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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
Vandalism and the red hands of William Gladstone

Red-handed: William Gladstone statue in Bow Churchyard. Photograph: Russell Parton

In Bow Churchyard there is a statue of William Gladstone. Blunt against the greening bronze, Gladstone’s hands are red. An inscription to the plinth dedicates the monument: “A gift to the east of London of Theodore H. Bryant.”

Bryant was a Bryant of Bryant & May matches, then in production just around the corner in seven acres of red brick architecture, towers, chimneys – a site repackaged in a 1980s urban renewal project into Bow Quarter’s 750 handsome flats.

About Gladstone’s reddened hands, East End urban legend has it that the factory matchgirls – many only children, all on starvation wages, unshod through winter, vulnerable to white phosphorous poisoning and still six years out from their landmark 1888 strike – each had a shilling docked from their pay to finance Bryant’s ‘gift’. At the unveiling, several girls smuggled stones in their pockets, cut their hands and bloodied the statue in protest. The red paint is a tribute.

Gladstone’s hands have over time gathered a heavier connotative load than the memory of stolen shillings and abused factory workers. The same vandalism has been reenacted on a number of occasions, and in the fractured, plural, liltingly continuous rhythm of cultural reinscription, the same reddened hands have been glossed with fresh significance. On a tour of ‘the radical East End’ this summer, my guide added a contemporary postscript to the tradition of the monument’s origin: ahead of the 2012 Olympic games, the bronze (among other things) was scrubbed clean. But the next morning, of course, Gladstone’s hands were newly scarlet.

I was to understand that this vandalism was no sneaky individual insubordination, but a communally articulated claim. “The East End”, the tour guide said, “wouldn’t let its story be rubbed out.”

It interested me that in his account, the red paint, and not the bronze statue, seemed to become a public artefact under threat. It raises the question: who were the vandals?

The word ‘vandalism’ was contrived by the Abbé Henri-Baptiste Grégoire during the French Revolution, to curb an ascendant vigour for wrecking monuments and art. His neologism invoked the Vandals, a northern European tribe of the early centuries A.D. remembered as uncivilised, threatening, other. Grégoire, a revolutionary himself, was aware that the mobs tearing statues off plinths all over Paris were animated by rage towards the old order, and was afraid that this amounted to a celebration of ignorance.

So he constructed a framework of radical ideas about heritage and public property that positioned the obliteration of artworks as counter-revolutionary, external and threatening to the principles of liberty. Casting destructive revolutionaries as ‘vandals’ and, on other occasions, ‘barbarians’, framed them as senseless, brutish and, crucially, as outsiders. So branded, ‘vandals’ lost their legitimacy as revolutionaries, and their place in the debate about preservation. In short: ‘vandalism’ silenced the vandals.

It seems ridiculous to think of the Bow Churchyard vandals as senselessly destructive, or as outsiders, but these folkloric tales of Gladstone’s hands can at root be seen as a story of silencing and resistance.

I imagine that the statue, whether or not it was paid for with stolen shillings, felt less like a gift to the east of London than a symbolic incursion by the wealthy and powerful. A monument to the establishment (Gladstone was still Prime Minister when it was unveiled), the statue is engraved with the name of an exploitative factory boss, and demands gratitude on his behalf.

Monuments do make strident political claims on the spaces they inhabit. The bronze Gladstone in Bow Churchyard was an assertion of external control and a reminder to the East End’s poor of their own voicelessness. Blood smeared against granite, paint brushed onto metal – these are demonstrations of resistance, but arguably, they’re weak demonstrations of resistance, which illuminate impotence as clearly as they do injustice.

East London has been spoken about, and spoken for – typically by the more wealthy and geographically more westerly, established classes. In his book The Cultural Construction of London’s East End, Paul Newland writes about the area as an object habitually defined from an external viewpoint. “It has been depicted as a terra incognita”, he writes, “a space populated by faceless, voiceless, homogeneous figures.”

The image echoes the barbarian hordes that the Abbé Grégoire conjured with his ‘vandals’. These are pictures we use to distance and silence. But in Bow Churchyard, there has been an inversion. Facelessness has meant resistance to silencing too. It’s the anonymity of the vandals that has allowed the ownership of Gladstone’s red hands to become diffuse and communal, a public property in its own right.

