STREET SCENES
I grew up in Hackney in the 1970s and began taking photographs while still at school. As a kid, broken-down and bombed out houses provided endless adventures, as well as a source of childhood treasures. Rag and bone men would tour the streets on a horse and cart, ringing a bell and crying out for ‘any old iron’. The odd car in a street was a sight to behold and we would swoon in admiration.
My first photos were taken when I was still at Hackney Downs School and inspired by my trips to Stoke Newington library. It was a forbidding place with fierce librarians, and their glance could kill if there was the slightest noise breaking the deathly silence. But, hidden on the shelves, were photographic books of an exciting world beyond the confines of the grey Hackney streets and my council flat. There were Photography Annuals printed in garish colour, it was hardly the stuff of Cartier-Bresson, but for a teenager in Hackney they had a dreamlike quality.
Working as a Saturday boy in Stoke Newington Woolworth’s I saved for my first camera. Each week I would look in awe at the window of North London Cameras and the wondrous display of cameras. A Pentax Spotmatic seemed to be the height of sophistication. The best I could manage on my meagre saving was a Russian made Zenith E. But it was everything that a boy could want from a camera. Built like a tank it had lots of knobs and dials, and they all had a satisfying clunk when operated. The trick was remembering to open the lens aperture to focus and then close it down to take the photograph. My massively over exposed negatives indicated that I didn’t always get it right.
Some of my earliest photographs were taken around Brick Lane, Ridley Road and the Dalston Waste markets. Brick Lane represented everyday poverty. Food in rusting cans was sold well past its use-by-date. Old men would stand by their cast-off clothes, hoping to get a few bob. Bombed-out houses in Cheshire Street formed impromptu market stalls and the smell of stale, stagnant second-hand clothes filled the air. Ridley Road Market was different, full of life and energy. It was a noisy meeting place where my mum would do her weekly shop, dragging her trolley on and off buses and haggling with the stall-holders.
Hackney’s decline continued in the 70s. Much of the housing was very poor, there were virtually no childcare facilities, no bookshops, and slowly the nine cinemas were closing down.
But something was to change quite dramatically. In Dalston Lane up popped Centerprise in 1971. Suddenly there was a bookshop and, extraordinarily, a coffee bar, exhibition space, advice centre and publishing project. Soon the project formed the base for all kinds of campaigns, citizens’ rights, play, under-fives, writers’ groups and literacy programmes. As a meeting centre it became a hive of activity and I worked in the coffee bar after school. I became involved in the People’s Autobiography of Hackney, a Workers Educational Association group recording the oral histories of local people. Suddenly we started to have a voice and discover our lost history and lives. This hugely influenced my interest in documenting those who have been hidden from history.
DON’T MIND THE KIDS
It was common to see children playing in the streets in the 1970’s. The lack of traffic, and very different attitudes, gave children a freedom that seems quite remote now. My own memory was of ‘going out to play’ all day long and my parents having no idea of where I was or what I was doing.
On the streets the Salvation Army were then still trying to rescue the lost souls of Hackney and their brass bands would plod round the streets to the almost total disregard of the locals.
I took photographs of what must have been the first street theatre to come to Hackney in 1972 for Hackney Action, a community newspaper. They went to Shoreditch Adventure Playground and the children were completely entranced, never having seen anything like it before.
One of my favourite photographs (see my archive this link https://tinyurl.com/2kv3amps) is of a young girl wearing sunglasses. I was working at De Beauvoir Adventure Playground and we were on a coach trip to Margate. It was the first time most of the children had been to the seaside and even a Box brownie was able to capture the magic of the moment.
THE TOWER BLOCK
I moved to Rachel Point on the Nightingale estate, Hackney, with my parents in 1970. We’d moved from the fifth floor of an estate with no lift in Stoke Newington as my father had become disabled and couldn’t manage the stairs. Towering above the streets, with central heating and lifts, Nightingale Estate was the planners’ dream of the future. It was so modern. There was a fitted kitchen and the heating magically came through grills in the walls.
Except within weeks of moving in, the heating and lifts kept breaking down, making my father a prisoner in his own home. I’d have to run down the stairs to bring up the shopping my mum had bought.
Even with its drawbacks it was, for many people, an improvement on their previous homes but what was missing was any sense of community. It was impossible to get to know anyone who wasn’t on your floor.
I set about trying to take portraits of the people living in the tower block. I managed to get around six before giving up as so few people would even answer their door.
The first demolitions started in 1998, with Rachel Point finally being demolished in 2003 leaving one standing - Seaton Point. The future did not last long.
As part of my current project I have started taking portraits in Seaton Point.
WORK
As a local photographer I was approached by the Hackney Trades Council to put together an exhibition about the role of women in the workforce. This was to be part of celebrations for the 75th anniversary of the local trade union movement. The women on the Trades Council were not impressed that the theme was to be that of ‘brotherhood’.
Through Centerprise, a bookshop/community centre in Dalston, I met Jo Spence who was then a high street photographer in Hampstead. Together we brought together a group called Hackney Flashers and set about documenting the lives of working women in Hackney.
In the 70’s and 80’s Hackney still had a manufacturing base. The largest by far was Lesney’s on the River Lea where hundreds of women made Matchbox cars. Their shifts were arranged so they could fit in their childcare needs and a fleet of double-decker buses would transport them to and from work. Further up the Lea, in Clapton, was Initial Cleaning Services, with massive laundry facilities. Dotted around the Borough were smaller, mostly garment industry workshops.
