East End Review

Tag: Books

Atlas of Improbable Places – book review: ‘informative and enthusiastic, scholarly and amusing’

Statuesque: Atlas shoulders the weight of the world at Portmeirion, one of the featured places in the book. Photograph: Travis Elborough

On the outskirts of Mexico City, we’re told, are “the last vestiges of a gigantic and ancient system of canals, terracotta aqueducts and tens of thousands of man-made islands… called chinampas”, one of which has become known as the Island of Dolls.

This “terrifying attraction” was formerly home to a lone hermit, Don Julian Santana Barrera, who one day discovered the body of a young girl drowned in the canal.

The next day, the recluse found a doll washed up on the shore, which he believed must have belonged to the girl, so he attached it to a tree in her memory.

When another doll arrived, the “one-off tribute [turned] into an obsession and before long Don Julian was fishing about in the canal and scouring local rubbish dumps for more dolls to place in trees and to furnish his makeshift abode”.

The loner died in 2001, reputedly drowning in the same part of the canal as the girl, and the place has since grown into a gallery of hanging dolls, with visitors travelling to add to the collection. Oddly, “the life cycles of these anthropomorphic creations” are “alarmingly similar to our own”. It’s a curious and delightfully eerie tale.

Stoke Newington author Travis Elborough’s Atlas of Improbable Places is a collection of short essays describing some of the strangest and most historically-obscure locations across the globe. Split into six sections – Dream Creations, Deserted Destinations, Architectural Oddities, Floating Worlds, Otherworldly Spaces and Subterranean Realms – the peculiarities contained in this somewhat bizarre book are manifold.

Author Travis Elborough

From the aforementioned Isle of Dolls to a squatter metropolis in California, Ireland’s bloody and haunted Leap Hall, and media tycoon William Randolph Hearst’s never-completed mansion, there’s plenty of interest to explore.

Among the highlights is a fascinating account of the formation of a subterranean network of tunnels in the Canadian city of Moose Jaw, where a community of Chinese workers – who arrived to work on the Canadian Pacific Railway – were driven underground as scapegoats when the country slipped into recession.

And then there’s Wrangel Island, on which herds of woolly mammoths thrived while their kin were elsewhere dying out.

Elborough seems particularly intrigued, though, by the geographical remnants of the Soviet Union, and the articles resulting from this are invariably captivating.

He writes of a once closed Soviet city that could now “be taken for a vintage Soviet theme park”; of the Darvaza Crater, or Door to Hell, in Turkmenistan, where a team of Soviet geologists drilling for natural gas in 1971 “blundered and created a deep sinkhole oozing potentially poisonous methane vapours”, which they proceeded to set alight; and then also the acutely symbolic Hill of Crosses in Lithuania.

The release of Atlas of Improbable Places follows Elborough’s excellent A Walk in the Park, and it’s most certainly welcome. It’s informative and enthusiastic, scholarly and amusing. While it might seem tempting to pop this book in the loo and flick through it in short bursts, it’s best read in one or two long stints – not least because once started it’s nigh on impossible to put down.

Atlas of Improbable Places: A Journey to the World’s Most Unusual Corners is published by Aurum Press. ISBN: 978-1781315323. RRP: £20

October 6, 2016
An Unreliable Guide to London – book review

“Top-notch city writing” – An Unreliable Guide to London. Photograph: Influx Press

An Unreliable Guide to London looks and sounds like a bit of a gimmick. The title positions it as a humorous alternative to the city’s latest Lonely Planet publication, while the front cover – laden with hackneyed London graphics and brandished with the tagline “bad advice – limited scope – no practical use” – is the type you might expect to find attached to an unwanted stocking filler. The content, however, is of an altogether different nature.

The idea for the collection, which contains more than a few exceptional stories set in some of the capital’s lesser-known locations, arose during a conversation over meatball subs at a Tottenham retail park. Editors Kit Caless and Gary Budden of Influx Press sat together wondering why publishers weren’t printing books about the parts of London they knew and interacted with on a daily basis. “What novels had we read set in Hanwell, Cricklewood or Barking?” they asked.

Inspired, they brought together 24 diverse contributors from across the city, before launching a successful Kickstarter campaign to give new literature to a London “that exists on the periphery of the imagination”.