Things have changed. Today, vandalising Victorian statues is not the only way for the East End to raise its political voice. What Gladstone’s hands articulate now – about space and about identity – has fissured and multiplied. The red is a nod of solidarity to the difficult past, it’s the blood of matchstick girls, which might communicate a twinklier, more subversive sense of local pride than the sort performed by West London’s army of gleaming bronzes. They are myth and folklore and graffiti – a toast to the refusal to be silenced.

Through nearly a century and a half of reiteration a piece of vandalism becomes an artefact of heritage. Gladstone in Bow Churchyard is a site of symbolic contestation. His red hands are as much a repository for cultural meaning as his greening bronze body. That is, Gladstone’s red hands are a monument upon a monument. And shouldn’t monuments respond to shifting context?

When the Soviet Union fell, communist statues were toppled from their pedestals. A number of them were collected in a Moscow sculpture park. They were settled in weird proximity, some chipped, many prone on the lawn. I’m sure the Abbé would have called it vandalism, though the statues tell a living story of conflict and contestation.

In 2012, 130 years after Bryant’s ‘gift’ is unveiled in Bow Churchyard, the Ministry of Defence announces plans to mount missiles on the water tower that punches skyward above seven acres of red brick architecture, just around the corner. Hundreds of East Londoners march to demonstrate against a ‘corporate Olympics’. Meanwhile somebody, allegedly, tries to erase the red from Gladstone’s hands.

November 16, 2014
East London Suffragettes: ‘more diverse than middle-class women marching around dressed in white’

East London Suffragettes set their stall out on Roman Road. Photograph: Norah Smyth

In January 1914, the main Suffragette organisation in the East End, the Women’s Social and Political Union (SWPU) split in half. The eastern part re-established itself as the East London Federation of the Suffragettes (ELFS), with its own newspaper, The Women’s Dreadnaught.

Historian Sarah Jackson has marked the centenary of this event with a new book, Voices from History: East London Suffragettes, which aims to break with the image of the Suffragettes as closely associated with Westminster, West End department stores and women who could afford to march in white blouses – no mean feat when most washing was done by hand and there was enough soot in the air to give the capital its own microclimate.

Jackson and several hundred others also marked the occasion with the East London Suffragette Festival in August, a week of events with a central day of talks at Toynbee Hall on women’s history and other ‘hidden histories’ such as the role of south Asian women in the struggle to get the vote.

“We wanted to raise awareness of this quite remarkable group of campaigners, who have I think been largely forgotten, not just within the Suffragette story but also in East London as a whole,” says Jackson.

“They were a really creative, courageous group of rebels, and we thought their story would really resonate with a lot of the people in East London today, many of whom are still involved in different kinds of activism, different forms of protest, community action, all those kinds of things.”

East London was the original bridgehead in the capital for the WSPU, set up by Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughter Christabel. Based in Manchester, the WSPU’s first London base was set up in 1906 at the mouth of the River Lea in Canning Town.

But this Docklands HQ was gradually abandoned as the organisation moved uptown in search of wealthier and more influential members.

It was left to a second Pankhurst daughter – Sylvia – to, in Jackson’s words, “go back” to the East End, setting up in a shop in Bow in 1912. Sylvia initially met with a hostile response – “people throwing fish-heads and bits of rolled-up newspaper soaked in urine,” according to Jackson – but eventually she won people round: by the end there were reportedly over 1,000 members in Bow North alone. The eastern branch went its own way after its scope widened to include other hot topics of the early 1910s, including Irish Home Rule. Then they almost vanish from history.

“We’re lucky we have Sylvia Pankhurst’s own memoirs and correspondence – she was a middle class woman and so she wrote down a huge amount of information about what happened,” says Jackson, who built her book on the research of pioneering academic Rosemary Taylor, the original salvager of the ELFS.

“We also have The Women’s Dreadnaught; lots of women wrote for that or gave interviews if they weren’t literate; a lot of people in the East End at the time couldn’t write.

