Letting the side down: Polish film director Jerzy Skolimowski, whose films feature at this month’s Kinoteka Polish Film Festival
The Kinoteka Film Festival gets underway this month, with East London venues set to screen work by some of Poland’s most renowned filmmakers.
A retrospective of the films of Jerzy Skolimowski will be held at the Barbican.
Skolimowski is a maverick filmmaker who has worked as a director, writer and actor for over 50 years, and is regarded as one of Polish cinema’s most iconic figures.
For the opening gala on 7 April, Skolimowski will be there in person to introduce his new film 11 Minutes, which focuses on 11 minutes in the lives of a variety of characters whose paths cross as they race towards an unexpected finale.
The film, described as an “inventive metaphor for our modern hectic lives driven by blind chance”, will be followed by an onstage question and answer session with the director.
Over the month the Barbican will be showing more films from Skolimowski’s extensive back catalogue, including rarely screened titles such as 1960s psychological drama Barrier (with an introduction by Skolimowski), Deep End, a comedy-drama about obsession, and the 1982 film Moonlighting starring Jeremy Irons, which was awarded Best Screenplay at the Cannes Film Festival.
The Shoreditch-based Close-Up Cinema will be hosting festival films too, as part of their Masters of Polish Cinema season. These include a screening of Skolimowski’s loose trilogy featuring his on-screen alter ego Andrzej Leszczyc: the films Identification Marks: None, Walkover and Hands Up!
The boutique cinema is also planning to show three early psychological thrillers by Roman Polanski: his Skolimowski-scripted debut Knife in the Water; the controversial, mind-bending exploration of psychosis, Repulsion; and the paranoiac ménage-à-trois Cul-de-sac.
Then later in the month the cinema will show Pawel Pawlikowski’s debut feature, Ida, the Oscar-winning film that delves through 20th century Polish history, scripted by East London resident Rebecca Lenkiewicz.
Bicycle courier turned journalist and author, Julian Sayarer
As a bicycle courier, Julian Sayarer spent three years being a “tangible cog” in a world of multi-million pound contracts, greasing the wheels of the global economy.
When Lehman Brothers collapsed in 2008, he delivered the receivership notices to the bank in Canary Wharf, becoming a bit-part player in a major historical event.
“It shows the quite humanised absurdity of the world economy that the couriers get paid £7.50 to deliver three sets of notices on a £50 billion bail out,” he recalls wryly.
In his book Messengers, Sayarer, now a journalist and author living in Dalston, writes about being a cycle courier, transporting information from bank to law firm, learning London off by heart, and becoming intimately acquainted with kerbs, potholes and alleyways.
Sayarer first started couriering after finishing university and returning from a year living in Istanbul.
“You’re pedalling around London, sometimes coughing your guts up because of the air quality, or you’re sick but don’t get sick pay and so have to go to work anyway. But I was in my early 20s and on balance it was enjoyable, diving between gaps in traffic and hammering it hard across the city for your next delivery.”
In 2009, Sayarer broke a world record for cycling around the world, recounted in his first book Life Cycles. The previous record holder, Mark Beaumont, had the backing of corporate firms and sponsorship deals. So when Sayarer broke the record he not only stuck it to his arch-rival, but to the man too.
But returning to London, the victory began to seem hollow. A world-record on your CV doesn’t always help your job prospects, and soon Sayarer slipped back into cycle couriering.
Messengers is set around 2010-11, after Sayarer had returned from travelling, and the initial thrill of darting around London on two wheels had made way to misgivings about the future.
“There’s lots of notions of readjustment in it,” he says. “Cycling through Kazakhstan, you’d get people inviting you in to have tea in their yurt, and then you go back to the City, which is money motivated, fast-paced and frequently hostile – so there’s quite a lot of reflection on the nature of the modern city.”
The word “precarious” comes up more than once in our conversation, a word that describes the profession in several ways.
Before the dawn of email, a bicycle courier could eke out a living, but now couriers are among the ranks of the lowest earners. In return for risking their lives each day they are made to work as self-employed contractors – meaning no pension contributions, no sick leave and no holiday pay.
But despite the physical exhaustion, the poor pay and the lack of prospects, there is also camaraderie amongst cycle couriers, a subculture and sense of community that marks it out from other professions.
“It’s an urban community and it has its rituals. You have the alleycat racers who organise races where messengers will compete against each other, you’ve got the courier world championships held in places like Chicago, Warsaw and Lausanne where couriers from around the world would race.
