Rich Mix is facing an uncertain future should it be forced to repay £850,000 to Tower Hamlets Council in one lump sum. The Shoreditch arts centre has decided to go public with the details of a legal dispute with the council dating back to 2011.
The council is demanding repayment of £850,000 given to the arts organisation in 2002 to enable the organisation to complete the refurbishment of its premises at 35-47 Bethnal Green Road.
Rich Mix claims it was never settled whether this money was a one-off grant or a loan that would have to be paid back. But in 2011, the council served legal papers demanding immediate repayment of the entire sum.
It is not clear why the council has demanded all the money at once, but Rich Mix says it does not have sufficient financial reserves to pay the money and that the centre would find it difficult to continue to operate if it did.
Rich Mix CEO, Jane Earl said that the arts centre disputes that the money needs to be paid back, though has offered to do so in instalments, adding: “What we mustn’t do is pay it in a way that will make us go bust.”
She also claims that the council is withholding £1.6 million owed to Rich Mix as part of the planning agreement for a nearby development. Under this agreement, the developer, Telford Homes, paid over £2 million towards cultural development in the immediate area. The council’s Strategic Development Committee decided in 2010 that this money would go to Rich Mix.
A formal contract was drawn up for the money to be transferred but contained no specific targets that Rich Mix would need to meet in order for the funds to be handed over. The contract was recently judged “unenforceable” by a court because of the lack of firm targets.
Earl blames the contract’s poor drafting on the council, who rejected the idea of targets. She said: “In 2011 the council said it would be premature for us to set targets when we didn’t know what our level of Arts Council support would be.”
Following the court judgement, Rich Mix has proposed a deal whereby the council would hand over the £1.6 million of development money and in return Rich Mix would pay the council the outstanding £850,000.
Asked whether the council is using its power over funding to shut down Rich Mix, Earl declined to comment. She is, however, concerned that some councillors hold a negative view of its activities, including the “idea that it’s some kind of licentious drinking den”.
A spokesperson for Tower Hamlets Council said: “The council considers that it would be inappropriate to comment on either ongoing litigation or associated settlement discussions. Irrespective of the litigation between the parties the council remains open to constructive discussions with Rich Mix over possible partnership funding.
“During these difficult times for local government funding and taking into account the council’s statutory obligations, the council must ensure that any further funding is appropriate, affordable and delivers value for the borough.”
‘Let’s talk about death!’ Participants gather at a recent Death Café meeting
Jon Underwood has a simple answer to the question ‘what happens at a Death Café?’
“We talk about death,” is his basic point. “There’s no agenda, we don’t have an objective, no point we’re trying to get to.
“Rather we just introduce ourselves, say what the rules are. Then we go round in a group and people say what brought them to Death Café. We let the discussion go from there.”
Death Café is a global phenomenon, run out of a terraced house near Hackney Central by Underwood. The website he administrates features the legend “Let’s talk about death!” and a jolly picture of a teacup with a skull on it.
The ‘Cafés’ are run in sitting-rooms, public libraries and real live cafés the world over, as one-offs or regular events. To use the Death Café brand, and Underwood’s guide to setting one up, you have to agree to the ethical code. “It’s not for profit,” explains Underwood. “You can’t lead people towards any product, conclusion or course of action, and you have to be respectful of different beliefs.”
Since Underwood set up the site in 2011, there have been 1,392 Death Cafés in 26 countries. Underwood estimates 6,000 people have passed through a Death Café in the time they’ve been around. The idea is to get people talking. “The objective of Death Café is to raise awareness and help people make the most of their finite lives,” Underwood explains.
In his view, open discussion means people aren’t ceding power to the specialised knowledge of doctors or funeral directors: “Death Café specifically tries to erode that distinction between those people who know and those people who don’t. It’s not a real distinction because death is a bit unknowable.”
Underwood, a Buddhist, had trained in “spiritual care for the dying” before working at Tower Hamlets Council. Frustrated by council work, he felt something had to change: “I was lacking direction, something came to my mind that I wanted to do some work around death.”
Inspired by the work of ethnographer Barnard Crettaz – who established the Café Mortal in his native Switzerland – Underwood got a few friends round to see how the idea could work. “The first one I didn’t know how to do it at all so I really scripted it, had lots of exercises – writing things down, ceremonial burning: people wrote down what they were afraid of around death, and we had burning of fears, things people wanted to get rid of.”
It was his mother who suggested the more open format which subsequent Death Cafés have followed. “She said ‘just let people talk!’”.
Underwood has recurrently been impressed by the quality of talk which this plan has resulted in. “People generally talk very openly about these things; the façade disappears, or it’s less present. Because in death what people think about you is
less important.”
There have been some “jaw-dropping” discussions but Underwood won’t share stories. “It stays in the room,” he says. Topics range from tales of the paranormal to the open discussion of fear.
Underwood is clear that the Cafés are not intended for people who are themselves dying or who have been recently bereaved. “It’s a discussion group rather than a counselling session. It’s aimed at people for whom death is abstract.”
