East End Review

Tag: Hackney Wick

Gavin Turk gives cautious welcome to plans for dedicated ‘artist zones’

Artist Gavin Turk at Hackney WickED. Photograph: Anna Maloney

Plans to ringfence dedicated zones to offer protection from developers and rising rents have been given a cautious welcome by Hackney Wick artist Gavin Turk.

Mayor of London Sadiq Khan’s culture chief Justine Simons is working on proposals to stem the numbers of creatives being priced out of the city through the creation of a “creative enterprise zone”.

But Turk, who is considered one of the Young British Artists whose work gained notoriety at the Sensation exhibition at the Royal Academy of Art in the mid 1990s, told the London Citizen that there were pros and cons to such schemes.

He said Simon’s proposals were “all good” but that they “might start to create an unfortunate situation where you say one artist is worth keeping and another isn’t”.

Turk added: “There is culturally a problem in this country where the arts are seen as a Sunday activity, and accordingly artists are an underclass who aren’t very well paid.”

He also warned there could be “problems with the idea of government legitimation of art”.

He said: “When I was doing a residency in Paris back in the late 1980s, the government there were keen to protect artists in certain areas – so in the Bastille you had artists running away from the government’s patronising [of them] because they felt it undermined the creativity of their practice.

“There’s a massive contradiction there, and it’s a very difficult thing to approach.”

But the 48-year-old artist praised Ms Simons for taking steps to stop artists being priced out of London.

“UK culture is quite bad at seeing and respecting art, but the country actually does quite well by its creative cultural production: design, art, advertising, film and music,” he said.

“So it’s good that she [Simons] has made a call and said ‘let’s go appreciate these artists and make an investment in them’.”

Turk’s current exhibition at Hackney Wick’s Béton Brut Gallery tackles the subject of gentrification.

“It’s a story that’s told over and over: artists go to cheap places, they create an energy, and people start to be drawn to these areas, and then property developers see that attraction and excitement and start coming in to build flats,” Turk said.

“It’s funny, because in a way artists are actually part of the gentrification process. There’s actually an economic value to their cultural capital – artists are financially valuable.

“Developers should almost be paying them, but how do you do something like that legislatively? Maybe there could be studio spaces on the bottom floor of these expensive flats? But then, I’m not sure artists would be interested.”

Professor Simon Robertshaw from the University of East London is among those who have given their backing to the idea of protected areas for artists.

He said: “The way in which London actually supports its artists isn’t great. I think we’ve got to start having protected zones for artists’ rents.

“My staff who are artists are now moving out of London to Margate or Folkestone or Hastings because that’s what they can afford.”

September 16, 2016
London’s Olympic Legacy – book review: ‘spruced up field notes’

Author Gillian Evans outside the Olympic stadium

What lasting benefits did East Londoners seek from the 2012 Olympics? What were we promised? What have and will we receive? These are questions that have been pondered ever since planning for the Games started in 2000.

Sixteen years and two mayors on – and four years after the Games themselves – it is possible at last to begin to take stock and patch together a verdict.

The London Olympics were from the start sold as an opportunity to regenerate East London in a sustainable and inclusive manner.

In 2007 Tessa Jowell, then minister in charge of this mega-event, promised to “make the Olympic Park a blueprint for sustainable living”.

Mayor Ken Livingstone, for his part, maintained that “the most enduring legacy of the Olympics will be the regeneration of an entire community [East London] for the direct benefit of everyone who lives there”.

Little by little, however, many of the idealistic goals that motivated those involved the early phases of legacy planning were eroded in the face of a sharp economic downturn, government cuts to public spending and a change in the political complexion, first of the London mayor and then of the government at Westminster.

Gillian Evans’s volume London’s Olympic Legacy: The Inside Track provides an account of this process based on participant observation.

Though Evans – an academic anthropologist at the University of Manchester – has published the book with an academic imprint, it is written in an engaging narrative style as a chronicle of her insider view of the planning process.

Evans was embedded in the bodies responsible for legacy design from 2008 to 2012.

She recounts both the ebullience and commitment of those involved in developing plans for the Olympic Park and surrounds after the games, but also their frustration as governing structures (‘delivery vehicles’) changed and swerving political priorities unstitched years of work.

Though the volume is compelling in the dramatic style of its presentation, which is quite atypical of most academic monographs, it is in many ways an intensely frustrating book, as it reads more like spruced up field notes than a coherent analysis.