In London, couriers would hang out at the former Foundry pub, which lay on the corner the junction of Old Street and Great Eastern Street.
“There’d always be a gathering of couriers out front drinking tinnies from the off-licence, which is probably one of the reasons why the pub couldn’t survive,” Sayarer reflects.
As more vital information is driven online, cycle couriers will only become less needed and it might not be long before the profession disappears completely.
Sayarer tells me that when he was a courier, colleagues and friends would be able to get by through living in a squat – something no longer viable since squatting a residential building has been criminalised.
“It’s a genuine community that’ll look after people who maybe are a little rough around the edges but still have that right and need of a community, and I think the modern city is squeezing people out of space for that sort of thing,” he says.
A time came for Sayarer when the thrill of careering through traffic gave way to a fear of doing it for the rest of his life. Now 30, he can look back at couriering as a chapter of his life that has come to a close.
However, he is aware that not everyone doing the job has that luxury.
“It’s all well and good having this social tourism and saying this is a job with a shelf life and eventually you get out because it’s hard,” he says.
“But you need to talk about the people who don’t get out of that job, who are going to do it for the rest of their working lives and never manage to get the breaks to move on.
“I think it’s something I would have always wanted this book to bring out.”
Messengers: City Tales from a London Bicycle Courier is published by Arcadia Books. RRP: £8.99 ISBN: 9781910050767
Julian Sayerer will be reading from Messengers on 7th April at Pages of Hackney pagesofhackney.co.uk
Dean Rodney, the charismatic singer of The Fish Police. Photograph: The Fish Police
‘It’s gonna be a big one,” warns Dean Rodney, lead singer of the Fish Police – and although size is always relative, he isn’t wrong.
Within minutes of taking my seat at Café Oto, the five-piece launches into a song that has the venue on its feet. ‘Coco Butter’ nods to the quirky alternative hip-hop of De La Soul with its blaring 80s funk keyboards, but as a paean to the pale-yellow, edible vegetable fat extracted from the cocoa bean, this is music that inhabits its own unique world.
“Just a little cream, raise your hands up to the skies, it will moisturise,” Rodney implores. Won over, the crowd obeys. Before I know it the chairs are folded away – I’m in danger of becoming an island in a sea of revellers.
There’s no raised stage so audience and band blur into one as the dirty fuzz bass and spoken-word intro to ‘Black Scissors’ kicks in, calling to mind the silliest (and most fun) excesses of George Clinton.
The Fish Police play catchy and uplifting pop songs informed by singer Dean Rodney and guitarist Matt Howe’s autism. The band is part of a nascent music scene, where learning-disabled acts share bills and audiences with those unaffected, that includes Ravioli Me Away, a post-pop-punk trio with a penchant for costume who are the evening’s excellent support act.
Listening to the Fish Police takes you away from the drudgery of the real world into a joyful realm inhabited by cartoons.
Through the course of the night we hear about a Japanese girl who is “always reading and falling asleep in the classroom” and Monica 300, whose defining feature is her blue hair.
Watching the band is pure escapism from everyday drudgery, with Rodney’s deadpan delivery balanced by soulful backing vocals and some very capable musicianship from bassist Charles Stuart and drummer Andrew McClean (both of whom have played in Grace Jones’s backing band, no less).
The biggest crowd pleaser of the night is ‘Chicken Nuggets for Me’, in which Rodney whips the crowd into a frenzy promising “I’m gonna tell you how I like my chicken” before doing just that in the chorus (no spoilers).
Jumping up and down about chicken nuggets is an oddly liberating experience, and one that – like the rest of this band’s extraordinary output – comes highly recommended.
Vera Hems Anderson and Natailia Garay, founders of the Cheap Cuts Documentary Film Festival. Photograph: Cheap Cuts
Hackney director Asif Kapadia may have won an Oscar for his film about Amy Winehouse, but budding documentary makers from East London and beyond continue to have a difficult time making work and getting it shown.
Documentary can be an unnecessarily inaccessible medium, according to filmmakers Vera Hems Anderson and Natalia Garay, which is why they together founded Cheap Cuts Documentary Film Festival.
The volunteer-run festival, which takes place over the weekend of 2–3 April at Hundred Years Gallery, is for films under 30 minutes long made without a huge budget or the backing of a production company.
