East End Review

Tag: Sarah Birch

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
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
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
East London collective Assemble become first ‘non-artists’ to win the Turner Prize

An indoor garden with roof. Part of Granby Four Streets by Assemble

A group of architects based in East London has won the Turner Prize for a project that transformed a street of neglected terraced houses in Liverpool.

Assemble, a group of 18 architects and designers, collected the prize last night at a ceremony at the Tramway arts venue in Glasgow.

The group won the prize for its Granby Four Streets project, in which it spectacularly restored a cluster of terraced houses in Toxteth, Liverpool, that had been purchased by the local council after the 1981 Toxteth Riots and been allowed to fall into disrepair.

Working alongside residents, Assemble refurbished the houses in a way that celebrated the area’s architectural and cultural heritage, creating an indoor garden and establishing a monthly market.

It has also established the Granby Workshop, a social enterprise that trains and employs local people to manufacture and sell a range of handmade products, the like of which were used to refurbish the houses.

These items, which were on display in a showroom at the Turner Prize exhibition at the Tramway in Glasgow, are very unlike most of what appears in mainstream homeware shops.

The rich textures and colours of the pieces bespeak the relatively simple processes through which they have been created from raw materials. wall tiles reminiscent of Kandinsky, elegant mantlepieces formed of recycled rubble, one-off ceramic doorknobs, and pressed terracotta lampshades.

Granby Four Streets Axonometric View

Accepting the prize from Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon, Assemble member Joseph Halligan said: “I think it’s safe to say this nomination was a surprise to us all. The last six months have been a super surreal experience but it has been an opportunity to start something which we really hope will be with us for a very very long time.”

During its 31-year history the Turner Prize has questioned traditional boundaries of what may be considered art, with Tracey Emin’s My Bed from 1998 a particularly notorious example.

Assemble’s entry is no less bold, as it blurs boundaries between art and architecture and has an explicit social purpose. It is also the first Turner Prize-winning entry that people actually live in.

Hazel Tilley, a resident on Cairns Street who was involved with the project, talked of how a sense of pride had been restored to the community thanks to Assemble.

She told Channel 4: “They brought art into everyday living and everyone has a right to that, because otherwise art just belongs to rich people who live in posh houses and it should belong to everybody – real art is accessible.

“It’s a story of humanity, and if art isn’t about humanity I don’t know what it’s about.”

Assemble is the first collective to win the Turner Prize.

The group was selected ahead of artists Bonnie Camplin, Janice Kerbel and Nicole Wermers for the £25,000 prize, which is awarded annually by Tate to a British artist under 50.

December 8, 2015
Stage review: Henry IV Part 1 and 2 at the Barbican

Jasper Britton as King Henry IV and Alex Hassell as Hal in Henry IV Part II. Photograph: Kwame Lestrade

Shakespeare’s meditation on the universal themes of honour, duty, loyalty, and affection is packed with both dramatic action and raucous comedy.

No contemporary political parallels are intimated through costume or set – this is straight-down-the-line classic English theatre.

Antony Sher shines as Falstaff, in turns manipulative, deceitful, endearing and very human. But though Sher is by far the stand-out performance, Alex Hassell also plays a fine Prince Hal.

Part I centres on the strong attachment between the two men and its gradual unravelling as Hal responds to his higher calling as a warrior and defender of his father’s throne.

There is a clear spark between Sher and Hassell, who together elicit a wide range of emotional reaction.

Trevor White’s Hotspur is also well-judged, his bristling energy an apt counterpoint to Hal’s graceful self-assurance.

Part II picks up where Part I leaves off, but with a notable shift in emphasis as wild Hal’s sense of responsibility and filial duty becomes a heavier weight on his young shoulders.

On hearing news of a second rebellion, merry Falstaff is called away from London’s underbelly, his coquetry with potty-mouthed wench Doll Tearsheet (Nia Gwynne) and Mistress Quickly (Paula Dionisotti) put on hold.