The study lacks the conceptual framing that might help readers make sense of the broader social and structural forces that shaped the evolution of legacy thinking, or the norms and role understandings that informed individuals’ visions of what they were trying to achieve.

Another underwhelming aspect of the volume is that the main narrative ends abruptly in 2012, before legacy delivery had got underway in earnest. The brief ‘afterward’ provides a sketch of the some of the achievements and failures of the delivery process, but not an overall assessment of the extent to which the original promises were kept.

This worm’s-eye view of someone working alongside Olympic legacy planners has produced invaluable documentary evidence of the evolution of thinking about how East London could and should be reshaped in the post-Olympic period, but it would have benefited tremendously from more in-depth analysis.

London’s Olympic Legacy: The Inside Track is published by Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN: 978-0-230-31390

August 23, 2016
Floating Cinema comes to Hackney Wick flyover this weekend

Coming soon to a flyover near you: Floating Cinema. Photograph: Up Projects

This weekend (19 – 21 August) will see a Floating Cinema moor underneath the A12 flyover in Hackney Wick.

The award-winning structure, designed by Duggan Morris Architects, will play host to a three-day festival of open-air film screenings, workshops and talks, all under the theme of ‘World Cities’, considering London’s place in the world.

Tickets are booking up fast for a variety of documentaries, films, talks and a guided walk through Hackney led by Kit Caless of Hackney-based publisher Influx Press.

Available screenings include the “documentary meets participatory opera” Public House, about how a pub in Peckham was saved from the hands of property developers and became the first Asset of Community value, and Half Way, a film about a family in Epping forced into homelessness.

Daisy May Hudson in documentary Half Way. Photograph: Nick Pomeroy

The weekend festival will also see DJs, free popcorn from Propercorn, craft beers from local Five Points Brewing Company as well as a series of drop-in events over the course of the weekend.

For further information on tickets and events, see: http://floatingcinema.info/events/2016/world-cities

August 19, 2016
Queen Elizabeth Park eateries: Breakfast Club, Mason & Company, and Randy’s Wing Bar – reviews

The Buffalo wings at Randy are highly recommended. Photograph: Joe Woodhouse

Hackney Wick is virtually unrecognisable from its pre-Olympics self. When I moved in to Queen’s Yard almost six years ago, there were few bars and restaurants. Now it is a bustling centre for boozing.

Once upon a time the famously ugly Olympics Media Centre loomed over the disused canal, rendered inaccessible by a razor wire fence. Whilst passing one day I spotted a dead dog in the water and informed some Park officials. “Oh we know,” they responded breezily. “It’s been there for ages!”

But with the London Legacy Development Corporation’s regeneration plans coming to fruition, this stretch of canal has been transformed into highly desirable real estate, with a glut of canal-front restaurants opening. I visited three of them to investigate. On a sunny day, all of these places have outdoor seating in lush greenery, making it a perfect place to linger with a beer.

Out to brunch

The Breakfast Club, which started out in Islington, is like a TGI Fridays for the younger set. It is a cheerful destination that serves American-style breakfasts, heaping piles of nachos and a range of cocktails. At brunch I had the chorizo hash, which was perfectly serviceable, and my friend enjoyed her vegetarian sausage sandwich.

Later, to see what it was like in the evening, two of us attended a boozy bingo night, where a girl dressed as a grandma demanded that the bar staff bring out shot after shot of sours for the players. It was slightly corporate for my tastes but unpretentious fun nonetheless, and a great place to go with a group of friends or colleagues for a knees-up.

The Breakfast Club
29 Easy Bay Lane
E15 2GW

Playing for crafts

When I heard Mason & Company’s premise – craft beer – I was dubious. The Wick already houses three breweries after all. It is, however, worth a visit. From the owner of the Five Points Brewing Company, this is a glossy bare pine venture with industrial motifs.

The beer menu includes rare and limited edition brews from around the world, and whilst some half pints cost as much as £5, the selection is exceptional, with up and coming breweries such as Siren as well as local favourites Beavertown and The Kernel. Heading up the food is former Kerb regular Capish? with items like deep fried spaghetti balls and meat loaf corn dog. The menu seems to be a parody of traditional Italian-American fare and was too rich for my tastes, although would serve as good ballast for extended drinking.