For Jackson, looking at such ‘social’ history is part of simply getting the story straight, an historiographical movement away from “wars and kings and banks”. But it also provides a link to the past for the ordinary people of today.

“There’s something extraordinary about finding out your house had a Suffragette living in it, or a 14-year- old Irish girl who worked in a match factory who went out on strike; I think it gives you a sense of connection.”

The East London Federation had a good war, organising itself to alleviate the everyday hardships its members experienced once, as Jackson puts it, “people who were already living on slender means found themselves in starvation conditions”.

The Federation lobbied for food price controls, a living wage and equal pay for women. It set up a relief programme to provide milk for poor children and opened a toy factory to employ male and female workers on an equal footing as well as a “pioneering affordable nursery”. There was an employment exchange, a clothes exchange and a place to rent children’s clothes cheaply. “This was community action,” says Jackson, “a community organising for its own survival.”

Later on, the Federation started to campaign against the war, with The Women’s Dreadnaught one of the first publications to report on shell-shock. The story goes that female suffrage was a reward for women’s work during the war. Jackson rejects this idea, pointing out that voting rights granted in 1918 were only for women over 30 and there remained a property qualification. Poor women and young women still couldn’t vote. Full female suffrage didn’t come until 1928. So why celebrate the anniversary of an organisation that could be counted as a failure?

“We need to remember that the Suffragette movement was more diverse than middle-class women marching around dressed in white,” she says, pointing out that the same view bedevils feminism today.

“It’s fantastic that you can regularly pick up a national newspaper in the UK and there’ll be a story in it about equal pay, about women’s rights, about sexual harassment, and it’s not long ago that these issues were not talked about.

“But I think there is a bit of an imbalance in the kinds of story that get picked up: getting women onto boards of blue-chip companies is a big issue but it’s important to keep the issue of the high number of women who work for below minimum wage, for instance, on the table.”

Part of doing that is not to be nostalgic about the past. “1914 and the era around that was an extraordinarily polarised time with a lot of activism – it’s easy to get caught up in this kind of heady atmosphere and think ‘what a time to be alive, all these characters, these amazing, passionate people’ – but I think it’s important to remember the context: how many girls didn’t go to school, how divided society was, the extent of poverty.”

As such, the final chapter of Jackson’s book covers women’s rights campaigns up to the present day, including the protests against moving the Women’s Library from its old home in Aldgate to the LSE in 2013.

Jackson is now writing about the Focus E15 Mothers housing occupation, looking at parallels with the East London Suffragettes of 100 years earlier. Until last month, the women occupied their former social housing block in Stratford from which they had been evicted. It’s a new and different fight, taking place only a mile or so north of the first WSPU foothold in Canning Town. History goes on.

Voices from History: East London Suffragettes by Sarah Jackson and Rosemary Taylor is published by The History Press RRP: 9.99. ISBN: 9780750960939

November 15, 2014
Iranian activist TV channel is operating out of Hackney Downs

TV activist: Maryam Violet. Photograph: Ryan Hubbs

When the Iranian Green Movement broke out in June 2009, Maryam Violet watched from a computer screen as a reported three million reformers marched against former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Having arrived in the UK in January 2009, Violet was about to start a PhD in astrophysics, but the protests changed all that. Her entire life became devoted to “sitting at a computer, watching the news and searching for videos and seeing how people in Tehran’s prisons were getting abruptly raped and tortured”.

Violet soon realised that as an Iranian woman she couldn’t afford to have her head in the stars and follow her dream of working for Nasa.

Instead, Violet became production manager of Zanan TV, an Iranian feminist and activist TV channel that has production offices in Hackney. It was set up in 2011 by Violet’s mother, Mahboubeh Abbasgholizadeh, who runs the main office in New York.

Abbasgholizadeh is a high profile, prominent Iranian feminist and activist who fled Iran after she was imprisoned three times.

Although inspired by her mother, Violet insists on keeping her own identity. She says that until June 2009 “I wasn’t destined to become an active feminist… I came to London with just one suitcase; I was planning to go back. My valuables and all my memories, everything was left in Iran.”