His own view of this abstractness is that our culture doesn’t know where to put mortality. “On the one hand we’ve pushed it to the sidelines, it’s quite an invisible phenomenon. On the other, we compulsively consume quite a strange kind of death, through the news media, through films, games, music, which sort of serves to keep death terrifying: it’s hidden in
plain sight.”
Underwood is looking for premises for a permanent Death Café, in order to “bring death to the community”.
St Joseph’s Hospice hosts a Death Café on 5 February, including a panel talk with Fi Glover and photojournalist Eleonore de Bonneval, whose exhibition, Everlasting Lives, is currently on show at the hospice.
Rising playwrights: The Story Project. Photograph: Ugly Sister Productions
The Story Project, a series of 10 15-minute plays with different casts, directors and writers, provides for any number of links and themes, promising “one evening, ten tales, a million possibilities”.
One pattern is the succession of variously pathological female characters, but men come in for it too, with the violent, witch-finding and increasingly loony pastor in Chino Odimba’s The Bird Woman of Lewisham and Miles Mantle’s creation Vincent in the play Control, a Coldplay fan with no trousers on who by his own admission has his “head so far up my own arse that my sphincter’s matted with chest hair”.
Like these two plays, David Lane’s Will and Sharon Clark’s Pig are single dramatic one-on-one encounters between a man and a woman in a confined space, ideal for the closely hemmed-in stage at the Arcola and hinting at a wider story beyond the action.
Others deal with the time limit in different ways: The Circle – Shelley Davenport’s group of pathologically boastful new mothers – and Emily Juniper’s Clause IV which takes New Labour to a children’s birthday party – are more self-contained, almost like comedy sketches.
Meanwhile, Gareth Jandrell’s That Dead Girl and David Byrne’s Sad Play recount a whole narrative within the time-limit. That Dead Girl creates a terrifying mimesis of cyber-bullying (featuring Anyebe Godwin as a topless selfie, one of only three black actors in the evening’s large cast), and Sad Play turns out to be ironically entitled as Byrne successfully tries to write about his depression in as hilarious a way possible, proving along the way that it’s possible to have people rolling in the aisles in 2015 with a parody of Rumpole of the Bailey.
Monologues are another option, with alcoholic to-be-wed Kat in Hannah Rodger’s Bricks and Bones having only a rapidly-emptying champagne bottle for company onstage and the titular Jimbob in Christopher York’s play being only an imaginary friend, leaving Jake (Jonathan Milshaw) to carry the play all by himself in impressive style.
If you can cope with the chopping and changing, The Story Project is a great night for seeing what dramatic form can achieve.
The Story Project is at the Arcola, 24 Ashwin Street, E8 3DL until 10 January.
Back in the day: the site that became Hackney City Farm. Photograph: David Walters
At the start, building up a roster of animals was a patchwork affair.
“In the beginning, the horse came with Carol, who was a local person. There were some rabbits, which actually came from Bridgewater in Somerset because a lady wanted to help us. Some were bought, some of the chickens were incubated through school projects. Turkeys were brought in and… er, prepared for Christmas, with the community plucking them.”
Such a gathering of livestock – described by David Walters, who oversaw it in the early 1980s – is part of the huge number of things you need to do if you want to transform an abandoned brewery on Hackney Road into a working farm.
Hackney City Farm, as it exists today, is a picture of what you’ll end up with: two and a half acres complete with pigs, goats, geese, ducks, chickens, donkeys, rabbits, guinea-pigs, occasional sheep, fruit trees and bushes; a school where 10 pupils who have been excluded from other schools in the borough receive a full-time education; and a café which many people originally thought was very expensive but which today is probably one of the cheapest on the road.
Taking Stock
It’s now 30 years since Hackney City Farm got underway, and it is celebrating with an Arts Council-funded project called Stepping Out, a series of interactive displays and installations featuring many of Walters’ photographs from the early days: horses and carts, school children planting crops, and workmen zooming across slow-exposure film looking like constructive ghosts.
It took six years for the idea of Hackney City Farm to become a reality. In 1978 Walters had just finished a course in youth and community work, and was making a
living as a milkman, looking around for something else to do. He wanted to be part of a project that would go beyond the limits of his classes: “When I’d been doing my course I realised at the end I was interested in doing a community project with all family ages, not just youth work.”
He soon found the group which was eventually named the Hackney City Farm Movement, a collection of teachers, social workers and local people who had their eyes on a couple of old garages off Mount Pleasant Road, with a view to creating a community garden, home to flora and fauna.
“They were interested in getting something which was a family-orientated project,” says Walters. “They liked the idea of animals because they brought people closer to each other. One of the philosophical arguments was that if you cared for animals and you cared for plants, then you actually cared more for other people. And it made the way you interacted with people more positive.”
Geography was different in the late 1970s. Walters relates how at meetings half a mile from where he lived people would say to him: “You don’t live round here”.
“The borough then was still a lot of little villages,” says Walters. “You could cross all sorts of interesting boundary lines, and you were either part of something or you weren’t.”
Walters didn’t think the garages were up to much and, overcoming his outsider status, managed to persuade the group to set up a steering committee to find a proper site. In the end, they looked at more than 200 possible locations, and were offered the Middlesex Filter Beds on Hackney Marshes. But the group liked the filter beds as they were and didn’t want to turn them into a farm.