Inside Mason & Company. Photograph: Owen Richards

Over two visits I tried most of the menu: the aforementioned spaghetti balls were forgotten by the server and never made it to my plate, but the steak sandwich stood out, tender and melting and topped with taleggio cheese. And for vegetarians the aubergine parmigiana was a fine option.

Mason and Company
25 East Bay Lane
London
E15 2GW

Winging it

My favourite among the new arrivals is Randy’s Wing Bar. It was formed by Richard and Andy, two street food graduates with a family connection to a Norfolk chicken farm.

“They couldn’t give the wings away,” Richard explained, and thus a business idea was born.

Like the previous two restaurants, the menu is predominantly American-inspired, with chicken wings, popcorn shrimp, fries and cocktails. The atmosphere is unpretentious and inviting. We had a taster of wings, which include the classic Buffalo and Kansas styles, as well as Gangnam (Korean style), Bombay and Hanoi (a fish sauce recipe akin to the one from the famous street food outlet Pok Pok). Curiously not the only place in this line-up to serve chicken scratchings, it seems like the perfect local joint for a cocktail and snack, where I might head to unwind with friends after work.

Randy’s Wing Bar
28 East Bay Lane
Here East
The Press Centre
London
E15 2GW

July 25, 2016
Feral – Ulli Mattsson review: ‘urging new water through old riverbeds’

Ulli Mattsson. Photograph: Adam Weymouth

For Ulli Mattsson the water has always been synonymous with home. Growing up by a river on the border of Swedish Lapland, she has lived for the past six years aboard a former peat-transporter on the River Lea. This century-old barge has doubled as both abode and arena, acting as the stage from which she recently launched debut album Feral and its accompanying tour over the course of three intimate nightly shows down in Hackney Wick.

Feral’s invocation of the waterways acts as an antidote to homesickness that delves deep into the tradition of Scandinavian folk music. Beginning with ‘Blue Whales’, an elegiac waltz of blunted guitar cut through by pining strings, it is a song saturated with a yearning for landscapes of her past, for blue whales and other organisms not usually found in the depths of the Lea.

‘Mother’, the record’s lead single, similarly follows this notion of loss and yearning but with more dynamism in the music. The guitar is upbeat despite the bleakness of the narrative, and this renewed vigour propels the album forward.

Lyrically, the album seems to take its inspirations from folk oral traditions. Mattsson’s vocals, though minimal in range, materialise with a raw tenacity that conjures fragments of her homeland into a collage of aquatic ecology, oceanic mythology, and her own existence.

It is an album of stories that find their sources in both the individual and communal tales of sea-faring creatures, from the account of the lonesome ‘Riverwoman’, to references to Queequeg and the Sirens found in ‘Winter’s Waiting’.

Ulli Mattsson’s Feral. Photograph: Adam Weymouth

Whilst the first half of the record pays due reverence to traditional instrumentation, the song ‘Magpie’ ushers in a change of scenery. The sudden deluge of electronic instruments that appear in the middle-eight presents an interesting contrast to Mattsson’s personal take on the old ‘One For Sorrow’ nursery rhyme. It brings out a clear sense of divergence from what has come before, thrusting the record into new waters.

Subsequently, tracks such as ‘Wandering Lights’ and ‘Last Song’ offer some of the most surprising and interesting musical moments on the album in a honeyed cohesion between deep, ritualistic percussion, and the flash and twinkle of modern programming.

It is through this mixture of old and new, here and there, that Mattsson uses Feral to draw original noises from traditional sounds, urging new water through old riverbeds.

ullimattsson.com

April 27, 2016
Ringing the changes – London’s first all-women’s wrestling event hits Hackney Wick

The Pro Wrestling EVE roster. Photograph: Pro Wrestling Eve / The Ringside Perspective

When the opening bell rang at London’s first ever all women’s wrestling event last month, it called time on another fight that has rumbled on for more than 60 years.

Professional wrestling in London was outlawed in the 1930s, and when the ban was lifted in 1952, the Home Office quickly passed a by-law exempting women.

The ban was finally dismissed for both sexes in 1987, but with the rise of American wrestling and their focus on ‘divas’, women’s wrestling became, for the most part, a sideshow.

But the ‘Let’s Make History’ event, hosted by professional women’s wrestling organisation Pro Wrestling EVE at the Cre8 Lifestyle Centre in Hackney Wick aimed to ‘redefine’ this much maligned genre.

