East End Review

Category: BOOKS

Ways to Walk in London: how to find inspiration on foot

Parkland. Image: Alice Stevenson

“I’ve grown up always going for walks,” says Alice Stevenson. Having grown up in West London, Stevenson has walked the city for years and is now an East End resident.

Ways to Walk in London is her first book, and it came as a surprise to Stevenson, who primarily identified herself as an illustrator. It’s a collection of personal journeys across the capital, with the text complemented by her distinctive illustrations.

Stevenson sees London not just for its historical importance but for its unique atmosphere too.

Stevenson says: “Woolwich felt so remote and industrial, with these brutal, abstract structures and when I reached Greenwich it felt different, like a seaside town – maybe it’s because of its maritime history. It was such a contrast.”

Ways to Walk in London takes us to places such as the Isle of Dogs, Shadwell Basin and Hackney, and to the reflective surfaces of Canary Wharf. “I like how you can have all these different experiences in the same city,” says Stevenson.

The book doesn’t just focus on the physical side of the city though. Stevenson sees the process of walking as a vital source of artistic inspiration: “Walking makes really good memories,” she says. “When you’re on public transport and it’s busy, you don’t have time to sit back and observe things or think about how something feels. I think walking your life slows down. You start noticing things you wouldn’t physically have time to do otherwise. I find it very inspiring, visually.”

Stevenson sees a crucial difference between walking alone and walking with friends: “I feel when I walk by myself I become really fixated with details and notice things a lot more, whereas with a friend, you can talk to that person about the walk, which made it easier to work out. When I did walks on my own, it was tough to find out what the walk was about.”

Part of the book’s success is that the text is filled with keen observations and only the necessary historical details. Stevenson didn’t want the book to be a list of places and historical facts, but a document of her personal wanderings.

The text is stripped back, and Stevenson says she enjoyed the challenge of working to these limitations: “It forced me to physically edit it and stop it from rambling. I could’ve written hundreds of pages about these walks. For me, I’ve always admired minimal writers, which I think has something to do with being an illustrator, working with limitations.”

Stevenson’s book is a fetching tribute to walking, and to London. The book shows the city in all its beauty and contradictions and in all its details – the bare oaks of London Fields taking on a new “spectre-like dignity” in the fog. Stevenson’s passion for the city is infectious and the book is a good place to start for anybody thinking of exploring London further on foot.

Ways to Walk in London: Hidden Places and New Perspectives is published by September Publishing.
ISBN: 9781910463024 RRP: £12.99

April 17, 2015
The Flat White Economy – book review

Flat whites: stirring up a revolution in the economy. Photograph: Flickr

Douglas McWilliams first found out about hipsters by monitoring the number of passengers coming through Old Street tube station every day. He thought the huge spike in Oyster swipes he saw by 2012 must be some kind of recording error, but on further examination found it was in fact the thunderous beeping and banging of thousands of people rushing to join a new kind of economy.

The “advanced techie people, marketing people and creative types” McWilliams and his staff at economics consultancy CEBR increasingly had to wade through to get to their own Old Street offices had their odd collection of new industries christened by McWilliams’ colleague Rob Habron as the ‘Flat White Economy’, after the beverage the workers consumed in the largest quantity. The name allegedly stuck in economic circles and, thanks to McWilliams’ zippy little book on the ‘FWE’, may well catch on in other circles too.

Its headline finding is this datum: 32,000 businesses were set up in the postal district EC1V (i.e. Old Street) between March 2012 and March 2014. The book is about how this astonishing level of entrepreneurial go-getting got going, where it’s got to and where it might get us: by 2012 there were 114,500 FWE jobs, and McWilliams argues that if its success can be replicated elsewhere the Flat White Economy may lead to a bright future for the UK as a whole.