But Violet has never returned to Iran. She misses friends, family and sometimes even the smell of pollution in Tehran, but her activism is stronger than ever. As a feminist she aims through Zanan TV “to fight against discrimination, obtain equal rights in the constitution, see less abuse in daily lives and fight for more freedom” for women in Iran who she says are viewed as “second-class citizens”.

Violet considers the 2013 elections of President Rouhani as a political act designed to improve Iran’s international footing.

“He made some international political gestures, like when he released Nasrin Sotoudeh, a feminist human rights lawyer, but his domestic reforms didn’t evolve,” she insists.
Last month Iran executed Reyhaneh Jabbari, a woman accused of murdering an intelligence service officer who she said had tried to sexually abuse her. Violet describes it as “the execution of all of us”.

“I don’t know if she killed him or not, but what I don’t understand is how as human beings we can decide to end the lives of others with our own hands.”

According to the UN, more than 250 people were executed in Iran in 2013.

However, Violet remains optimistic about the future of the country and was moved by the international campaign urging for Jabbari to be spared the death sentence.

For now, though, Violet’s dreams lie within the field of journalism. Her ambition is to become the next Oriana Fallaci, the Italian feminist journalist notorious in Iran for ripping off the chador while interviewing Ayatollah Khomeini in 1979.

www.zanantv.net/en

November 14, 2014
Everlasting Lives exhibition at St Joseph’s hospice

Jade Sempare, 31, was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis at the age of 13

Photograph: Eleonore de Bonneval

Gardening tools

I have set up my own gardening project in Canning Town Caravanserai. I want to help people have a more simple life through gardening. I spoke to the participants about growing plants and challenging them about how it makes them feel, knowing that when you see something grow it builds your self esteem.

Photograph: Eléonore de Bonneval

John Waterhouse, 77, was diagnosed with blood cancer in January 2013

Photograph: Eléonore de Bonneval

A special photograph

I was born at the wrong time – 1937. I don’t remember seeing my father until I was eight years of age. It wasn’t a normal upbringing because my mother was in hospital. She had TB. She died at 32. I was nine. When my Dad came back he was like a stranger because I had not seen him at all really. I remember he came in, he gave us a little jar of sweets and went down the pub. I still remember that day. I didn’t know what sweets was in those days – everything was rationed.

Photograph: Eléonore de Bonneval

Viviane Fatimani, 29, was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in December 2009

Photograph: Eléonore de Bonneval

A song written for me

My boyfriend wrote me a song when I was on my gap year. It is the best present I ever got. We went to see him play in a bar and he played this song to me. Everyone was like ‘Oh my goodness!’ I said: ‘It is a song about friendship – you don’t understand it, he understands me! I understand him too, this is a friendship song.’ But really, I was in denial about our relationship. I met with my boyfriend before I got diagnosed with MS. He is really supportive, very understanding.

Photograph: Eléonore de Bonneval

Everlasting Lives by Eléonore de Bonneval is at St Joseph’s Hospice, Mare Street, E8 4SA until 16 January.

www.edebonneval.co.uk
Twitter/Instagram: @edebonneval

November 13, 2014
Dance festival in Isle of Dogs to give platform to new choreographers

Dancing days: Emerge 14

The world of dance is intensely competitive, leaving many non-established choreographers few opportunities to road test new work in front of an audience.

Fortunately this is what Emerge Festival is all about, which returns this month to The Space Arts Centre in the Isle of Dogs for a three-week run.

The success of last year’s festival, which saw premieres of pieces that have gone on to be performed at Secret Garden Party festival and large venues such as Hackney Empire, has led organisers to add an extra week to the programme.

Festival producer Adam Towndrow of C-12 Dance Theatre is keen for age not to be a barrier to taking part in the festival.

“Past 25 it’s very difficult for your work to be seen by anyone,” explains Towndrow, who will be presenting one of his own pieces at the festival. “Lots of people are – and rightly so – supporting young people but there’s a big gap where other people who are slightly older don’t have that exposure. For a lot of people it’s about finding the next young hot talent but actually that talent is ageless in our eyes.