An Unreliable Guide… is divided into four sections – West, North, South and East (in order) – and draws on areas as far apart as Wormwood Scrubs and Exmouth Market, and then further again. Aki Schilz gets the collection off to a great start with “Beating the Bounds”, but it’s Eley Williams’s bizarre and brilliant “In Pursuit of the Swan at Brentford Ait” that really sets the work alight.

Williams delves into the rich, ambiguous world of cryptid research, painting a mythological history of an over-grown swan believed to have long terrorised local riverbanks, with a plumage reported to be “dim smoky purple or a vivid electric pink”. She describes Brentford FC football chants that pay credence to the beast and details umpteen dangerous encounters stretching back centuries. It’s a stunningly strange tale.

Budden’s own “Staples Corner (and how we can know it)” – about a trip on the 266 to Currys and PC World, dropped off amid a “web of underpasses and roundabouts, of concrete walkways and steps to nowhere… trapped in the fevered dying dream of a brutalist architect” – is another of West’s highlights, while Chloe Aridjis kicks off the North section with an evocative exploration of night, shadows and optical illusions in N1.

Though M John Harrison’s “Babies From Sand: A Guide to Oliver’s Island, Barnes & the St Margarets’ Day of the Dead” is one of the weirdest, most-inspired pieces of short literature I’ve come across in a while, it’s the assemblage from East that is, for me, of most interest (primarily because I know the territory so well).

The poet Tim Wells lyrically laments the loss of wanker-free record stores in Hackney, where back in the day he’d purchase reggae, drink beer and chat with mates, before moving on to get his fill of pie, mash, liquor and slippery eels at Cooke’s on Kingsland Road. Nikesh Shukla makes fine work of Tayyabs, the famous Whitechapel curry house, while Irenosen Okojie brings a dizzying, Borges-like tale of time travelling monks to Barking.

As if that’s not enough, Marshman Gareth E Rees delivers a typically fun and enlightening account of a walk around Leyton Mills Retail Park – the car park, specifically – and co-editor Caless finishes things off with a probing series of politically-loaded vignettes dedicated to the forces tugging away at Exmouth Market; there’s spiced lamb, adulterous office sex and a bronze bust of Vladimir Lenin.

Despite appearances, An Unreliable Guide to London is a formidable anthology of top-notch city writing.

July 28, 2016
Post-war poignancy: a photographic elegy to 1960s East End

London docks, 1964. Photograph: John Claridge

East End is a stylish collection of more than 200 black and white photographs that captures all the grit and poverty of post-war East London and turns it into an elegy for a lost world.

Plaistow-born John Claridge, one of the most prolific photographers of the 1960s, had a typical East End childhood, playing in bombsites, boxing and falling asleep to the sounds and lights of the nearby docks.

Claridge knew he wanted to take photographs after seeing a camera at a funfair and took photos everywhere he went – whether it was the docks with his father or the shops on a Saturday with his mother, developing the photos in their outside toilet. The result is an intimate look at the East End through the eyes of one of its own.

Outside the Anglo Pak Muslim Butchers in 1962. Photograph: John Claridge

The photographs are a glimpse into an East End that is no more. In one picture a horse stands in a field framed by the Truman Brewery in the background, the chimney standing tall in a sky that has no skyscrapers. Others show shops with hand painted signs and broken windows, and a cobbler in his workshop.

The book progresses to show a changing East End. There are building sites and older faces, graffiti on a metal walkway and hollowed out factories, signifying the end of Claridge’s work in the area. As he mentions in the book’s introduction: “My East End was gone…I never expected it to go and then all of a sudden it was gone.”

The photographs rarely show any indication of a specific place such as a street sign – yet it is so distinctly the East End. From misty views of the Thames at dawn to close up portraits of boxers, the location is constantly signposted by the photographer’s familiarity and warmth to his subjects.

East End begins and ends with photographs of London’s docks and wharves, cementing the connection between Claridge’s childhood experiences there and his career: “I used to get up with my dad before he went down the docks…I really wanted to go to sea and see the world, but I did it through people sending me around the world to take photographs.”

East End by John Claridge is published by Spitalfields Life Books. RRP: £25.00. ISBN: 9780957656994

Mr and Mrs Jones, 1968. Photograph: John Claridge

July 19, 2016
London Life – book review: a wonderful photographic celebration of the city

Touch of frost: Regent’s Canal freezes over. Photograph: Colin O’Brien

Photographer Colin O’Brien’s book London Life may appear at first glance a series of beautiful yet somewhat random photographs, but is in fact a narrative of London and his own life.