McWilliams tells the story of the City Fringes’ transformation into Tech City through lots of stats, international comparisons and aside observations about the lives of young workers. There were three main drivers of the FWE’s development: relatively cheap rents (at least to start with); an existing substrate of art, media and communications business; and a lot of high-skilled immigration, mainly from afflicted Eurozone countries. McWilliams’ general point about immigration is that having lots of people from different backgrounds working together makes for more creative thinking, which is a hearteningly cosmopolitan thing to hear in a time of increasing parochialism.

The book’s optimism may occasionally grate. There’s little room for what has been lost to the FWE’s creative destruction: the closed galleries and priced-out tenants. It’s not that kind of book. And McWilliams – as an economist – should be fulsomely praised for writing about young people without emphasising their importance as a mysterious and fickle market needing to be advertised to in complex ways.

Instead, a generation closely associated with recession, austerity and student debt is given economic agency and seen as having the potential to transcend the beards, fixies and craft beers – and maybe change the world.

The Flat White Economy is published by Gerald Duckworth & Co Ltd. RRP: £16.99 ISBN: 9780715649534

April 15, 2015
Ghosting by Jonathan Kemp: book review

Author Jonathan Kemp

Jonathan Kemp’s second novel, Ghosting – the follow up to 2010’s much-lauded London Triptych – is a sharp and pacy read exploring grief, memory and transformation.

Grace Wellbeck is a frustrated 64-year-old still mourning the deaths of her daughter, Hannah, and her hypnotic but violent first husband, Pete. Dreading a second nervous breakdown and plodding along with Gordon – Pete’s solid but lifeless replacement – on their London houseboat, her future is mapped out and bleak, until she meets Luke.

A 20-something performance artist caught up in a complex love triangle with his two best friends, Luke is a dead ringer for Pete, so much so that Grace fears she might be “losing it again”. Having tracked this strange apparition to a boat nearby, she finds herself on the receiving end of a warm welcome and stumbles further into a world far removed from anything she’s ever known.

Her unlikely collision with a misfit art scene gives Grace a vantage from which to consider her own existence; the journey that follows is impossible to put down.

Filling in the gaps of her current ‘crisis’ with digressions into the past – revisiting his main character as she falls in love at Blackpool Pleasure Beach, grieves in a mosquito-ridden room in Malaysia and at various other key moments over the years – Kemp gradually pieces together a life that rings quietly true.

It’s a moving depiction of how we interact with our personal histories and the way we might respond to serious trauma, always treading a fine line between the real and delusional.

While Kemp’s style is generally neat and succinct, it’s not short of the odd flourish, too: “Back on the boat she sits down in front of her make-up mirror, wishing she could claw her skin off; dig deep into her flesh and excavate the young woman buried there,” he writes. “The evening gapes empty ahead of her, a nest of hours like open mouths waiting to be fed.”

His execution is, at times, stunning – particularly when painting a distinctly lucid image of a squat party in Hackney Wick.

It’s no surprise that Kerry Hudson, author of the excellent Thirst, has described the novel as “a rare combination of insight, compassion and brilliant craft”.

She and Kemp share concern for literature’s underexplored people and both display a real knack for gripping the reader by the scruff off the neck.

With characters expertly drawn and real to a tee, Ghosting is an emotional ride through the decades to a present where direction and certainty are rare. It’s tight and, in a sense, as streamlined as the longboats moored up on the banks of the city – and that’s no bad thing. It’s about one unseen woman’s struggle, and you’ll be hard-pressed not to relate to it in some way; it’s a definite success.

Ghosting is published by Myriad Editions. RRP £8.99. ISBN: 9780956251565

March 26, 2015
Fishermen’s Tales – book review

Catch of the day: Author Peter Kennedy with a fish

Fishermen’s Tales, the self-published debut novel by Peter Kennedy, is the product of seven years of writing. Born and raised in Hartlepool, Kennedy moved to East London with the aim of making it as a writer 20 years ago. After unsuccessfully going down the traditional route of sending his work out to agents, Kennedy decided to do it himself.

“Fishermen’s Tales is a DIY project, bath-tub gin for the working classes,” says Kennedy. “This is a literature that came from the streets, passed on by the people word of mouth – one of my objectives when I was writing it was that my mother would be able to read it. I’m trying to reclaim and romanticise the working class heritage that I came from.”