Filmmakers submitted their work for free (which is increasingly rare these days) with a total of 1,400 submissions received for the fledgling festival.
“Our aim is to make documentary accessible to people for all walks of life. We think too many film screenings and festivals have become exclusive events and this is both unfair and unproductive,” Anderson says.
“Film can be an extremely inaccessible medium and financially the film industry is one of the most unforgiving around. Film schools remain out of reach for most young people, obtaining the latest equipment is not cheap and even cinema trips are now a luxury outing.”
The open doors submissions policy meant Cheap Cuts received a diverse range of documentaries, some by unknown filmmakers from countries such as Syria, Mexico and Iran, as well as home grown practitioners from East London and elsewhere in the UK.
“We strongly believe in content over form and are interested in the stories filmmakers have to tell and not the equipment or budget used to do so,” Anderson adds.
In keeping with the festival ethos of inclusivity, screenings are free to attend, with the weekend itinerary also including workshops and at least one masterclass with a renowned documentary maker.
Cheap Cuts Documentary Film Festival 2-3 April Hundred Years Gallery, 13 Pearson Street, E2 8JD
Going Wilde: cast members of an operatic production of The Importance Of Being Earnest. Photograph: Royal Opera House / Stephen Cummiskey
Subversive wit? A satire of Victorian morality, with a distinctly homoerotic undertone? If you haven’t guessed it I might add the name ‘Bunbury’ or, better still, the immortal line: “A handbag?”
Yes, it’s The Importance of Being Earnest, Oscar Wilde’s genius farce, which this month comes to the Barbican in an operatic refashioning that promises to be inventive, exuberant and anarchic.
To recap for those who haven’t read the play since school, Jack and his friend Algernon are in love with Gwendolen and Cecily, but there is some confusion over which of the two young gentleman is called Earnest – a name both girls are very fond of, and something a romantic deal breaker. Meanwhile the fearsome Lady Bracknell, Gwendolen’s mother and aunt to Algernon, strongly disapproves.
This adaptation by Gerald Barry was first performed as a concert, winning a Royal Philharmonic Society Award, before being staged as modern-dress production by Ramin Gray for the Royal Opera House in 2013.
Now back for its second London season, cucumber sandwiches, smashed plates and megaphones are set to be the order of the day, all set to a hyperactive score that includes surreal variations of Beethoven and ‘Auld Lang Syne’.
The Importance of Being Earnest
29 March–3 April
Barbican, Silk Street, EC2Y 8DS barbican.org.uk
Steve Davis and Kavus Torabi. Photograph: Cafe Oto
In his 1980s heyday he was practically unbeatable, but now snooker legend Steve Davis is cueing up in a very different way.
The six-time world champion has swapped the snooker table for the turntable, and on 6 May will be in Dalston to DJ at Café Oto alongside psychedelic musician Kavus Torabi.
Although the most successful player of his day, Davis was given the nickname ‘Interesting’ for his playing style, which makes his foray into DJing all the more surprising.
The 59-year-old lives in Brentwood, Essex, where he presents a weekly radio show alongside Torabi on PhoenixFM.
“They all think I’m fucking mad,” said Davis, talking about his love of Frank Zappa to the Guardian.
Davis is known to be a fan of the French collective Magma, whom he brought to London for a series of shows in the late 1980s.
His tastes range from 1970s prog, Canterbury and Zeuhl to modern day Rock in Opposition, Avant-Progressive and even left-field electronica and Intelligent Dance Music.
This month Davis is to join the likes of Thom Yorke and Four Tet on the bill of Bloc festival in Minehead, with his DJ name rumoured to be either DJ Thundermuscle or Rocky Flame.
Adlyn Ross and Haley McGee in Made Visible, a play about race and identity at the Yard Theatre. Photograph: Caleb Wissun-Bhide
In much younger, more pretentious days, I remember writing a short play as part of my A-Level coursework that was a conversation on a park bench.
Made Visible, which opens at the Yard this month, is by coincidence exactly that (although I’m sure similarities end there).
Based on a ‘real encounter’ Pearson had in Victoria Park with two women of Indian origin, it is a ‘meta play’ that aims to humorously explore issues of race and identity.
Playwright Deborah Pearson, 33, an East Londoner originally from Toronto, uses the conversation between the three women to take aim at white privilege, asking the white writer to take accountability for being white.