“You don’t just take something because it’s available,” Walters contends. “You take it because you can build on its intrinsic shape. Sometimes things that are left unmanaged end up being quite beautiful forests. It might be better not having anything there, having it as an open space.”
Hackney Council was on board from early on. Councillors were “quite keen to have a different type of community facility which would engage with people”, recalls Walters. “There were the various animal sites, in Clissold for example, but they were quite passive – you were viewing. Volunteers weren’t involved with them and
people were kept at a distance.”
The city farm they had in mind would, from the start, be centred around active participation. “One of the things we learnt was that you’ve got to work with people and they’ve got to manage things as well.”
Bucolic: a donkey takes a nap. Photograph: Hackney City Farm
End in site
Finally the group found the Hackney Road site, which the farm has occupied ever since. Planning permission hinged on proving animals and manure wouldn’t poison the children’s hospital next door. Trips to the farm and interactions with the animals would in fact eventually become a key part of care offered at the hospital.
Walters loves this kind of wider interaction with the surrounding community, which the farm has developed. “What the farm is fundamentally is a community resource for the local area,” he says. “The fact it has animals in it is only part of its attraction. We were there to provide facilities where possible for people who had none.” This extended to simply letting local people use the farm’s photocopier.
Walters has developed a poetic philosophy of community projects. “If you have something that is valuable it gets shown in different ways,” he explains. “You get attracted in the dark to someone striking a match; you look at the light. The farm does that in many ways. It draws people in and then it draws out of them other things. So they might come in for a walk, they might come in to the café. They might come in for a pottery class. They might come in because they’re attracted by the atmosphere. It happens to have animals and plants, which is important because a lot of that is missing.”
Such projects need to be open to change. If a resource is “rigid”, Walters says, then it “loses its locality”. The farm “needs to be open-minded about the possibilities of what might happen. Every farm has got a different constituency, a different set of activities and it’s all to do with the energies of the people involved.”
Originally granted a 90-year lease, the farm is secure for some time to come. Asked what changes he sees for the farm in the future, Walters returns to the site’s original infrastructure as a brewery, including its 90-ft well. “You could end up getting Hackney spa water out of that,” he proposes.
The farm also has plans to try and acquire around five acres of land outside London, to act as somewhere for Hackney people to escape to. Anyone with such an asset is invited to get in touch.
For the Stepping Out project, the Farm is also trying to trace other founding members.
If you were involved in Hackney City Farm at any point of its development, or know someone who was, please email charlie@hackneycityfarm.co.uk or drop into the farm at 1A Goldsmiths Row, E2 8JQ
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
Sipping an expensive coffee in Broadway Market, it’s impossible to believe that a neo-Georgian block of flats a short walk away, with high ceilings and sash windows facing out onto the canal, was once on Hackney Council’s ‘hard to let’ list.
But back in the late 1990s the Haggerston Estate had a really nasty reputation. It was ‘the heroin capital of Europe’ in contemporary press reports. Delivery men refused to enter and social tenants were desperate to live almost anywhere else. The buildings had fallen into disrepair and the plan was to demolish the estate before the turn of the millennium.
None of which deterred German film-maker and university tutor Andrea Luka Zimmerman from making Samuel House on the estate her home for the next 17 years.
“That’s my flat, there at the top,” she says, pointing out a row of three windows in the photo of Samuel House which adorns the flyer for her new film Estate: a Reverie, a ‘creative documentary’ about the last seven years of the building’s life. “It sounds crazy today but I applied to live there and got it within a month.”
Samuel House was the gigantic brown-brick building that used to stand on the bank of the Regents Canal a couple of bridges down from Broadway, its windows filled with person-sized portraits of the remaining residents.
It is now, finally, rubble, shut away behind a high fence. The date for demolition was announced seven years ago.
Zimmerman’s film is about the changes in perception its subjects experienced once they knew their estate was going to be knocked down. It registers what Zimmerman calls “the thickening of the moment when you know you are going to lose something.
“Suddenly you see what’s there and you know it’s not going to be there anymore. It’s that kind of time-warp – like if you know you’re going to lose something, then suddenly your eyes open. It’s about exploring that.”
However, the film also seeks to challenge the negative public image of housing estates and the people who live on them. Zimmerman cites friends of hers who grew up on the estate and went to fashion college or became photographers. “You have people from this place who do things that you wouldn’t really associate with this estate. And I wonder why that is. The people who live there are actually normal people, they have normal jobs.”
Zimmerman describes smashed windows, pealing wallpaper and leaky ceilings, but says the building was otherwise a pleasant place to live. “It wasn’t different from anywhere I’d lived before really. The neighbours were always very nice.” The main cause of problems, she says, was a lack of maintenance.
“We were quite a strong residents’ association and we really tried to get the council to do repairs. But it didn’t happen, it never happened. In the early days they wanted to do either private partnerships or sell it to outside or have a housing association take care of it.”
She’s sympathetic towards these failings, pointing out there were restrictions on how much councils could borrow to fund social housing – restrictions which are in large part still in place. “It wasn’t like Hackney Council didn’t want to do repairs, they just couldn’t afford it,” she says.