Kennedy’s novel – a collection of closely linked stories about a village and plague taken from 18th century fishing village folklore, and influenced by the Old Testament, the Brothers Grimm and Kennedy’s mother – showcases some excellent writing. Kennedy lures you in with his fairytale-like prose in stories such as ‘Auto-da-Fe’, writing about a “deep dark forest” and a “strange little man” who has not gone to bed early tonight because “tonight his house is on fire.”

The writing works best when it is clean. Some chapters lose pace in the dialogue, and there are occasional inconsistencies in tone, such as in the final chapter when switching from the more formal – “was not” – to the informal – “gonna” – in the
same sentence.

As a physical object, Fishermen’s Tales is underwhelming; the quality of paper is poor and the front cover is less than inviting. But to use that old cliché, do not judge a book by its cover.

Fishermen’s Tales is reminiscent of Cynan Jones’s The Dig in that it’s a lean book of separate parts, engaging with the environment and feelings of isolation. While not without flaws, it’s a promising debut.

Fishermen’s Tales is published by J Publishing Company.
ISBN: 9781907989070

February 26, 2015
The rise of the Little Free Library

Bookish: A Little Free Library in Clissold Park, Stoke Newington

Perched atop a post outside a house on Victoria Park Road lies a small hut that, from a distance, could be an ornately decorated birdhouse or, less likely, a microwave. But while there’s no food inside, those with an appetite for reading won’t be disappointed, as it holds books, which members of the public can borrow and return without charge.

The Little Free Library project is a nationwide initiative though strongly concentrated in East London. Victoria Park Road and Clissold Park are the two Hackney outposts, then there’s Leyton, Leytonstone, Stratford and 12 in Walthamstow, the erstwhile home of the charity’s manager, Nick Cheshire.

“We’re looking to promote reading, literacy and art, and a sense of community engagement,” says Cheshire, who founded Little Free Libraries UK with his wife, Rebecca, last year.

The libraries are ‘hosted’ by volunteers, who promote them locally and keep an eye on stocks, and they are decorated by local artists wherever possible. One is emblazoned with a handsome red fox, others are inspired by William Morris and Jackson Pollock.

Children and families may be the primary focus of the libraries, though Cheshire insists anyone can make use of them.

“It’s a simple process of take a book, return a book, donate a book and if you want to take a book that’s absolutely fine. If you want to donate or return it that’s fine but you don’t have to. Some people will use them as a book exchange, other people might not be able to afford books and find that it’s nice to have free access to them.”

Little Free Libraries originate in the United States, where Cheshire discovered them and was inspired to bring the concept to the UK.

Given our increasing reliance on technology, the idea of a Little Free Library seems something more suited to a bygone time. But Cheshire says that the tangibility of books sets them apart from their digital counterparts.

“We’re not against the technology of Ipads or Kindles but I think the idea that it’s your copy of a book and you can inscribe something in the cover is really special. We’re trying to promote real books as much as reading in general as well.”

littlefreelibraryproject.org.uk

February 24, 2015
Book review: Salt by Lucinda Lloyd

Photograph from Salt by Lucinda Lloyd

Salt, a collection of poetry and photography by actor and writer Lucinda Lloyd, explores love and loss as well as innocence and experience. Published by A Little Bird Whispered – Lloyd’s own creation too – it is a collection put together with great care.

Poems such as ‘Naked’, ‘Milk’, ‘Quiet Time’ and ‘The Cage’ are terse and controlled. They are refreshing in their brevity, their economy of language.

‘The Weight of a Tear’, too, is excellent. Lloyd contemplates the coffin that will hold the body of her loved one. She writes about the “black dress” that will “contain your flesh”; the dress acting as a vessel for the body rather than merely clothing it. The collection is dedicated to Lloyd’s mother and this poem is certainly a fitting tribute.