“At first it appears to be naturalistic, a conversation between three women of different ages and backgrounds, but it then starts to question itself and becomes more like a play about the attempt to make that play, or the ethics of making that play and whether or not one should,” she says.
Although one of the characters is a playwright called Deborah, Pearson says it is important to retain a degree of ambiguity over whether the character is actually her or not, or even whether the encounter actually happened.
“It’s clear it’s a composite of me,” she says, “but would it really be possible to really stage something that really happened anyway? There would always be something about the truth of that situation which is flawed by trying to funnel that experience through one person’s perspective.”
A former Royal Court young writer and co-director of experimental theatre outfit Forest Fringe, Pearson describes much of her work as ‘contemporary performance’, solo performances that are usually autobiographical, so writing a play for actors is a departure.
Her ambition is for the play to be part of a wider conversation about lack of diversity and a lack of representation in the theatre industry, an issue that has come to the fore in Hollywood recently with OscarsSoWhite.
“We’re all trying to see this play as an emperor’s new clothes moment of pointing out how come so many writers are white and what does it mean. Just because someone is white and in this dominant position it doesn’t make them objective.”
Pearson realises that making a play with a basis not far removed from academic discourse could be a challenge for audiences expecting an evening’s entertainment, and she has a solution – humour.
“The thing is whenever you want to talk about something that’s a sensitive topic politically, a good way of doing that is by being entertaining and funny,” Pearson says.
“I hope the play’s quite funny but I hope that the joke’s in the right place. There’s a great term about punching up rather than punching down so I really want the jokes if anything to point towards the discomfort these things bring about and then that these are things that need to be addressed.”
Made Visible 15 March–9 April The Yard Theatre, Queens Yard, White Post Lane, E9 5EN theyardtheatre.co.uk
Nowhere arts space on Bethnal Green Road. Photograph: Russell Parton
A film and community art space in Bethnal Green at risk of losing its home celebrated a ‘huge victory’ after Tower Hamlets Council upheld its legal status as an Asset of Community Value (ACV).
No.w.here, an artist-run space founded in 2004 that runs workshops, discussion groups, screenings and exhibitions, moved to secure ACV status last September after lease negotiations for its home at 316–318 Bethnal Green Road stalled.
Two appeals to Tower Hamlets Council to overturn the ACV status subsequently failed, with the latest announced on 4 December.
The ACV status means that No.w.here, which houses film-making equipment unavailable anywhere else in the UK, now has the opportunity to buy the building should the landlord proceed with its plans to sell.
And if No.w.here does request to make a bid, the landlord must wait until the end of a six month ‘moratorium period’.
Karen Mirza, who founded No.w.here with fellow artist Brad Butler, said that she respects the landlord’s right to sell the building but that “you can’t just throw someone out of a building as and when you choose to profit from it”.
However, Mirza added: “The ruling only gives the right to be considered as one of the bids, it doesn’t give us much power and it doesn’t give us much time to raise capital to make a bid.
“But what it does do is make the buyer recognise that we actually exist, which was not happening before because the landlord was trying to sell with vacant possession.”
James Holcombe is a filmmaker and head of lab and education at No.w.here. He showed me some of the bespoke equipment at No.w.here, including hulking machines for processing film by hand.
“There are some countries, such as Spain, where this kind of equipment doesn’t exist anymore and there are no spaces like this,” he said.
“People fly over for a couple of days, use the equipment and fly back with a suitcase full of film. If you’re interested in chemical film this is your space, but it’s more than just film, it’s a community project, as we have language classes, events and symposia.”
According to Mirza the type of heavy, industrial equipment used at No.w.here is ideally suited to their current warehouse premises, and moving would undo more than ten years’ work of establishing a community of artists.
“We house industrial technology that goes back to the mid to late Sixties, and some of our machines weigh ten tonnes.
“The type of industrial spaces that are there for this type of resource have become fewer and fewer as they’ve been turned in to residential.
“We’re fighting not only for own rights but for the kinds of spaces that should exist within city centres. Urban spaces shouldn’t just about domestic lifestyles.”
A petition on Change.org, which has gathered more than 1,000 signatories, seeks to lobby the landlord into renewing the lease of the artist-run space, which is an Arts Council England National Portfolio Organisation.
T’Nia Miller in rehearsals for Re: Home. Photograph: Joe Twiggs
The Beaumont Estate in Leyton helped to transform the skyline of 1960s London. And for the first residents moving in, it represented the urban dream: affordable housing with stunning views and no outside toilets.