The evening featured many different styles, from the taut, technical wrestling of April Davids and local fighter Pollyanna, to the all-out physical contests often referred to in wrestling vernacular as ‘slobberknockers’.

In fact, the sheer close-up danger of the slams, leaps and head-first drops on show triggered audible shock amongst some curious, less experienced punters, who seemed surprised at just how real this ‘fake sport’ could be.

Lighter moments came with the arrival of identical twin tag-team The Owens Twins, and the suspiciously English-accented Tennessee Honey, billed as hailing from “Peckham, Tennessee.”

At one point, two wrestlers launched each other into the venue’s soundproofing tiles, leaving a visible dent and triggering speculation that EVE’s damage deposit was in jeopardy.

Luckily, the venue staff seemed to be getting into the spirit of things.

Cre8 employee Melissa Herbert, who spoke of remembering “the originals – Big Daddy, Giant Haystacks…” told the East End Review: “I hope they are successful. They’re bringing something different to Hackney.

“There are girls out there who want to do something physical, but something different.”

As if to hammer this point home, a representative from South London wrestling school Burning Hearts circulated the crowd, asking punters whether they could see themselves lining up alongside the stars of EVE in future.

A chant of ‘this is wrestling’ echoed around the auditorium and, as a bruised but triumphant Rhia O’Reilly emerged to lift the EVE Championship belt, the message couldn’t ‘ring’ any clearer.

April 5, 2016
New play Lines looks at how peace is ‘just a gap between wars’

Soldiering on: Lines at The Yard Theatre. Photograph: Ben Hopper

A surprising fact little trumpeted is that 2015 is the first year since the start of the First World War in which British troops are not engaged in warfare.

But what are the implications for the army’s 81,700 full-time service personnel, and what does it mean to be ‘at peace’ anyway? These are questions explored by Lines, a new play that has opened at The Yard Theatre in Hackney Wick.

The play focuses on four young recruits who join the army for different reasons. The audience witnesses the boys transform into soldiers, but in a time of peace these new warriors play out their days cleaning their guns and ironing, a situation that soon becomes combustible.

“There’s a line in the show that says peace is just a gap between wars, that peace is bullshit,” says the play’s director and Artistic Director of the Yard, Jay Miller.

“We rationally try to want peace and desire it, but blimey look at what happened in Ankara – at a peace rally. This show tries to explore that really human need to be violent, regardless of who we are, where we are or what we’re doing.”

Miller, along with the writer Pamela Carter and the creative team, visited barracks and spoke to soldiers whilst preparing the script. Some of the soldiers, Miller says, were deeply disillusioned and bored and have subsequently quit. Following these visits they felt confident enough to create characters that were true to real life.

“Sometimes we literally took lines, sometimes there was just a sense of someone,” Miller says. “What we did do explicitly is spend time researching the process the army takes young recruits through, what they do on day one, what they do on week one, week two, etc. And we’ve been very, very careful to mirror that process on stage. All of these things that you’ll see the soldiers do on our stage, they do in real life as well.”

But how to make a play about violence with it being violent itself? Miller assures that Lines is not the theatrical equivalent of an action movie –a Rambo Goes East, if you will.

“It’s about an everyday violence,” Miller says. “A lot of male relationships are formed on a bed of violence, because they take the mick out of each other, so violence is represented through those relationships that are formed on stage.

“We see the characters become very aggressive, and although there is physical violence it is used very sparingly. Then what we do is that we fire the audience’s imagination to make them imagine and feel what these boys do.”

Promising explosive techno and angelic choral singing, Lines is The Yard’s third in-house production, following The Mikvah Project in February and last year’s Beyond Caring, which was transferred to the National Theatre. How important is it for the Yard to be making its own work, I ask.

“It’s really important,” Miller replies. “It’s just as important to define contemporary theatre as to be responsive, and I really believe we’re defining what is contemporary in theatre today.

“We want to be pushing theatre in new directions and working to try to figure out what tomorrow might look like.”

Lines is at The Yard Theatre, Unit 2A Queen’s Yard, White Post Lane, E9 5EN until 21 November. theyardtheatre.co.uk

November 2, 2015
Beyond Caring – stage review: the shocking reality behind zero-hours contracts

Janet Etuk as Grace and Sean O’Callaghan as Phil in Beyond Caring. Photograph: Mark Douet

During the pre-election ‘air battle’, zero-hour contracts were a hot topic. It is timely then that Beyond Caring, a play that peels back political rhetoric to reveal the realities of cleaners working in a meat factory with no fixed hours, has transferred from The Yard in Hackney Wick for a brief run at the National Theatre.