However, not all of Lloyd’s poems work as well. ‘A Potent Sea’ is particularly overwrought, invoking “ancient echoes”, “azure air” and “tombs of majesty”. The imagery is overwhelming and, as a result, the poem loses power.

Lloyd’s poetry works best when it is confrontational and efficient. At other times it indulges in the language of the land and the elements, betraying her more honest poems. Her strengths lie less in describing nature than in portraying how we come to terms with tragedy.

Lloyd clearly has the ability to publish beautiful books, too. The physical quality of the collection is excellent, and includes some startling photography.

Salt is published by A Little Bird Whispered. RRP: £9.99. ISBN: 9780993070006

January 26, 2015
How to raise a happy dog in the city

Dog lover: Louise Glazebrook

Canine companions are ever more popular in Hackney as people seek exercise partners and guardians. Yet many novice dog owners have limited knowledge of how to care for their precious pooch, and there are doubtless far more dog-lovers who are put off the idea of getting a puppy for fear of not being able to cope.

Now Stoke Newington-based dog trainer and behaviourist Louise Glazebrook has come to the rescue with this advice-packed book on how to take care of your hound in an urban environment.

Dog about Town: How to Raise a Happy Dog in the City provides advice on everything from selecting the right breed to providing your animal with appropriate mental stimulation. We also learn about canine nutrition, housing and clothing; and there are useful tips on dog training, walking and holiday care.

The advice can be sobering: dogs need to be walked at least two hours a day and should not be left at home for more than four hours on their own. But there are also fascinating titbits, such as how to interpret different types of tail wag, and the number of scent-detecting cells a dog has in its nose (up to 225 million, whereas humans only have 5 million).

Whether it is read cover-to-cover as a crash course in dog ownership or kept on the shelf as a useful reference guide, Dog about Town is full of practical advice and reassurance for those keen to do right by their canine.

The clear, easy-to digest information and stylish illustrations make this chunky little volume a perfect stocking-stuffer.

Dog about Town: How to Raise a Happy Dog in the City is published by Hardie Grant Books. ISBN: 9781742707754. RRP: £12.99.

December 18, 2014
How to design happiness into your life

Designs on happiness: Paul Dolan. Photograph: Jochen Braun

Is there a key to being happy? One would assume so, judging by the title of Paul Dolan’s Happiness by Design.

But if you are looking for a spirituality-meets-science explanation of how to ‘design’ happiness into your life, this book will only give you half of what you wish for.

Hackney-born LSE professor Dolan is an economist and behavioural scientist, and it shows. There is nothing approaching metaphysics here and philosophy is only mentioned in the conclusion.

Once Dolan lays bare his assumptions, he approaches human experience mechanistically. Using hundreds of studies he suggests ways to be happy, or – more in line with his thinking – to design your ‘context’ so that happiness is produced more easily.

His book is full of dozens of conclusions from studies on happiness, maybe too many. Some of these are fascinating. For example, spillover effects from being ‘good’ (e.g. doing some exercise) often lead to more undesirable effects (gaining weight by rewarding yourself with cake). This is the “promoting, permitting, purging” nexus of behaviours.

Are you a “pleasure machine” or a “purpose engine?” How much pleasure would you trade for purpose (by having children, for example)? And are you making the mistake of basing decisions on your evaluative self rather than your experiential self?

These questions are backed up by a few sense-making frameworks. Dolan invokes his intellectual hero, the Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman’s system one and system two thinking; the first system is fast, instinctive and emotional, while the second is slower, more deliberate and logical. The message being that you may think you are in control but – guess what? – your context is driving you through system one.

This book is academically rigorous in how well-referenced its claims are, though peppered with few anecdotes about Dolan’s own life and opinions. It is also lean on the kind of generalisations or narrative structure that make other books on psychology or self-help titles easily accessible. This is densely packed prose, which may not suit the casual reader.

Perhaps most useful and original is Dolan’s own academic contribution about the role attention plays in manufacturing happiness. “Your happiness is determined by how you allocate your attention,” he writes. “The scarcity of attentional resources means that you must consider how you can make and facilitate better decisions about what to pay attention to and in what ways.”

