlight, for me, being a set of wind turbines he worked on in Norway – and what the future holds now the world is interested.
“I feel very warmly embraced by the communities that I have worked with,” he says. “I feel very grateful as an artist for that experience. It’s an exciting journey – it’s a huge responsibility, but I do feel that it’s my responsibility as an artist to respond to the current political state of affairs.”
Stik’s book, which forms one mammoth project, is a triumph. His pared-down, sublimely minimal approach delivers touching snippets of human experience and explores private city space in a dramatically public manner. He’s both engaged and engaging; it’s easy to understand his fast-rising popularity in the art scene.
As we tie up our conversation, Stik makes an obscure reference to Somerset, and when I ask more he shrugs it off and mutters something about friends and some work he’s got going on there.
I can’t help but feel it’s a hint at a previous life; another scrap of the obscure biography he’s been scribbling on walls everywhere. I can’t be sure, but it’s fun to speculate.
Stik is published by Century. RRP: £20. ISBN: 9781780893334
Stik’s Print Launch is on 24 September from 5-8pm at the Education Centre, Homerton University Hospital, Homerton Row, E9 6SR
Charlotte Ginsborg’s Melior Street takes elements of documentary, performance and auteurship and stirs them together to produce an intriguing study of a place in perpetual flux.
The film was recently screened at Hackney Picturehouse, and was followed by a talk with the director and Emeritus Professor Ken Worpole, an expert in East London architecture and sociology.
Gaping like a canyon on the south side of London Bridge, the eponymous road – which has already changed significantly since the film’s original, pre-Shard release in 2011 – is composed of a ragtag mix of architecture.
Amongst towering glass facades, there’s a Catholic church, a homeless centre, a community garden, a banking college and an immigration office. From these locations, and others, Ginsborg pulls together a cast of real people and delivers a montage of varying experience and diverse psychologies.
Opening to a sequence of everyday urban images and a frantic strings accompaniment, the piece instantly calls to mind Dziga Vertov’s classic Man with a Movie Camera. Composer Gabriel Prokofiev, who heads a Hackney-based contemporary classical music label, has contributed a mesmerising score that perfectly complements Ginsborg’s artistry.
From then on, there’s a lot more to admire in the work. The photography is exquisite and the director’s creative approach to portraying a deeply fragmented – and fragmenting – social space is very impressive. As well exploring her chosen landscape using traditional documentary methods, she incorporates a series of odd, well-executed dramatic constructions and a bizarre use of song.
Taking her contributors’ words, Ginsborg pieces together tracks that are then performed by the characters; the film becomes at once a musical, a drama, a documentary and a topographical study. Such self-reflexive formal flourishes effectively – and provocatively – call into question the usefulness of drawing distinct lines between fiction and the real.
Beyond stylistic technique, the film is very much about discussion and sharing stories, in the tradition of Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales – the procession in which, coincidentally, sets off from Southwark. The talk in the piece focuses a lot on community, belonging and identity.
While Ginsborg’s one-on-one interviews are always interesting and sometimes surprising, the conversations she facilitates between her characters can feel laboured, even cumbersome. Her concern with the authoring role of the director becomes, at times, a touch too pronounced and the dialogue suffers as a result.
But this small criticism mustn’t take away from the film’s considerable merit. Something of Melior Street feels like lifting the red rock of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and peering into the shadows beneath. It’s a bold reflection of chaos, creativity and the transience of city life, and it’s well worth a watch for anyone interested in the psychogeography of London.