Demand to present work at the festival has been high, with applications coming from the young and inexperienced to older, more seasoned choreographers. Towndrow thinks this means there’s greater depth to the three-week programme than ever.

Highlights from the programme include a piece by Gosia Mielech on art and vandalism, Julia Thornycroft’s satirical dance theatre comedy Crufts & Great British Menu and Luke Brown’s Love Is a Complex State Of Mind.

One of the success stories of last year’s Emerge is John Ross, winner of the Matthew Bourne Choreography Award for 2014. His piece Wolfpack, which premiered at Emerge, was recently performed at Hackney Empire.

“It was fantastic to see that in 12 months he’s now performing work in a 1000-seater auditorium in Hackney and to be part of his development and growth,” says Towndrow.

“What the artists need and what we try to give them is that development – not just the platform but choreographic support, rehearsal space and contact with festivals that they wouldn’t normally have.”

Emerge Festival 4 – 22 November The Space, 269 Westferry Road, E14 3RS www.space.org.uk

November 11, 2014
Winterville festival reveals more programme details

Lucy Benson-Brown in Cutting Off Kate Bush

Those who missed out on seeing Kate Bush live can take solace in the line-up for Winterville, the winter festival set to take over part of Victoria Park this December.

Cult tribute act Fake Bush will perform a comic tribute to the singer, and the programme also includes the one-woman show and Edinburgh Fringe sell-out play Cutting Off Kate Bush, which charts the plight of a woman’s personal crisis through the medium of Kate Bush.

The Festival organisers are aiming to provide something for everyone at the month-long event. The town itself is free to enter with a selection of ticketed attractions available to buy from the Winterville website.

Scottish songwriter James Yorkston will be taking to the stage for his annual Christmas performance, while the Winterville bespoke spiegeltent is set to host two shows by one of London’s finest burlesque cabaret companies, Cirque du Cabaret.

With club nights, street food markets, an ice rink and fairground rides, Winterville is covering all the bases when it comes to winter-themed entertainment.

Grown ups and children should be equally at home. The Winterville’s Kids’ Quarter will be graced by artists Gavin Turk and Deborah Curtis and their travelling arts circus House of Fairy Tales, while Big Fish Little Fish will be hosting family-friendly dance parties complete with pro DJs, glowsticks, bubble machines and glitter.

There’s even going to be a pantomime of Robin Hood, produced by Hackney-based theatre company Tour de Force. The daily hour-long show will feature pupils from schools across East London and will be packed with traditional slapstick humour and live music.

Winterville will be running throughout December with an extended day of celebrations on New Year’s Day. The launch on 2 December will take the form of a ‘Winterville Revue’ featuring highlights from the programme – a good way for the uninitiated to learn more about what’s in store.

Winterville is at Victoria Park, E3 5TB from 2 December – 1 January
www.winterville.co.uk

November 11, 2014
The Voyeurs embrace equal opportunities for new album

Portrait of The Voyeurs by David Wala

Sly and the Family Stone, Buddy Holly and The Crickets – the idea of lead artist and backing band is age old. But the hierarchy implicit in the naming convention is arguably at odds with the romantic ideal of people getting together to create music worth more than the sum of their individual talents.

East London vocalist and guitar player Charlie Boyer decided that with his group Charlie Boyer and The Voyeurs, internal democracy was the way to go. Now called The Voyeurs, the band has recently released Rhubarb Rhubarb, the follow up to their debut album Clarietta.

“It kind of made sense really, we all agreed that’s what we should do because it reflects what we’re doing,” says Boyer. “It’s not me and a band now.”

Instead of the back-of-a-napkin approach employed on their debut disc, The Voyeurs have been able to spend a month in their East London studio with producer Oli Bayston – as opposed to the week they spent recording their debut.

And with each member of the band involved in the composition process, the 10 tracks of Rhubarb Rhubarb boast increased depth and a revolutionised sound.

“Things take longer now we have to fight and argue, prove our points and try and make it as good as everyone thinks it should be,” says Boyer. “We’ve got very good at arguing with each other, trying to carve out what the best possible thing is between us.”