This is an economist speaking, cool and rational. “If you are not as happy as you could be then you must be misallocating your attention,” Dolan continues.

The Dalai Lama is reported to have said: “If there is ever a conflict with religion and science, science wins.” Well this is science. And as such it corroborates parts of other approaches towards finding happiness that do in fact work. Approach this book like a mine. You won’t remember it all but you’ll almost certainly find valuable nuggets to make it well worth your time.

Happiness by Design: Finding Pleasure and Purpose in Everyday Life is published by Allen Lane. RRP: £19.90. ISBN: 9781594632433

November 18, 2014
Jack London goes down and out in The People of the Abyss

“Court Yard Salvation Army Barracks Sunday Morning Rush – men who had tickets given them during the night for free breakfast.” Photograph from The People of the Abyss

“For the English, so far as manhood and womanhood and health and happiness go, I see a broad and smiling future. But for a great deal of the political machinery, which at present mismanages for them, I see nothing else than the scrap heap.”

Roughly 30 years before Victor Gallancz published the fruits of George Orwell’s destitute adventures either side of the English Channel, Jack London’s unflinching portrayal of The People of the Abyss (1903) first came to print. Well over a century on and his taut account of tramping the then disgracefully poor avenues of the East End has been rereleased by Tangerine Press and comes with an extraordinary stock of the author’s original photographic plates.

Evocative of Jacob Riis’s seminal work on How the Other Half Lives, London’s socialist expose is red raw and scathing of the powers that be. Slipping beneath the pomp of the British Empire at its opulent peak, the San Francisco native – who would later pen White Fang and The Call of the Wild – traded his wealth and comfort for a suit of secondhand rags, sinking willingly into what he presents as a festering pit of despair and degradation.

“We rolled along through miles of bricks and squalor, and from each cross street and alley flashed long vistas of bricks and misery,” he writes early on. “Here and there lurched a drunken man or woman, and the air was obscene with sounds of jangling and squabbling.” It’s an ugly picture that grows and darkens with each engrossing chapter.

The text works something like a montage, with London’s short but weighty anecdotes delivered in desperately passionate prose. We join him as he wanders the streets and dosshouses with cheerless companions, scoffing foul hospital leftovers and sipping pints of ‘skilly’ – a coarse “fluid concoction of three quarts of oatmeal stirred into three buckets and a half of hot water”.

The material is uncomfortably harsh and offers a brutal dissection of early 20th-century morality and law. “Here then we have the construction of the Abyss and the shambles,” the author explains. “Throughout the whole industrial fabric a constant elimination is going on. The inefficient are weeded out and flung downward.” He proceeds to detail various circumstances that might make an unfortunate person “inefficient”, thus becoming a part of his wretched statistic that one in every three working adults would die on public charity.

London also attacks the absurdity of policemen who would forcibly prevent the homeless from sleeping at night – preferring them to wander like zombies in the moonlight – and details the hopelessness of the old whose children were either dead or otherwise unable to support them. It’s stirring stuff, to say the least.

It’s hard, though, not to suspect the author of exaggeration. But, as Iain Sinclair’s measured and typically insightful introduction supports, this is not necessarily a fair criticism: “The People of the Abyss is intentionally shocking,” Sinclair writes. “Much of Jack London’s material, factored like sensational fiction, is supported by blocks of statistics, newspaper cuttings, court reports.”

He goes on to crack the nail on the head, asserting that “reality is pressured until it becomes fantastic, grotesque.”

Grotesque is absolutely right. London’s work as a faux-displaced sailor brings to light a distorted world of hellish poverty. While occasional splashes of humour might today be perceived as facetious, his unwavering dedication to raising awareness of the plight of what was a rotten East End is most impressive.

His icy images, savagely oppressed characters – like the unforgettable Dan Cullen the Docker – and unrelenting energy make for an enriching, if bruising, read with a relevance by no means confined to its own time.