Designed to encourage a flexible labour market, zero-hour contracts force workers to bend over backwards to meet the whims of an employer. If you are young and lucky enough not to fall ill or on hard times – you might survive. But those in Alexander Zeldin’s play are the vulnerable, the poor and the sick.

The action follows three women taken on for a two-week job at a meat factory. They are bolshy Liverpudlian Becky (Victoria Moseley), timid Susan (Kristin Hutchinson) and Grace (Janet Etuk) who has had her disability benefit cut and has been passed fit for work despite having rheumatoid arthritis.

They join Phil (Sean O’Callaghan) a gentle giant type who buries his head in detective fiction and is on a treasured permanent contract, and manager Ian (Luke Clarke).

All the acting is strong but Clarke gives an especially good performance as Ian, the type of manager who thinks an extra 27p an hour and a university degree gives him the right to laud it over his subordinates with fascistic zeal.

He calls team meetings after punishingly long shifts (“I’m not happy guys”), prevents Grace from taking medication and watches porn on his phone all the while spouting an infuriating jumble of self-help clichés and managerial jargon.

Nothing happens, the days pass in a pattern of work and biscuit breaks. This lack of plot is consonant with the sense that there can be little progress for those forced to live in the immediate.

We learn little of the characters’ backstories beyond hints at private tragedy but again this is a reflection on the nature of their work, for how can human connections be forged on such inconstant foundations?

Tension builds as physical exhaustion and pent-up rage pushes the cleaners towards the edge. Grace’s muscles, pushed beyond their capability finally give in and she collapses over the huge concertina-shaped machine. Paste-grey water is sloshed frantically over stainless steel machines, but the stubborn smears of congealed sausage meat will not budge.

The cleaners are presented as ‘invisibles’ (Ian says the staff party will give them a chance to mix with the ‘normal staff’) but 2.3 per cent of the UK’s workforce are on zero-hour contracts. The barman at your local gastropub is probably on one, as is the Sports Direct cashier who sells you a bundle of socks.

What really shocks in this brutal piece of theatre is that legislation that values a business owner’s profit-motive over basic human rights has become so commonplace in modern Britain. Beyond Caring leaves the audience smarting – not just from the pungent smell of sanitiser but from the injustice of it all.

Beyond Caring is at the National Theatre, South Bank, SE1 9PX until 23 May
nationaltheatre.org.uk

May 11, 2015
Hackney WickED art festival is cancelled

Cancelled: Hackney WickED. Photograph: eatingeast via flickr

Art festival Hackney WickED has announced it will not be going ahead this year due to “ever-increasing” production costs.

The annual festival, which has been running since 2008, is taking the year off to “re-evaluate and adapt to the changing nature of Hackney Wick”, and will instead be curating a programme of smaller events.

In a statement, the festival organisers said: “The festival faces ever-increasing production costs that are necessary to manage the event in line with requests from authorities and our own desire to present a safe, professional event.

“Thousands of pounds have previously been spent on waste disposal, security, street cleaning and the general infrastructure required to manage the 30,000 plus crowds that attend the festival each year.

“Hackney WickED greatly appreciates the sponsorship and funding received to date. However, the festival still has to rely heavily on in-kind support from suppliers, the management team and a volunteer network – and this is no longer sustainable for an event of this scale.”

Anna Maloney, one of Hackney WickED’s six directors, told the East End Review earlier this year that “for Hackney Wicked and other local organisations the police and council have made it quite difficult for us to put things on.

“[This] has actually created the expense because they made us responsible for the security of the whole of Hackney Wick and Fish Island.”

All is not lost, however, as Hackney WickED now aims to evolve as an organisation by supporting local artists and creating more art events across London and beyond.

It has also been awarded Arts Council funding to conduct research to measure the value of Hackney WickED to the wider community, which will help map out the way forward.

Hackney WickED was formed by artists living in Hackney Wick as a “defiant uprising” in the face of the London Olympics.

Since 2008, it has promoted creativity in Hackney Wick and provided a platform for local artists to showcase their work.

April 24, 2015
Ghosting by Jonathan Kemp: book review

Author Jonathan Kemp

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

March 26, 2015