The book begins in Little Italy, Clerkenwell, where O’Brien grew up. The early photographs are box camera negatives that O’Brien came upon by chance when clearing out his house. Looking at a photograph of two friends leaning against a car in Hatton Gardens in 1948, O’Brien says: “I love the way they’re posing. They were Italian, very confident and very cheeky.”

O’Brien’s early photographs show an interesting contrast of tenderness and violence. On one page, a girl is being taken to a birthday party in her new dress on Clerkenwell Road; on another, we see a car accident on the junction of the very same road.

There is a sense of loss in O’Brien’s photographs. He says: “I took lots of pictures of ‘last things’: the last tram, the last trolley bus, the last day of Woolworths, the last day of smoking in parks.”

Horse and cart in Hackney

Looking at pictures of Westminster Bridge and Trafalgar Square in 1954, O’Brien notices that even the light has changed. The air back then was dirty: “I remember going to the cinema and getting our money back because we couldn’t see the screen.”

It is not just the faces that are changing, but also the very nature of photography in the city. In the first half of the book, the photographs seem lonelier, the city more vast. In the 70s, however, the photographs are more populated with people and cars.

Flattened: High-rise flats are demolished at Hackney Downs. Photograph: Colin O’Brien

Every photograph has its own personal story. O’Brien turns to a photograph of Jim’s Café, on Chatsworth Road, taken in 2008. The proprietor is standing in the doorway.

“I took his picture, went back a month later with the pictures and his wife started crying and said he died last week. I said do you want the pictures and she said if she wanted them, she’d get in touch. She never got back.”

London Life is a wonderful celebration of the city, of people together and of tragedy. “I just take what’s in front of me,” O’Brien says, and it is this openness to experience that has taken O’Brien from the Victorian dwellings of his youth, and made him the London photographer that we know today.

London Life is published by Spitalfields Life. RRP: £25.00. ISBN: 9780957656956.

July 8, 2016
Adrift: A Secret Life of London’s Waterways, review – ‘serious and fascinating’

Nomadic existence: author Helen Babbs documents 10 months living on a boat in her new book Adrift

If you’re given to walking, running or cycling around Victoria Park, or strolling from Mile End to Broadway Market on a Saturday morning, you’ll be familiar with stretches of the Hertford Union and Regent’s Canals. You’ll no doubt have noted the motley rows of eclectically-named barge boats, and you’ll probably have peered through the windows at the micro-homes within, wondering whether or not a life on the water could be for you.

Whilst most of us tempted by that nomadic, challenging existence will do nothing but imagine, Helen Babbs, acclaimed author of My Garden, the City and Me: Rooftop Adventures in the Wilds of London, has taken a more proactive approach. She traded in the comfort of central heating, mains electricity and community roots for a narrow boat called Pike and decided to document a 10-month period of her new life, travelling from the capital’s east to west in 2014.

Adrift: A Secret Life of London’s Waterways is made up of four seasonal sections split into poetic and informative vignettes. Thoroughly researched, it covers the disparate histories of the canals, the surrounding landscapes and natural habitats, and the unrelenting presence of development. As well as mulling over the wider social constitution and the reasons why someone might opt out of living on land, Babbs records the personal, day-to-day trials and triumphs onboard.

But not just about the anatomy of the city’s waterways, it is also a book about literature, and for those interested in nature writing, psychogeography and the literature of London, Adrift will be a treat. It offers a compendium of great works to discover and revisit. Babbs, clearly a well-informed and voracious reader, touches on figures such as Penelope Fitzgerald, Thomas De Quincey, Dickens and Virginia Woolf – mentioning the latter during a delightful musing on truth, perception and the capricious nature of place.

And then there are the many writers still working today with whom she shares themes and concerns, and from whom she appropriates various methods of dealing with her material. While literature has long been associated with travel and journeys – The Epic of Gilgamesh is at once arguably the first travelogue and the first work of literature – great British authors of recent years in particular have made use of a roving, fluid practice, writing beautifully about the landscapes they come upon and get to know.

Babbs’s use of the word “territory”, for instance, recalls Iain Sinclair’s – loaded with passion and politics – and her close, enthusiastic examination of the natural environment, albeit in an urban setting, has something of a holistic quality akin to the works of Robert Macfarlane and Richard Mabey. She references these writers – Sinclair and Mabey on numerous occasions – and nods superbly to Michael Moorcock’s Mother London in the final stages.