However, she still feels it’s wasteful that a good building was allowed to go fall into disrepair. The Haggerston Estate was built in the ‘neo-Georgian flatted dwellings’ style, designed to resemble Georgian terraces. (That’s one reason why all the buildings and streets on the estate are named after characters from Samuel Richardson’s 18th century novel Clarissa).
In the 1930s, hundreds of these structures were built around the country from a mass-produced blueprint, with individual variations in different areas. “Each individual council sort of made up their own version. It made it very democratic; it could be done by anyone,” says Zimmerman.
The buildings were ‘thought through’, with, for instance, rounded walls where it was likely people would bump into a corner. Zimmerman believes this had more than practical value. “It’s symbolic, that it was thought through. Architecture is a symbol of values in our society.”
They were also built to last, and for all that physical decay was a blight on the estate, Zimmerman believes there were deeper forces at work which ultimately led to the buildings’ demolition, making a comparison with “real Georgian buildings” which are over twice the estate’s age but have been lovingly maintained throughout subsequent generations.
Social structures are as much a concern in Estate: a Reverie as architectural structures.
“I’m really interested why it is that in buildings that are made to last – what is it structurally that destroys the community – in Hackney, in Islington, in Camden, Harringey?
“What is it that makes some things possible and others impossible? How can you participate, how much say do you actually have?”
Zimmerman first conceived of the project when in the early 2000s a private security firm was installed on the estate without the residents being consulted, with two rottweilers kept in one of the flats. It was a move which, in Zimmerman’s view, made everybody feel less safe.
“Literally overnight they put up all these high security signs. It looked like a mess, it looked like a war zone.” This was compounded by large, orange Hackney Homes boards placed over the ground-floor windows. “It looked abject, run-down,” she says. “Nobody asked us about what we wanted.”
An opportunity for the residents to take control of their own image arose in 2007 when the estate was taken over by the London and Quadrant Housing Association (L&Q ).
L&Q wanted to take down the orange boards over the windows and that made way for the project I Am Here, the gigantic portraits of residents which used to look out over the canal. These portraits are now kept in a container, ready to be returned to their subjects as and when they ask for them.
“Everything changed,” when L&Q took over, says Zimmerman. Under the stock-transfer agreement signed by tenants, it was agreed that the buildings would be demolished and residents re-housed. But for the remainder of its existence, residents were to be given free reign over the estate. “The new landlords allowed us basically to do what we wanted, because they knew it was going to be demolished and they wanted to keep us happy.”
What ensued was a sprouting of folk art. Allotments were dug and table tennis tables were set up. Tenants painted the outside of their flats in different colours, including the discarded tyres that had lain in the lots for years. There were film screenings and bonfire nights. “It was amazing,” says Zimmerman. “I hadn’t seen people like that for years and years, because it had been rubbish.”
Estate: a Reverie documents this period, with interviews with residents and footage of the way the community developed as it gained control over its environment, including historical re-enactments of living conditions experienced by the estate’s first residents before they were moved there 80 years ago. Just across the canal from the ruins of Samuel House is Bridge Academy, a very successful instance of providing a state-funded institution with autonomy and decision-making power.
Zimmerman never suggests that Haggerston be used as a model for other estates, but she is concerned about the direction housing policy is going – especially the social implications of ‘Secure by Design’, a construction protocol for new social housing which eliminates open-access spaces and gives everyone a key-fob. “The younger generation grows up with fear and suspicion – and that’s a form of inequality. The home is safe, which means outside is unsafe.”
She likes the new accommodation she has been given in compensation for the loss of her flat in Samuel House, but was no fan of the security system originally proposed, in which residents would need to use their door fob to operate the lift doors, which would only open when the lift was at their own floor: the building was designed with the assumption that residents wouldn’t know other people in the block and would never visit them. The residents managed to resist the imposition of this feature.
There’s a bigger story to social housing in Britain, but Estate: a Reverie is a powerful voice for the residents at the centre of that story. It documents what can happen when people decide to trust each other, and goes a good way to disarming mutual suspicion, one of the biggest threats to anything prefixed with ‘social’.
Estate: a Reverie is premiered at Rio Cinema, 107 Kingsland High St, E8 2PB on 22 November at 2.30pm www.estatefilm.co.uk
Thumbs up: photograph taken from My Journey exhibition
According to the 2011 census, nearly two million of London’s residents were born outside the UK.
The figure for Hackney was 35 per cent, or nearly 70,000 people. All of their stories are different, with migrants coming to work, study, or to find a new life; others are fleeing for their lives, and many arrive in this country through desperate and difficult means.
The Sudanese journalist, photographer and artist Anwar Elsamani, a migrant himself, is concerned with this last group. In particular, with the thousands of African migrants who have drowned in the last decade trying to cross the Mediterranean.
In his contribution to a new art project My Journey, which encouraged recent migrants to tell their personal stories, Elsamani decided instead to look at this wider state of affairs.
“I thought it was a good idea to talk about a big issue, not about my own journey,” he says. “Because my journey was not dangerous, like the
other people’s.”