But by the beginning of this century that view had changed. Ugly, poorly-constructed and with a reputation for anti-social behaviour, high-rises fell out of favour, and many were demolished.
Among them were the Beaumont Estate towers, pulled down in 2006. This month a play at the Yard Theatre uses interviews with former and present residents of the estate to examine what our homes mean to us.
Re: Home is directed by Cressida Brown, and comes ten years after her original play about the Beaumont Estate. That play, Home, was set inside one of the condemned towers prior to its demolition, and used interviews with former residents to create an urban family drama.
“I had all these interviews so I just decided that as it’s 10 years to the month [since the demolition] that I’d revisit them. A lot of the people have moved, either into the new low-rises on the estate, or away completely. I thought I’d try to find the people I originally interviewed to see what had happened to them.”
What emerges is a complex picture: on one hand, enhanced security makes the estate feel safer; but on the flip side, she says, fewer people seem to know who their neighbours are.
“I interviewed one person who rather horribly was talking about the ‘civilising nature of architecture’ and that one of the reasons for tearing down the towers was that you could have these crack houses as hide outs in there, but now you don’t get everyone knowing one another and a sense of people looking out for you.”
High rise and fall: All Saints’ and St Paul’s Tower from Leyton High Road. Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons
Brown admits some anxiety about the idea of a “white middle class theatre-maker” parachuting into a community and making a play about the residents’ lives, and asks: “What right do I have?” It’s a question that makes its way into the play too.
“A lot of the play is actually turning the looking glass back on the process of making the theatre, so what’s the editing process and the responsibility of dealing with real people’s words,” Brown says.
“What we’ve done without trying to give it away is to throw the idea of being a witness or documenting other people’s lives back into the audience.”
For people of a certain generation, not having St Catherine’s Tower or St Paul’s Tower on the skyline must seem strange. But demolitions happened in many London boroughs, so why choose to focus on the Beaumont Estate in the first place, I ask.
“It’s a very notorious estate, it has lot of problems,” Brown replies. “And the towers had dominated the skyline and become almost an iconic space of the borough.”
“But the second reason was totally accidental. I was looking for an empty building to do a play in and a man at Waltham Forest Council suggested I interview all the people who lived in this building that was going to be demolished and make the play a celebration of their community.
“What’s weird about that is that using interviews has been the process for my theatre company ever since.”
Re: Home is at The Yard Theatre, Queen’s Yard, White Post Lane, E9 5EN from 9 February– 5 March theyardtheatre.co.uk
Tom Hunter in front of ‘The Ghetto’, an exact model of two squatted streets, now on display in the Museum of London. Courtesy of the artist
What is now a leafy side street connecting London Fields to Mare Street was the scene of a hard fought battle during the 1990s.
Victorian terraced houses on Ellingfort Road, owned by Hackney Council, were run down and classified as derelict. Tenants were moving out, and one by one squatters moved in. Before long the entire street was squatted.
“The neighbourhood is a crime-ridden, derelict ghetto, a cancer – a blot on the landscape,” said the managing director of food distributors the Don Group, to the Hackney Gazette in 1993.
According to contemporary reports, the company was planning with Hackney Council to invest £6 million in a 21,000 square foot food retail distribution and manufacturing park in the area, dubbed the Hackney Industrial Improvement Area.
“The problems associated with dereliction – of vandalism, squatting, fly-tipping – which have bedeviled the area for years, will be arrested by the proposed development,” said the then Council Leader, John McCafferty.
The development, which was due for completion by September 1995, aimed to create 200 jobs, but would mean bulldozing the squatted houses on Ellingfort Road and London Lane, home to some 100 people.
Ellingfort Road’s most well-known resident was Tom Hunter, a photographer who documented the lives of his neighbours in a series of photographs and presented them with a dignity that stereotypical representations lacked.
When Hunter squatted 17 Ellingfort Road in 1991, he had been working as a tree surgeon but was about to start a degree in photography at the London College of Printing.
We meet at his house, which isn’t far from Ellingfort Road, on a pretty street north of London Fields lined with smart terraced houses.
He tells me that squatting was fairly commonplace back then, as poorly maintained houses and flats, owned by councils and leased to housing associations or cooperatives, weren’t considered worth repairing.
At the end of leases tenants would move out and the property would lie empty until squatters moved in.