The People of the Abyss is published by Tangerine Press. RRP: £10. ISBN: 9780957338531

November 17, 2014
Michael Rosen: How parents can be a child’s best teacher

Ideas man: Michael Rosen

Michael Rosen seems to go out of his way to look silly.

A quick Google image search turns up thousands of results showing him puffing out his cheeks, poking his ears, opening his eyes as wide as possible. He speaks in playful sound bites – the kind journalists love – but look any closer into Michael Rosen and there’s no concealing that he is a very serious man, indeed.

The former Children’s Laureate, professor of education, broadcaster, poet and impassioned critic of Westminster’s education policies has made no secret of his disenchantment with government – but he has no intention of entering it. The frustrations would be far too great to balance the power one may have, he tells me.

“It’s that whole business of whether you want to be in the tent pissing out, or outside the tent pissing in. I’ll stick, for the time being, outside the tent,” he says.

Among his various methods of “pissing in”, Rosen sounds off his disapproval in his weekly Guardian column, Letters to Mr Gove, now addressed to the new education secretary Nicky Morgan.

In this summer’s cabinet reshuffle Morgan, who voted against gay marriage, was named minister for women and equalities, as well as education secretary – a contradiction in terms according to Rosen.

“It’s really quite outrageous that someone who’s in charge of schools which are committed to equal rights, in fact is opposed to gay marriage. This is a wonderful new civil right that is being won. We finally got here and there you are, the minister of education, opposing it.”

Throughout his career, Rosen has been called to the House of Commons to meet with ministers about his ideas on education. What’s it like to talk libraries and ‘reading for pleasure’ with the likes of Ed Balls, Nick Gibb and Margaret Hodge?

Rosen puts it frankly: “It’s been almost entirely worthless.”

When speaking on the politics of education, Rosen’s voice is filled with ire. But on the subject of learning itself, he visibly – audibly – bursts with excitement, regularly employing anecdotes from his own sprawling family to illustrate the fun that can be had through learning.

Having brought up seven children between the ages of nine and 37, Rosen calls himself the “longest running school parent in existence”. It is this, and other apolitical experiences, from which Rosen draws the wisdom in his latest book, Good Ideas – How to be Your Child’s (and Your Own) Best Teacher.

Here, in the interest of learning, Rosen ditches politics and schools altogether, and focuses on families, encouraging mutual fascination between parents and children, and an education led by investigating passing curiosities – in the car, in the kitchen, on the street – with rigour and enthusiasm, and responsible use of Google and Wikipedia.

“How do we learn how to analyse or how to interpret? How do we learn how to find things out for ourselves?” he asks.

Good Ideas is for parents, Rosen makes clear (“I wouldn’t want that to be misunderstood” he tells me).

But nevertheless, Rosen seems to have hit a nerve with teachers. Perhaps he illustrates the way they’d like to be able to approach their jobs, but can’t due to the constant pressure of curricula and exams.

“The whole of education is surrounded with a postponement of when you can really conduct original research,” says Rosen.

“In actual fact, any kindergarten teacher will tell you that you can do original research with four-year-olds. Take some four-year-olds around an aquarium with some snails in it, and you ask the children to observe and talk about the snails. That is original research.”

After all, it was teachers who dominated the Q&A session of his recent talk at Stratford Circus. One primary teacher from Stoke Newington described him as her “hero”.

Books have to be marketed to someone, of course, but it would be a waste for this book to be confined to the ‘parenting’ genre.

Yes, Rosen’s anecdotes of joyous shared learning between parent and child, filtered through a bit of cynicism could seem a bit unrealistic, or even utopian.

But we follow other people in striving for so many things – the perfect job, the perfect relationship, the perfect bum. Good Ideas makes a compelling case to try harder. As Michael Gove often said: aim high.

Good Ideas – How to be Your Child’s (and Your Own) Best Teacher is published by John Murray. RRP: £16.99 (hardback).ISBN: 97814444796421

October 12, 2014