Instantly recognisable is the involvement of keyboard player Ross Kristian, although now gone is the distorted organ that characterised their first release. On ‘Say You Love Me (And Choke)’ The Voyeurs prove democracy hasn’t blunted the group’s dynamism. The group’s trademark bouncy disposition segues into a synth-led chaotic coda, giving the song the feeling of being trapped in a lysergic snow globe.

Foot-stomping is never far from the fore, such as on opener ‘Train to Minsk’, which begins with slap-back delayed drums bequeathed from early seventies glam, and features an utterly infectious hook.

Kitchen-sink style observations are the order of the day thematically. As Ray Davies of The Kinks framed life on the ‘village green’, Boyer’s inspiration emanates from ideas of the domestic, sourced from the commonplace hubbub of everyday life but nevertheless “dark, cold, true stories”.

The idea that a more even-handed approach to music-making leads only to compromise is blown apart by The Voyeurs, who have organically become a unit, shattering their original mould with a success that’s measured in the delight of their latest offering.

Rhubarb Rhubarb is released on 10 November on Heavenly Records and The Voyeurs perform live at Red Gallery, 1-3 Rivington Sreet, EC2A 3DT on 19 November www.facebook.com/TheVoyeursOfficial

November 11, 2014
Gillian Riley on sausages – the breakfast of centurions

Doing her wurst: Gillian Riley. Photograph: Jason Fidler

The people of our fair borough cowered in the bushes as the Roman legions stormed up Kingsland Road to subdue barbarians and rebellious tribes up north.

Sausages were what kept these centurions going, portable and long- keeping, tasty and nutritious, and can still be had along our end of the Great North Road where Gallo Nero imports them from Italy or has them made up in London to a traditional recipe.

Turkish stores have a variety of sucuk, beef sausages. Polish delis offer cured and fresh delicacies, and once upon a time Godfrey’s the English butchers (now flourishing in Highbury Barn) had a fine selection.

But if the legions had deviated a little from the long straight track north, and meandered westwards along the high ground that is now Stoke Newington Church Street, they might have hit Meat N16, and refused to move.

Hadrian’s Wall would never have been built, and British history might have taken a different course. This small independent local butcher sells organic meat and fowl, and an array of sausages that demand critical assessment.

These are made to standard recipes, Cumberland, Toulouse and plain pork, and in more adventurous mixtures with herbs, spices and additions like leeks (with lamb), funghi porcini, sun-dried tomatoes, juniper berries.

Customers submit recipes every autumn and gather for a greedy tasting; the Master Butcher chooses the winner, and adds it to his imaginative range. This year’s winner has pigeon, smoked pancetta and prunes, a wonderful combination.

Hackney tribes along Kingsland Road might well have sniffed aromas of the famous North Italian sausage Luganega from the mess kitchens of the Roman legionaries. It is said to have been brought all the way from Lucania (now Basilicata, a part of Calabria in the south of Italy) as vital supplies for the invincible Roman military machine. These sausages lasted all the way to Lombardy and Veneto in the north, where the subdued tribes took them to their hearts, and have been making them ever since.

By the time the exhausted and footsore Roman squaddies had got as far as the Vale of Pickering, on their arduous trek to Cawthorne Camp then over the North Yorkshire Moors to Whitby, they might have found solace in the splendid sausages of what is now Grange Farm in Levison, near Pickering, where breeds similar to today’s Tamworth ginger pigs, and the dark Berkshires, might well have been reared during the four centuries of peaceful Roman occupation, after the defeat of the wild Brigantes, my ancestors.

Today recipes vary but mainly consist of the cheaper, fattier cuts of pork, well seasoned with garlic salt and pepper, and sometimes coriander, cinnamon and cloves as well. But thankfully, we can once again drool over whiffs of the conqueror’s pig products, for today we have the Ginger Pig butcher in Lauriston Road, where meat from Grange Farm is for sale, along with a range of eight or more delicious sausages. These include an imaginative use of onion and black pudding, a peppery pork mixture, and a chunky Old Spot, all meat and fat but no breadcrumbs, for casseroles and stews; there is a home made smoked chorizo and a stonking merguez.