The result is Lighting Your Way, a photo-film pleading to citizens of wealthy countries to stop cursing immigrants and instead try to put themselves in the shoes, for example, of passengers on the many boats which leave North Africa in secret and which never arrive in Southern Europe, whose passengers die in unknown circumstances thousands of miles from home.
“I worked hard to be their voice,” Elsamani says. “The voice of the people who died before they touched Italy or Europe.”
Elsamani’s own migration may not have been so risky, but he hardly had an easy time.
In 2013 he was flown to the UK for medical treatment by the international organisation Freedom from Torture, and has been treated by their medical foundation in London since he arrived.
Elsamani is a victim of torture by the Sudanese government, and was granted asylum in Britain last year. His work on the art project was an opportunity to “create something positive”, he says.
Participants on the scheme, run by the Migrants Resource Centre (MRC), were given free courses in photography, film, comic strips and audio, but Elsamani’s work is informed by already- considerable experience in his field.
Working as a journalist in Sudan, Elsamani had risen to second-in- command at a national daily before being forced to leave the country. He started journalism early on, writing his first news articles aged seven. Growing up in Zalinje, a town in Darfur, his father and uncles would bring him English-language newspapers and get him to read them aloud. He turned a small profit in the process.
“After I had finished, they gave me some coins, so every day I got a lot of money, for me as a child,” he says.Photography was another early interest. One of his uncles agreed to go halves on a Polaroid camera if Elsamani could save up enough money. His early photos were of “a wall, the floor; there was no one to show me how to do it,” he says.
Nonetheless, Elsamani became a teenage roving reporter, calling himself ‘the mobile journalist’. After university in the capital Khartoum he went professional, eventually reporting from all over Sudan.
Elsamani’s work paid particular attention to remote villages and the growing number of refugee camps, home to displaced people from Sudan’s own civil war and from conflicts in the surrounding region.
“This kind of work, few other journalists focus on it, because they want to sit in a cool hall with the politicians. But for me, I don’t like that form of journalism because those people, they have a lot of chances to say what they like to say. What about the people without that chance?”
His photo from one refugee camp, of two small girls craning to fill a plastic jug from a filthy trickle of water at the bottom of a sandy hole, won an award for promoting children’s rights from the United Nations Human Rights Commission in 2009. He won the prize again in 2010.
Visiting the camps brought him into contact with many migrants’ experiences long before he was forced to live his own.
“I knew how they continued their lives, what the problems were. Sometimes they spent three years, five years on the way. And in this journey, they lose their money, the girls are raped, some people in Egypt kill them – sometimes they took their eyes, harvested their organs.”
When Elsamani arrived in the UK, the Home Office initially wanted to house him in Middlesbrough, but Freedom from Torture persuaded them he needed to remain in London to continue his medical treatment. He lived in Stratford for a few months until Newham Council, unable to house him, moved him to Hackney. He now lives in a hostel near the Town Hall with many other migrants from all over the world.
From here, he writes articles for newspapers in the Middle East and Arabic-language papers in the UK.
Hackney’s high rents and deposits make leaving the hostel difficult to imagine. Elsamani photographs prolifically. On a recent outing to Regents Canal’s houseboat regatta, he spent five hours photographing the reflections of houseboats in the water. “I went there like it was a date with my girlfriend,” he says of the day out with his camera.
The resultant photos are beautiful semi-abstract interfolding blocks of colour, the scattered reflections of the painted sides of the houseboats filling the whole frame. The surface of the water appears to assume different textures depending on the angle of the light, taking on by turns a shiny metallic gleam or a matt surface like a tray of brightly coloured powder.
Elsamani admires the Sudanese painter Ibrahim el-Salahi, who recently had a major retrospective at the Tate Modern and who is himself a refugee, who Elsamani believes “is feeling his way” – carrying on in the path he feels is right. “I feel that the colours and the light are the secret of life,” says Elsamani.
The sheer number of migrants in London leads to a story told in statistics, but Elsamani aims to tell a different story: “There are a lot of people who lose their life because they change their job or what they like, because there is a problem here for them to continue their ways.
“So just for one problem, they lose everything. And if they can have another chance, they can make a life for themselves.”
My Journey is at Shoreditch Town Hall, 380 Old Street, EC1V 9LT until 10 October.
According to Stoke Newington writer and historian Lee Jackson, the funny thing about the smoke, fog and grime in Victorian London was how people seemed to love it.
“There are so many quotes about ‘dear, dirty old London’,” Jackson says. “They’ve got that sort of indulgence for the filth and the grubbiness of it, because it’s so distinctive – distinctively urban.”
Jackson has just spent two years researching such delights as cesspools in the 1860s, and has sifted through the account-books of rag-and-bone men to write the book which takes its title from such affectionate sentiments.
Dirty Old London: the Victorian Fight Against Filth is the story of a forgotten world, a world in which it was normal for the streets to be two-foot-deep in mud, for hats to turn black simply from being worn outside and for tap-water to be deemed drinkable as long as the half-glass of brown sediment it contained had sunk to the bottom.
One of the book’s achievements is to enable the imaginative leap required to understand that these conditions were once accepted as the status quo. His prose forms a well-sprung surface from which the reader can make this jump into the past, recording the development of everyday amenities like paved roads and the collection of rubbish which it is easy to forget are ideas someone once had to think up.