Perhaps less overtly, there’s something of George Monbiot’s Feral, and the re-wilding movement, running throughout. In a nice section dedicated to the Middlesex Filter Beds, she details the evolution of an old waterworks, from its original cholera-related purpose during the Victorian era to derelict, overgrown tranquility and on to official nature reserve. The book gives the reader a sense of the possibility, with the right management, of a more verdant London.

Style-wise, Babbs’s effortless prose is tight and lyrical, moseying along at a calm, steady pace, but there are moments both barbed and cutting. Here she is on the 2012 Olympics: “The mania of the sporting event long gone, the left-behind landscape is entirely altered. What came before has been comprehensively erased – the allotments, the dog track, the silty tides, the marooned boats. Mad old London running to the wild. We are a city that easily forgets.”

Adrift is a serious and fascinating book, and I’ll be sure to read whatever its exciting young author produces next.

Adrift: A Secret Life of London’s Waterways is published by Icon Books. RRP: £16.99. ISBN: 9781848319202.

July 6, 2016
A Walk in the Park: The Life and Times of a People’s Institution – book review

At leisure: a man cycles in Clissold Park

We all know the benefit of ‘fresh air’, even those of us who spend the majority of our urban lives hunched over computer screens or sprawled across sofas.

This common sense approach to the great outdoors is backed up by recent scientific research showing that exposure to green spaces reduces cardiovascular disease, mental health problems and overall mortality. What most of us don’t know is how our greens came to be what they are today.

Living in the city, you probably inhale most of your fresh air in a park, but in this you are lucky, for it is only relatively recently that urban greenery has been freely available for all to use.

In A Walk in the Park: The Life and Times of a People’s Institution, Hackney writer Travis Elborough charts the fascinating history of the little pockets of nature that most of us now take for granted.

We discover that the parks have their origins in blood sports, as the forebear of the curated modern green space was the medieval private game park. Virtually all early urban parks – or ‘pleasure gardens’ – were also private places, to which the masses were admitted only on payment of a fee.

Though that fee typically entitled park-goers access to a smorgasbord of lavish amusements and decorations; in 1742 even Mozart performed at one such venue, Ranelagh gardens in Chelsea.

It was only in the Victorian era that the notion of the open access park took hold, with the young princess Victoria herself opening the first free park in Bath in 1830. The latter 19th century was the heyday of the urban park, as the recreational and ‘improvement’ needs of the industrial proletariat began to be recognised.

More parks were built between 1885 and 1914 than during any period before or since, and they benefitted from the period’s Arts-and-Craft style.

With its lake and pagoda, Victoria Park in Tower Hamlets was one of the most lavish of the royal parks laid out in London at that time. And famous 19th century arboretums at Loddiges and Abney Park in contemporary Hackney were widely-emulated models.

The nadir of the modern park was undoubtedly the period stretching from the post-war housing boom of the 1950s to the 1980s, when public places was gobbled up for redevelopment at an alarming rate.

Investment in open space also fell, and by the early 1990s many urban parks were dangerous, decaying relics.

A major 1994 report co-authored by Hackney historian Ken Worpole marked a turnaround in this trend, and parks enjoyed somewhat of a renaissance during the subsequent two decades on the back of National Lottery funding, only to fall victim to the austerity politics of the contemporary era.

With council spending on parks plummeting, land being sold for redevelopment and local authority grass increasingly being leased for paid events, parks are again facing a crisis that has prompted one call for all of London – 47 per cent of which is made up of green space – to be declared a national park.

In some senses this struggle is not new. One of the perennial moral and logistical challenges for park-keepers has been the surveillance of park use: who was to be allowed in, with what attire, and for what purpose.

The size and shape of men’s swimming shorts was a subject of regulation well into the 1930s, and the curtailment of sex in parks has been a losing battle from furtive couplings in Victorian pleasure gardens to wartime frolics in blacked out shrubbery to the hippy orgies of the 1960s.

Together with sex, politics has been one of the most consistent uses to which parks have been put down the centuries. From the 19th century open green space hosted electoral hustings, demonstrations and political gatherings of all sorts.

In 1948, Victoria Park proved a convenient place for Chartist meetings; on the eve of the First World War, Sylvia Pankhurst addressed anti-conscription gatherings there, and Oswald Mosley’s Black Shirts held rallies on the same grass in the 1930s.