Sausages, those ubiquitous links, can be a delicacy, made from quality cuts, or a shameful repository for unmentionable and unhygienic body parts, slaughterhouse slurry, padded out with all kinds of stuff. Dubious ingredients can be fed into a processor and stuffed into casings, along with preservatives and synthetic flavourings, to become an anonymous wodge, and sometimes a health hazard as well as a gastronomic crime.

Horsemeat is the least of our worries. We need to be sceptical about cheap mass-produced sausages, and critical, in a good way, of what gets into our designer sausages. Fortunately this column is all about good things, not the murky politics of food fraud, so we celebrate here the benign aspects of the sausage.

Throughout history sausages have been made to be eaten fresh, or preserved in some way or other, wind dried, smoked, salted, fermented, or cured in tubs of lard. The content varies depending on the process. Once preserved they can be sliced or cut into chunks, eaten as they are, or added to stews and soups and sauces.

A sausage made with prime lean pork would be a sad and sorry offering on the plate, for fat (where the flavour is) and something cereal like breadcrumbs to absorb it as it cooks, are essential for an unctuous softly chewable result. Trimmings from posh cuts, with their fat, and meat that can’t be sold as an item, are all useful.

Surprising things like tripe, offal, kidneys, liver and lights all get used. Perhaps the ultimate use of fat is in a version of the Jewish kishka, where matzo meal and schmalz (wonderfully tasty chicken fat) are combined with unctuous effect.

One spin-off from pig killing was the collection and coagulation and then cooking of the blood to make black pudding, at its best in French boudin noir, and Spanish morcilla. Tasty fat and something like rice or barley to soak up the juices are often used, but the lack of seasoning and the fear of fat make many British versions sadly stodgy.

November 10, 2014
Facing The Realness: ex-offenders and care leavers to star in new musical at Hackney Downs Studios

Serael Asphall as Rox and Veronique Andre as Shanice in The Realness. Photograph: Catherine Ashmore

Whether a hollow boast, a mark of authenticity or merely a matter of taste, the notion of ‘realness’ has been central to contemporary culture for decades.

Hip-hop artists frequently lay claim to being ‘the realest’, from legendary rapper Tupac Shakur to Iggy Azalea.

For the 16-strong cast of a new musical opening at Hackney Downs Studios this November, however, it is about learning to face the harsh realities of life.

Veronique Andre plays Shanice in The Realness, a musical about Jay, a young man who leaves prison and tries to get his life back on track.

“Realness is about what it’s really like on the streets,” she says. “When you leave prison and you go back to your normal life, that’s when the realness dawns on you.”

Jay’s is a journey that reflects the experiences of many of the cast, which is partly composed of care-leavers and ex-offenders performing alongside professional actors.

Co-created by The Big House Theatre Company and Big Broad Productions, the idea was born many years ago when director Maggie Norris was working in prisons and pupil referral units.

Faced with the shocking statistic that 40 per cent of young people in prison have been in care, Norris set up The Big House in 2013 to offer an alternative future for young care leavers.

“The problem with people coming out of prison is that they go back to their old patch. People don’t realise how hard it is to stay on the straight and narrow,” she says.

Offering a course of life skills training, drama workshops and the opportunity to devise and perform a new piece of theatre, the programme is an invaluable stepping-stone for young people making the transition into an independent adult life.

Directing A Christmas Carol in Wormwood Scrubs some years ago, Norris was approached by Jason, a young man eager to be in her production. It wasn’t until he reminded her that she realised this was the same young man who was once her neighbour.

Through The Big House Norris was able to intervene at a critical moment in Jason’s life and he is now delivering talks about the reality of life in prison to young people at risk of offending.

Inspired by the experiences of the participants on The Big House theatre training programme, recent productions have garnered exceptional reviews from local and national press as well as industry professionals.

More importantly, Norris argues that the programme she leads has a profound effect on the lives of the participants.

“It is not about training actors, it’s about building confidence and self esteem,” she says.

“But we still uncover some massive talent who really deserve to be in the profession, and Veronique is one of them.”

The Realness is at Hackney Downs Studios, Amhurst Terrace, E8 2BT from 13 November – 20 December www.hackneydownsstudios.wordpress.com

November 8, 2014