It’s a gripping tale which pits diligent reformers and wacky idealists against the literally parochial governing authorities and the stubborn refusal of the middle classes ever to pay for any kind of civic improvement.
“It’s that very sort of Victorian, 19th century, laissez-faire sort of thing; small government,” says Jackson. “And the whole book in a way is about that sort of thing: what does it mean to have local government?”
Dirty Old London answers the question in such an intriguing way that you start to wonder why people don’t ask it more often. Household waste, for instance. At the start of the century, the collection of ‘dust’ – predominantly made up of ash from fireplaces – was a jealously guarded privilege awarded to private contractors, who paid local councils high fees to be allowed to collect it.
Ash had value as it was used in the manufacture of bricks. There was a colossal demand for bricks at the time and, in consequence, for ash. Several ‘dust men’ became extraordinarily wealthy from the trade, including Henry Dodd, an Islington rubbish merchant who left an estate of £111,000 when he died in 1881 (a fortune that in today’s money would be comparable to that of J.K. Rowling).
But the dust trade was a victim of its own success. London grew too big, and the ‘brickfields’ in which the East End was baked were moved further away from the centre of the city. It became less and less economical to cart dust out that far, and bricks imported from Birmingham offered too much competition.
London was also ‘the Smoke’ – “a city named after its own pollutant”, as Jackson puts it. Fog was only part of the problem, but an all-enveloping part. It had a certain allure, and featured prominently in the erotic anecdotes assembled into the anonymous pornographic memoir My Secret Life, as well as in popular magazine stories about low-vis romantic encounters of the sort that – in Jackson’s words – “end with people turning round and saying ‘didn’t you know that was the Countess Von Such and Such you were speaking to!’”
Mud was also pervasive. Most of it was horse-dung, mixed with general filth and sewage to form an omnipresent ooze. As with the brickfields, farmland became so far away as London developed that it was no longer worth anyone’s while to crape the mud off the streets and sell it for fertiliser – the system the city had relied on to keep its streets navigable.
Crossing-sweepers – familiar to readers of Dickens as the ragged objects of benevolence, cruelty and non-standard orthography (such as Jo in Bleak House, whose every ‘v’ is written as a ‘w’) – didn’t simply keep junctions looking tidy as their name might suggest, but were actually in charge of ploughing a thoroughfare or ‘crossing’ through the mire and keeping it clean so that people could get from one side to the other, relying on optional tips as payment for the service.
Jackson’s enthusiasm for this stuff stems from his days as a Victorian crime novelist. His research ran away with him and now he predominantly writes history. He is the man behind the online archive of historical documents Victorian London, a website so popular that it’s listed first on a Google search for its name, beating Wikipedia and the several museums and tour operators also competing for the term. “More people have read that website than have read my books, I’m sure of that,” he reflects.
Jackson works on the period because of its continuing relevance. “It’s the cusp of modernity,” he says. “Transport. The Victorians thought you could annihilate time and space with the railway – you can suddenly move from one city to another in a couple of hours, the real modern transition.
“The Victorians invented rollerskates, you have these wonderful photos of women in their bustles rollerskating around on rinks made of marble.”
The washing machine, of the handle- operated kind, was also a 19th century invention, marketed using what Jackson calls “these amazing 1950s-style adverts. One was like ‘my servants wash more in three days than they used to in three weeks’, or ‘the boys in the reformatory now do their laundry much better than they could before!’
“By the end of the era you have the cinema, the radio – it’s all there. There’s very little in modern life whose origins aren’t Victorian. The crux of modern life is Victorian, for me.”
Jackson was born in Manchester and has lived in Stoke Newington for the last twenty years, an area which he says “started off as a very pretty village, and its first boom was as a rural retreat for bankers from the city.
“Then people realised they could make a lot more money by buying the fields, digging up the clay and building houses.”
He sees the social changes in Stoke Newington over the time he has lived there as “an exact parallel with Islington in the 1980s”, with gentrification and rising house prices. “I find it a bit depressing in a way how you just see wealth knocking people out of the way – and I’m part of it.
“But no one owns any district for a long time in London – with the possible exception of Mayfair, which is literally owned by the Grosvenor estate. The beauty of things like Hackney and Islington is there aren’t these overweening vast estates. This has changed over time, and if there is an economic collapse it’ll all change again.”
At a time when the idea of collective projects for the common good has once again become unpopular, it’s good to be reminded that it was only recently we managed to climb out of our own filth.
We were somewhere outside Shoreditch Town Hall when Little Jay turned up with a stash of this quarter’s Nervemeter magazine. I’d read it already but bought a copy and gave it to my friend. We then sat down next to a portable pissoir in Hoxton Square to have a read.
“This is a true story,” begins the preface. “It has been rewritten only so far as was necessary to conceal personalities. It is a terrible story, but it is also a story of hope and of beauty.”
The text is actually from a book by nineteenth-century poet, painter, magician and occultist Aleister Crowley, who may or may not have signed his name with a cartoon cock ’n’ balls for an ‘A’ as he does on the first page of the Nervemeter.