He travels to Gloucestershire, recruiting a raggle-taggle band of old soaks and rustic bumpkins from country villages, all the while believing himself still in favour at the Westminster Court.

In the shires he meets former acquaintance Justice Shallow (Oliver Ford Davies), who provides light relief as he nostalgically, and erroneously, recalls his gallivanting youth.

But as the sick King weakens, so does the bond between Hal and his roly-poly companion – their separation is also physical as they meet only twice in the whole play.

The deathbed scene in which Hal mistakenly usurps his sleeping father by taking the crown is one of Part II’s strongest moments.

Grief for his dying father and the looming burden of the throne he must inherit combine to force the reluctant prince into maturity. Hassell is affecting, as his cocky smile slips into mask of desperation, his swagger turns to diffidence.

Once the new king is crowned, Falstaff has become an unsightly remnant of Hal’s old hedonistic life, a vestige of an ill-spent youth that he would rather put behind him. “I know thee not, old man,” he says, wrapped in pomp and finery.

Part II dwells on the extinguishing of life’s “brief candle” whereas Part I shows it burnt at both ends – it is something of a hangover – full of regrets and reminiscence.

Henry IV Parts I and II is at the Barbican, Silk Street, EC2Y 8DS until 24 January

January 15, 2015
Hackney photographer Stephen Gill publishes two new books

Embracing: A Hackney couple on their wedding day. Photograph courtesy of Stephen Gill

Stephen Gill’s oblique take on the local urban landscape has fascinated photography fans across the world. His latest books, bearing similar covers and published contemporaneously, treat very different topics yet are linked through reliance on happenstance.

Hackney Kisses is a collection of photographs printed from 1950s negatives Gill bought on eBay. The actual taker of this collection of wedding pics remains unknown, but their theme is one of universal relevance.

Even the camera-shy can rarely avoid being snapped on their wedding day, and matrimonial shots virtually all involve at least one kiss.
Most of these images follow convention: there is a multi-tiered cake standing at attention next to the happy couple, who are attired in the classic wedding gear of the time: a dark suit and slicked-back hair for him, lots of white lace for her. Some kisses are overtly lustful; others are nervous pecks for the camera. All are romantic.

Writes Timothy Prus of this collection: “Kissing can be quite like the reveries in a beautiful forest, it can also be end-of-pier theatre. Our Master of the Hackney Kisses knows how these traits combine.”

By contrast, Pigeons takes as its object one of the most unromantic topics imaginable.
The collection features dead pigeons, flying pigeons, nesting pigeons, pigeons out of focus, pigeons sheltering under bridges, fornicating pigeons and decaying pigeon body parts.

Though the birds inhabit a world made by us, we don’t normally notice them. They are also a less-than-endearing bird, and these photos do not seek to change that.

The images have been taken by a camera placed atop a pole, thrust up into the dark underbellies of bridges. The result of this process has a random element to it, and it also yields a completely deadpan muck-and-all survey of the species in its near-monochrome habitat.

An introduction by Will Self provides an evocative reflection on the place of pigeons in London culture past and present. He concludes by noting that “Stephen Gill’s photographs are devoid of sentiment or affectation – rather than showing the pigeon in our world, they take us into theirs.”

The pair of books reflect two of Stephen Gill’s long-established passions – Hackney and birds. What the volumes share is a formal structure of repetition on a theme. Another less obvious commonality is the element of chance that was involved in their making; both collections are, in their different ways, the products of what might be called stochastic photography. They are thus fitting pictorial archaeologies of the local imaginary, sampling bits of Hackney life from marital rapture to pullastrine domesticity.

Stephen Gill, Hackney Kisses, Archive of Modern Conflict, 2014. ISBN: 9780957049079. RRP: £40. Stephen Gill, Pigeons, Nobody Books and Archive of Modern Conflict, 2014. ISBN: 9780957536975. RRP: £38.

December 24, 2014