Author Travis Elborough

Travis Elborough is known for his deft and quirky explorations of social history, including the Routemaster bus, vinyl records and the British seaside. This volume excels in this particular sub-genre; the prose is generally smooth, and often deliciously witty.

The book is also stuffed with fascinating titbits, such as the fact that Birkenhead Park near Liverpool was the inspiration for the design of New York’s Central Park, or that Alexandra Palace was used as an internment camp during the First World War, or that Victoria Park hosts the UK’s oldest continuous model boat club, dating from 1904.

So next time you wander over to your local park to soak in the summer sun, take along a copy of A Walk in the Park to show you how you got there.

A Walk in the Park: The Life and Times of a People’s Institution by Travis Elborough is published by Jonathan Cape RRP: £18.99 ISBN: 9780224099820

June 15, 2016
In a Land of Paper Gods author on ‘naughty children who disappeared from history’

Rebecca Mackenzie, author of In a Land of Paper Gods

Rebecca Mackenzie grew up in the jungles of Thailand, where her parents worked as Christian missionaries, but at 12 she and her family moved back to a Scottish fishing village.

Now living in Hackney, MacKenzie has written her debut novel, In a Land of Paper Gods, which steers away from her early experiences to tell the story of a schoolgirl in a boarding school in China at the outbreak of the second Sino-Japanese War.

Rebecca, how long have you lived in Hackney?

I moved to London at 17 when I went to university and I’ve been here ever since. I moved to Dalston over ten years ago. Friends used to be hugely relieved when I’d meet them from the bus stop and walk them back again. Now I live at the top of a vicarage in Stoke Newington. I love it, even though the first thing I see outside my front door is a graveyard.

The thing that seems to have struck a lot of reviewers is that it’s quite personal book – something that had parallels with what you experienced growing up.

What drew me to the lives of missionary kids was my personal experience. I grew up in what was partly an evangelical environment, but I was also surrounded by Thai animism, spirit worship, and the idea that there were spirits and creatures everywhere. But I chose to set the book in a different part of Asia, at a different period in history because I needed that distance to kickstart my imagination.

While there are definitely biographical themes there’s also a truth that comes from my dreamworld that’s not like the truth of your day-to-day reality.

I believe in synchronicity as well and there were synchronous moments in the writing for the book. For example I went to interview an English woman who’d lived in China during the Sino-Japanese war, and like me she was the daughter of missionaries. We were having this nice cup of tea together and I felt something. I couldn’t stop looking at her. It turned out that she’d returned from China to Edinburgh and she’d moved into the same street in Edinburgh I’d lived on, 50 years before me, and her grandparents came from the same tiny village in the north of Scotland my grandparents came from.

I thought that the voice of the lead character, Etta, was very strong. How did you create her?

I saw these formal school photographs at SOAS from a missionary school. Some children, if they weren’t sitting still, became a kind of blur. I became interested in these naughty children, who somehow disappeared from history as a result of fidgeting.

What things as a writer do you find particularly helpful about living in London?

Being near other writers and other creative people is a wonderful resource, but with that comes distraction.

How do you make time for writing, solitude and focus?

I love sitting in Rare Books and Music in the British Library. The concentration in there spurs me on to keep working.

In a Land of Paper Gods
is published by Tinder Press.
RRP: £16.99 ISBN: 9781472224194

April 21, 2016
How London’s terror attacks inspired novel No More Heroes

Novelist Stephen Thompson

Most people can remember what they were doing when they heard the news of the 7/7 bombings. I was working as a receptionist in an office in Bloomsbury, and heard a bang from several streets away of a number 30 bus exploding on Tavistock Square.

No More Heroes, by Hackney-born author Stephen Thompson, takes us closer still to the events of 7/7. The reader returns to the day of the attacks through the character of Simon Weekes, a man who miraculously survived one of the blasts on the London Underground.

Simon, an unambitious man who wants nothing more than a quiet life, is catapulted into the media spotlight after saving people’s lives in the aftermath of the bombing.

But attention is exactly what Simon doesn’t want, for he is harbouring a dark secret. The book goes further back in time to Simon’s childhood in Hackney during the Eighties, where we find out about the life from which he has long since escaped, but is now threatening to catch up on him.

Judging from accounts of survivors, the book’s fast-paced prologue is a realistic and extremely vivid portrayal of what happened that day, to the extent that at first I thought the book was autobiographical.

But Stephen Thompson is not in the business of autobiography. The 44-year-old author, who has published four other novels, was not even in the country at the time of the bombings, though recalls them having a profound effect on him.