It’s a high-risk strategy for page three. You teeter along the razor-sharp crag that leads to proper page four engagement with the publication, fighting huge pressure to shriek “twats!” and tear the magazine to pieces, stuffing them into the nearest possible portable pissoir.
Page four is interesting though, and not just for its facsimile of a temperance pledge. At the bottom of the page you can find out how to go into business alongside Little Jay:
“If you are begging on the streets then you qualify to sell Nervemeter magazine,” it says. “The minimum suggested donation is £3: all of that money stays with the vendor.”
Which is how it works. The two men chiefly responsible for the Nervemeter – Ian Allison, who looks after the words, and Kieron Livingstone, who does the pictures – carry boxes of it across London, dropping them at shelters or personally delivering them to homeless vendors with whom they’ve had relationships for years. The vendors go out and sell the magazines, and keep the proceeds.
There are a few outposts in central and west London, with a heartland in the east.
“We’ve got a guy outside Highbury tube, we’ve got a guy on Broadway Market, we’ve got Bob on Shoreditch High Street, Little Jay in Shoreditch. Over the whole time it’s probably about 50 or 60 people who’ve sold the magazine,” says Edinburgh-born Allison.
The Nervemeter started as the information organ the London Poor, which was Allison and Livingstone’s plot to cause Starbucks to collapse, along the lines suggested by the anti-financier Max Kaiser.
“He was into bringing down Coca Cola and Starbucks through short-selling, and boycotts,” says Allison, who works as a financial journalist in Canary Wharf.
“He had this list of the most bloated companies, that if you could wobble with the share price you’d have activist hedgefunds just slamming into them.”
The idea of the London Poor was to start the boycott and publish news of the tumbling share price.
“It was a financial paper,” is Livingstone’s description of the 2004 project. “The London Poor Starbucks Share Price Experiment – catchy.”
The homeless distributors were part of the plan from the start, says Allison. “It was always going to be distributed by poor people, or sold by poor people.
“We were sort of sickened by the number of free magazines everywhere, the Metro and everything, and we thought it would be good to have something that’s got value, that’s sold by poor people.
“We liked the irony of having a poor person selling you financial advice as well.”
“It was a conceptual art piece originally,” adds Livingstone. “The poor, the London Poor, the Victoriana, Starbucks, and the poor selling the rich financial advice – this was all in our heads.
“We put all of this stuff into the first issue and it’s sort of developed from there into what it is now.”
Allison thinks the Nervemeter’s become “a lot more shoddy” since then. Its production values have been enhanced, but its close concentration on a particular theme has bolted into a more freely flowing montage of text and images.
Previous issues have covered the Olympics, financial markets and benefits cuts. The current issue explores thinking around addiction, including quotations from psychiatric journals, addicts, advocates and temperance men – all culled by Allison from the British Library.
Other highlights include the prize-draw word-search at the back – “Hurry! Closes midnight tomorrow!” – and an image of David Cameron’s face spliced with the arms of a man injecting heroin.
It can get caustic. “The first one we did included alternative ways of making money if your benefits get stopped or something,” says Allison. “We predicted the riots in that one! It was the start of 2011 and we said in the editorial ‘you know, if your benefits have been stopped, we wouldn’t normally blame people for just rioting,’ but we wanted to advocate an alternative approach and say have you thought about, like, heroin dealing, or prostitution, or dog-farming, or money laundering on a really small scale?”
According to Livingstone, at the time they saw this less as satire and more like a kind of documentary. “It was more like, these are jobs you can get if your benefits have been stopped, this is what you’ll be left with.”
Livingstone was homeless himself for part of the 1990s, and now makes a living as an artist and designer. Neither he nor Allison think the magazine is necessarily about people finding routes out of homelessness.
“We’re not social services,” says Allison. “We’d like to encourage anyone who’s interested in getting more involved with our project to do so. And anyone who’s got a problem with drink or drugs, we would encourage them to go and get help.
“There are guys you know who you meet in a doorway, and I’ve had them round my flat for a bath or whatever, but there’s only so much you can do.”
Livingstone says selling the magazine gives the vendors a measure of dignity and freedom.
“You are giving people the freedom to earn a bit of money, and it’s not patronising. Anyone who’s selling it usually has an understanding of it; the ones who keep coming back love it, and they’re the best sellers because they understand it.”
The Nervemeter comes out whenever Allison and Livingstone can afford to print it. The latest print-run was 7,500 copies, printed with proceeds from a benefit gig featuring Fat White Family, the Stallions and the Phobophobes with accompanying art show in May at the Red Gallery in Rivington Street.
Their next plan is to buy their own printing press, and another fundraiser is in the works.
The image of the British Left suffered an unfortunate blow in 2008 when the Google Streetview camera van drove past the offices of The Morning Star – the world’s only English-language socialist daily newspaper – the day after they had been gutted by a catastrophic fire.
“I think it’s been updated now,” says Morning Star editor Richard Bagley. “But for a while if you went to the address on Streetview you had the door hanging off, loads of smoke damage, the windows smashed and the company secretary with his head in his hands on the curb!”