Remarkably, we had complete access to workplaces without any restrictions on where we went, quite unheard of now. The photographs taken in the 70’s and 80’s show quite clearly how the working population was changing as new waves of immigrants, mostly from Turkey and Asia, entered the garment industry.
This exhibit of photographs and hand-written text acknowledged the hidden contribution women made to the economy and was a strong statement for equal pay. It was basic in concept and execution, but was well received and much used. It started its public life in Hackney Town Hall, appeared at a Socialist Feminist International Conference in Paris (1977) and was hung in many venues in between.
JEWISH LIFE
I was commissioned to take photographs for a book on Jewish life in Britain in 1981. Tasked with photographing Haredi families in Stamford Hill, the Rabbi who was advising me, suggested I photograph a particularly rare event. Getting up early one morning April 1981, I went to a school playground that was at first empty but soon filled with hundreds of Haredi men and boys.
They were there to celebrate Birkat Hachama, which refers to a rare Jewish blessing recited when the sun returns to the position that it was in when the universe was first created. Jewish tradition says that the sun has a 28-year solar cycle.
The worshippers looked in vain for a sight of the sun but it made no difference to the celebrations as they danced around the playground. The event occurred again in 2009 and will take place again in 2037.
WORKING LIVES
Working Lives Volume Two 1945-1977 was published by Centerprise after three years of effort by the local history group. It contained 13 oral accounts of work by Hackney residents and was accompanied by 110 photographs and spread over 124 pages.
Volume One contained accounts from the First World War to 1945 and included that of my father who was a cabinet-maker. The approach was part of a much wider movement at the time where ‘ordinary’ people were able to record and provide account of lives that were, in many cases, far from ordinary.
The photographs were seen as essays in themselves that complemented the oral accounts and told their own story. The approach was inspired by the work of John Berger and Jean Mohr in ‘A Fortunate Man’. In addition to myself, Jo Spence, Sally Greenhill, Michael Anne Mullen and Barry Lewis took the photographs. We had a small grant from the Arts Council that barely covered the cost of the film let alone the other costs.
The book contained accounts by a hairdresser, social worker, postman, vicar, barber, mortuary technician, homeworker, fish and chip man, taxi driver, housewife, shop assistant, teacher, and school leaver.
It was a hugely ambitious undertaking for Centerprise and the only way we could keep the cover price down was to print 5000 paperbacks and 200 hardbacks and hope we could sell them all. Not only did we sell out but it went on to two reprints.
PROTEST
Politics started to change in the 70s and 80s. Cheap and empty houses attracted radicalised students and artists. Post 68 politics spread and community activism spread. The established order began to be challenged from the Town Hall to the estates and the schools. When I was at school we went on strike. What were we rebelling against? Well, what have you got?
Many of my photos were used in the community newspapers that sprang up in the 70s and 80s as a renewed activism started to shake the borough, and the Council in particular. Hackney Action, Hackney Gutter Press, Hackney Peoples Press took up the causes that were largely absent from the Hackney Gazette. The Stoke Newington Peoples Press was short lived. Possibly because they referred to one councillor as ‘the best money could buy.’
Nurses took to the streets in pay disputes, residents blocked the streets to protest about traffic, and there were constant protests as one hospital after another closed down. The German Hospital, the Metropolitan, St Leonard’s, Queen Elizabeth Children’s Hospital, Mildmay Hospital all closed.
In the 80s tensions grew between the black community and the police with the use of the notorious ‘sus’ stop and search and several high profile cases including that of the wrongful arrest of Newton Rose, and the death of Colin Roach in Stoke Newington police station.
In 1981 protests in Dalston erupted and turned into a riot with people throwing petrol bombs in Sandringham Road in what was known as the front-line. The police drove up and down Kingsland High Street in their vans stopping to baton charge anyone who happened to be there. I managed to take a few images from the roof of the Rio and on the streets. But, as it was night time and I had to use a flash, I could only take a few before running to avoid being beaten.
At the height of the rate-capping battle between the Council and the Government, Hackney Town Hall was occupied and the Red Flag waved in the Council Chamber.
HACKNEY WICK
The River Lea had been for decades a working river transporting goods to and from the London docks along the River Thames. Barges were dragged first by horses and then by engine with lightermen steering them through the treacherous tides and currents of the Thames. At its peak hundreds of barges would pass through Bow Locks. By the 70s the canals were in decline as a water highway for freight.
Lesney’s had dominated the Hackney Wick landscape since 1959, making Matchbox toy cars, and was by far the largest private employer in the borough. At its peak it employed 3,600 people, mostly women. By the 1980s manufacturing in Hackney was struggling to survive. A few miles away the London docks had closed and were replaced by gigantic container ports on the Thames. It was cheaper to manufacture in the Far East and ship across the world.
Working for local trade unions, I returned when it was on the verge of closure. Their buses could still be seen taking women to and from work but the workforce had declined to just 500. The factory was largely silent and production had all but ceased when I took the photographs just before Christmas 1981.
Attempts by trade unions to keep the factory open failed. The company went bankrupt in June 1982 and all the machinery was shipped to Hong Kong.