“The event itself rocked me as a Londoner even though I wasn’t in London at the time,” he says. “It took me a long time to filter it and to understand what had had such a strong impact on me, and what if anything I wanted to say about it.

“I realised what I wanted to say was that we can come back from something like that. Only seven years later we had the Olympics here, which around the time of 7/7 no one could have imagined actually happening.”

Simon’s parents are African-Caribbean immigrants, and ethnicity is not incidental to the narrative. Freeing himself from the bombed out carriage, Simon in his shock identifies each person by their skin colour.

For Thompson, writing through the prism of race is an “inescapable thing” for any black writer who works within established literary traditions.

“The consciousness [of race] changes your approach and the fabric and whole aesthetic of the piece. You have to make up that mind: do I want to go down that road or do I want to write for a non-ethnic or non-colour specific audience? I chose to concentrate on race because I thought race and racial identity, and religion and religious extremism, are important components of the novel and give it another dimension.”

Like his protagonist, Thompson grew up in Hackney during the 1980s to working class parents of African-Caribbean immigrant stock. But any similarities end there, as Thompson stresses that Simon Weekes is a “fictional composite” and that the book’s tales of squatting and of school and family life, are the result of rigorous research into the period.

“Good fiction does have some kind of autobiographical underpinning,” he says. “But I’m keen to stress that I am a writer who uses the tools and trade of his imagination to create fiction.”

That said, the decision to set part of No More Heroes in Hackney was, Thompson admits, a case of writing what you know.

“Many of the bombers were from the north and I toyed with the idea setting it in the north of England,” he says, “but I thought I’m from Hackney so it just made sense to set it in this part of the world.”

No More Heroes is published by Jacaranda Books. RRP: £7.99 ISBN: 9781909762121

February 18, 2016
A Traveller’s Year: 365 Days of Travel Writing in Diaries, Journals and Letters – review

Author and historian Travis Elborough

In the dead of winter, the mind has a tendency to venture into warmer climes and imagine the adventures to be had there. But the holidays are over, and most of us face the daily grind through bleak grey days for weeks to come. What better way to escape than a good travel book?

A Traveller’s Year puts at one’s fingertips a cornucopia of travel writing, in small morsels. The book is made up of snippets of travellers’ journals and diaries from the sixteenth century to the twenty-first. Use of the calendar day as an organising principle means that the book is full of serendipitous incongruities of time and place.

A 1992 account by Max Décharné of a man in an American bar asking for his Guinness to be microwaved is immediately followed by James Boswell’s 1773 tale of his journey to the Isle of Skye with a seasick Samuel Johnson.

George Orwell relates how in 1936 Wigan “nearly everyone seems very badly dressed and youths on corners markedly less smart and rowdy than in London”; in the following entry, Mungo Park recounts that on a 1796 African trip “the king, whose name was Daisy Koorabarri, was not to be distinguished from his subjects by any superiority in point of dress; a bank of earth, about two feet high, upon which was spread a leopard skin, constituted the only mark of royal dignity.”

There are between one and three entries – ranging from half a page to two pages in total – for each day of the year. Those who like their text in small quantities can savour the book for a full twelve months, reading each day’s entries at the relevant point in the calendar.

Yet it is easy to gobble up months at a time, mesmerised by the mish-mash of contemporary concerns about wifi to seventeenth-century tales of travellers dining on beaver tail, bear and camel meat.

The format of the books means one is never bored with tedious accounts of the duller moments, as the editing has been craftily performed by others.

Many of the authors are professional writers, together with painters, explorers, botanists, political leaders and tourists. Most are Anglophone, including Samuel Pepys, Captain James Cook, Mary Shelley, Herman Melville, Henry David Thoreau, Queen Victoria, Charles Darwin, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, William Morris, Charles Dickens, Graham Greene, Jack Kerouac, Alan Bennett and Bruce Chatwin. There is also a smattering of European and Indian writers such as Christopher Columbus, Michel de Montaigne, Simone de Beauvoir and Rajaram I, the Rajah of Kolhapoor.

The locales range from Easter Island (Jacob Roggeveen, 1722) to Brighton (which the Rajah of Bobbili likens to Bangalore) with all the continents in between.