The offices are in better shape today. Down the road from the Stour Space gallery in Hackney Wick, two smart red five-pointed stars sit above the door of a squat brick building, bookending the legend: William Rust House. Inside is a life-size brass relief of the eponymous one-time editor, done in jagged Vorticist style.
The newsroom holds a dozen state-of-the-art iMacs, a Palestinian flag and a pinup front-page from the paper commemorating the late trade union leader Bob Crow: “LOVED by the workers, FEARED by the bosses”. According to a whiteboard, James is ‘Worker of the Week’. Journalists drift in as the morning proceeds, a little sun-damaged from spending the previous day covering a march through central London by the People’s Assembly, an umbrella group for left-wing activists sponsored by the union Unite.
The paper has survived worse than fire in its time. When the USSR collapsed in the early nineties, it nearly took the Morning Star with it: since 1974 the Soviets had been funding the paper through buying thousands of copies a week and shipping them to Moscow.
The cash dried up not long after the Wall came down, causing a financial coronary at the Morning Star. Their building on Farringdon Road had to be sold and staff went unpaid. Bagley’s father, who started at the paper in the days when it was called the Daily Worker, left at this time because he needed to support his family. “Personally for him it was a very difficult time as well, seeing it all be torn apart,” recalls Bagley. “There was a lot of division, in-fighting, factional splits and acrimony. It was a very difficult period”.
Strikes by journalists in 1998 and 2009 again brought the Morning Star to the brink of closure. Pay was notoriously bad, the then-editor John Haylett writing in 2009 that “Every Morning Star staff member is told bluntly at interview: ‘The wages are crap. We work at the paper because we are politically committed to its aims’.”
Things have changed since then. Starting salaries are just over £20,000, with plans to increase in coming years. The staff wouldn’t give much away about their levels of political commitment, joking when asked that “some of us are more socialist than others”.
Funding comes from selling papers (cover price £1, circulation 15-20,000) and from fundraising from supporters. This includes jumble sales and second-hand book auctions, and, in September, a group of readers from Merseyside doing a sponsored cycle-ride from London to Paris. The paper is owned by the People’s Press Society, a cooperative with shares owned by readers.
Bagley points out that this is one reason why the Star’s editorial policy is different to other national dailies. The People’s Assembly march is a case in point. Unite paid for a free giveaway of the Morning Star at the demonstration, for whom it was front-page news. According to the organisers, 50,000 people marched through London on 21 June, though it was barely covered elsewhere in the press. Why?
“I think it possibly reflects the make-up of people in the media and what their outlook is personally,” is Bagley’s answer. “It’s also kind of like: ‘We don’t want there to be an alternative projected; that’s last century, left and right don’t exist.’ There’s a buy-in to this idea that this is it now; we’ve got this model, this is it, and nothing else is valid.”
For the same reason, Labour politicians who advocate nationalisation will be “gone for” by the newspapers. Says Bagley: “I mean the press is owned by oligarchs and pornographers. And the ‘hooray for the Blackshirts’ peeps at the Daily Mail”.
Since Bagley’s brought up the Mail’s Blackshirts connection, it seems fair to ask him about the support the Morning Star gave to Soviet repression in the twentieth century. The Morning Star backed the Russian invasion of Hungary in 1956, which saw tanks on the streets of Budapest and thousands killed.
The Morning Star masthead, with its red star insignia, would be illegal across much of eastern Europe (Estonia, say), much as Swastikas are forbidden in Germany. But this doesn’t much bother Bagley, who believes in the power of branding: “It’s just our logo. It’s not a Soviet star. And we’re not in Estonia anyway. I mean we’ve had that logo since 1966 – it’s our logo.”
A related legacy is a certain trigger-happiness with the word “fascist”. Bagley makes out the 2010 Conservative election campaign was “fascistic” for including “big slogans”.
With such loaded terms in play, politics can become a moral activity, rather than an intellectual one. Editorially, this moral preoccupation comes out in a tendency to commentate-as-you-report, with phrases such as “disgusting work capability assessment privateer Atos” used unflinchingly in the main news section. Bagley contends that this is simply doing more overtly and honestly what other papers do covertly. “We’re not ashamed to show who we are,” he says; which is why the front cover bears an explicit statement of the paper’s aims: “for peace and socialism”.
The paper’s stance follows the policy document of the Communist Party of Britain, Britain’s Road to Socialism, and the decision to do so is endorsed every year by shareholders in the People’s Press Society. Is this preferable to having to answer to the Barclay brothers or Rupert Murdoch? “I don’t get a phone call saying ‘this is your command today’,” Bagley clarifies.
“The broad thrust is that there needs to be an anti-monopoly alliance involving small shopkeepers, labour communities and trades unions, encountering the weight of the corporations and global pressures. That’s a comfortable place to be for a newspaper.”
What is striking is that, despite everything, it’s possible to feel extremely comfortable reading The Morning Star. Bagley’s view that we have a political monoculture is a valid one, and it’s worth giving serious time to his proposition that “under the guise of austerity, a lot of the advances made in the last hundred years are just being rolled back, because they’re not seen as required”. The typos and flagrant bias make you less angry than the stories it is actually reporting on do.