“You’d move in and tell your mates: ‘there’s a house we’ve been talking to the housing association tenants about in number 33. They’re moving out next month, they’ve given us the keys, you can move in there.’ So you’d get your mates to move in.”
Squatting Life
Hunter was a fairly seasoned squatter by the time he moved into Ellingfort Road, where he hoped to have a studio for his photography. The street before long began to fill, empty houses one by one becoming squats. But the squatters weren’t just artists, or students needing somewhere cheap.
“It was all very varied,” Hunter recalls. “Two doors down the guys were motorbike despatch riders – they’d save up enough money and go off to the Far East for a few months. Next door to me there was a builder, and a girl who worked in a casino as a croupier. There were charity workers, people doing hardcore labouring jobs, and others who were saving up. It was a really good mixture.”
The squatters began sharing and cooperating, and the community grew. Garden walls were knocked down and a communal garden established. A former motorcycle repair workshop became a community café, with food served three times a week. Bands like Asian Dub Foundation played at parties and Howard Marks came to give a talk. There was even a mini city farm – a pond with ducks, chickens and goats.
It might have been their shared ‘outsider’ status as squatters that brought them together. But what really cemented this tight-knit community was the fear of being evicted and losing what they had built.
‘Old Hackney’: photograph from ‘The Ghetto’ series by Tom Hunter, 1994. Courtesy of the artist
Eviction Battle
The battle to save the area began in 1994, when the squatters were threatened with eviction. Hackney Council unveiled plans to demolish the houses to make space for a large-scale industrial zone, including a frozen chicken warehouse.
“It’s hard to imagine now that area which is just so vibrant. Now it looks so gentrified with all those places opening up but at the time it was an area of abandonment and dereliction,” says Hunter.
The squatters weren’t alone in fighting the plans. On their side were local businesses against the idea of a fenced off industrial area. Hackney Council chose not to involve squatters in the consultation process, but legitimate businesses were invited along to the meetings.
“The shops, the businesses and the pubs immediately came straight to us and said: ‘do you realise they’re going to knock down your houses and kick you out?’ We made lots of strong links and that came about because we were facing eviction.”
One of the squatters ran a bike shop and was invited, as a local businessperson, to the meetings with the council.
“He became our main representative. They didn’t realise all along that he was a squatter too. They thought like stereotypical squatters you sign on or you’re a student and didn’t realise you could be running a business or doing lots of different things.”
Dignified: Woman Reading Possession Order by Tom Hunter, 1997. Courtesy of the artist
But the real game changer was yet to come. Hunter was approaching the end of his course and for his degree show, he and his friend James McKinnon made an exact replica model of the two squatted streets.
Made out of cardboard, wood, transparencies and photographs, The Ghetto accurately recreated the exteriors of the houses and the lit-up interiors of rooms, complete with the people who lived there, sitting on their beds or drinking tea.
“I wanted to make a document of the area before it was bulldozed, that was the idea. Because I wanted to represent everyone’s houses before they were all destroyed so that in generations to come they could see what was there.”
The sculpture, which is now on permanent display in the Museum of London, challenged the prevalent sense in the tabloid media that squatters were a threat to civilised society.
Hunter’s university tutor, Julien Rodriguez, was so impressed by the piece that he arranged for people from the Museum of London, the Guardian and Time Out to attend the degree show, and suddenly the squatters’ plight was catapulted onto the national stage.
“It became a political propaganda piece for us. It was an amazing transformation from being a squatter to the Guardian saying: ‘well what do you think about housing issues?’ It was like, wow, people are actually interested. And then lots of people started saying this is really important, and maybe we shouldn’t be knocking this down.”
With the sculpture making headlines, Hackney Council’s attitude softened. “Suddenly people in the council felt compelled to speak to us, so we could actually talk about a way to save and regenerate the area.”
“It gave my art a meaning and a purpose – it wasn’t just about putting pictures on the walls. It was a huge step in my career, a launching place which made me realise the potential of making art.”
Having won the propaganda war, the squatters spent the next 10 years transforming the community into a housing cooperative, borrowing money from a housing association to buy the properties from the council and fixing them up. Even today they are still repaying the money on the houses.
“That’s pretty much as it’s been ever since. I spent another seven years there I think, my daughter was born there, and I still stay there now and again. My friends are still there and they’ve got kids now that are the same age as my kids. They all go to Gayhurst so we even share the same school run.”