One thing that strikes the modern reader is the arduousness of pre-modern journeys. Before the era of jet travel, voyages were truly exacting and the misery of travel is well documented in this volume. Writing in 1934, Wilfred Thesiger appears to take these dangers in his stride: “I have not seen any horse in Aussa, though I have seen some mules and donkeys. As I was going to bed I killed two tarantulas in my tent. Beastly things.”

The book also pulses with the wonder of foreign lands. Travelling in the US in 1846, Edwin Bryant marvels at the physical attributes of Native Americans: “Many of the women, for regularity of features and symmetry of figure, would bear off the palm of beauty from some of our most celebrated belles.

A portion of the Sioux women are decidedly beautiful.” In 1914 Ernest Shackleton describes Antarctic recreation: “We remained moored to a floe over the following day, the wind not having moderated; indeed it freshened to a gale in the afternoon, and the members of staff and crew took advantage of the pause to enjoy a vigorously contested game of football on the surface of the floe alongside the ship.”

And arriving in the Barbados in 1932, Evelyn Waugh finds welcome refreshment: “Dropped anchor about 7 and went ashore to the Aquatic club to bathe and drink rum swizzles. Returned to ship for breakfast and later went ashore to Bridgetown.”

This hardback volume is handsomely produced and includes a selection of vintage photographs that add considerably to the magic of the writing. Simone de Beauvoir tells of “becoming a different me” in New York, and with this delightful book, we can all share in the transformative powers of travel, a bit at a time.

A Traveller’s Year: 365 Days of Travel Writing in Diaries, Journals and Letters is compiled by Travis Elborough and Nick Rennison and published by Frances Lincoln Ltd. RRP: £25. ISBN: 9780711236080

January 31, 2016
Hackney Propaganda: a look at 19th century working men’s clubs

The Mildmay Club today. Photograph: Ken Worpole

You don’t have to look far to find examples of how East London is changing, either on the streets or indeed on this very website. Continuity – our closeness to the past – is unlikely to make headline news, though to the social historian it is of equal importance.

Author Ken Worpole acknowledges the difficulty of simultaneously holding a sense of change from and proximity to the past in his excellent introduction to Hackney Propaganda: Working Class Club Life and Politics in Hackney 1870–1900.

The pamphlet, which Worpole co-authored with the lecturer and historian Barry Burke, was first printed in 1980 by Centerprise, a radical community centre on Kingsland Road sadly now defunct, and is an extended version of two talks given there in the autumn of 1979.

“The contradictoriness of the past is captured in the popular expression, ‘the good old bad old days’, in which, of course, we continue to live”, writes Worpole in his introduction, and what follows is a brief survey (40 pages) covering Hackney’s working men’s club movement and socialist organisations during the latter part of the nineteenth century.

Radical intellectuals such as Mary Wollstonecraft, Daniel Defoe and Isaac Watts are given their due in Hackney with proposed statues and streets and pubs named after them. But for working class people in Victorian Hackney, free thought and political independence were impossible without a formal education and better living conditions.

After the Reform Act was passed to extend adult suffrage in 1867 and the founding in 1864 of the International Working Men’s Association came a boom of groups and organisations representing unorthodox ideas and non-conformist thought.

The working men’s club was a hotbed of oppositional opinion. An alternative to the public house, it was a heated and well-lit environment where men could drink ale, enjoy entertainment and educate themselves.

The Borough of Hackney Club, which opened in 1873, contained a reading room and a small library, and its activities included “weekly discussions and lectures on political and social questions”.

By the 1880s, according to Charles Booth’s survey Life and Labour of the People in London, there were 115 clubs in Hackney and East London. “To many more club life is an education,” Booth wrote.

The authors look at the members and activities of several clubs of the period, clubs with names such as the Homerton Club, the United Radical Club and the
Kingsland Progressive.

Some of the clubs were explicitly socialist, distributing literature in the streets and holding meetings that were broken up by police. Others provided an audience and venue for speakers such as William Morris.

Walking through Hackney, it is difficult to gain a sense of what the borough used to look like 130 years ago, let alone feel any connection to the people who lived in those times.

But Warpole and Burke provide anecdotes and vignettes about those long forgotten people who once inhabited Hackney’s streets, which entice the reader and force us to engage imaginatively. They also draw neat conclusions about the legacy of those times on the politics of today – though the today referred to is 1980. To make Hackney Propaganda relevant to 2015 would require at least another chapter.

Hackney Propaganda: Working Class Club Life and Politics in Hackney 1870–1900 is available from Hackney bookshops and at worpole.net. RRP: £5.

November 23, 2015