Author: Louise Michel

A freight train moves steady but persistently over the illuminated blue railway bridge that crosses the northern decline of Mare Street. The weight of the cargo can be felt even from this distance as the seemingly never ending procession of container trucks cross the bridge. MAERSK, COSCO, P&O/Nedlloyd, MAERSK, MAERSK, HAMBURG SUD, EVERGREEN LINE, HAPAG-LLOYD, P&O/Nedlloyd, MAERSK, COSCO, HAMBURG SUD, MAERSK SEALAND. The frequency of these freight trains has recently been increasing.

Like a surrealist joke, a gnome dangles from a swing tied to the ‘Disabled Badge Holders Only’ sign marking the edge of the pavement and the entrance to Wayman Court. This feels like a coded sign, like those shoes you see dangling from telephone wires in Glasgow, but somehow with a wry and somewhat psychotic sense of humour. There is pathos in this dangling figure and it creates conflicting emotions within me. It instantly makes me want to laugh, yet the sort of laughter that is tinged with a deep and heavy sorrow.

Burroughs once wrote, “I don’t spot junk neighbourhoods by the way they look, but by the feel, somewhat the same process by which a dowser locates hidden water. I am walking along and suddenly the junk in my cells moves and twitches like the dowsers wand: ‘Junk here!’”

I know the Wayman Court estate well. I have lived here a long time and have a neighbourly relationship with many of its residences. It is a small estate. One 17 story tall block which stands like a counterweight for a line of Oak trees that radiate in a carefully planted row across London Fields. Adjacent to the tall block are two low-rise blocks of maisonettes forming an L shape that encloses a carefully manicured central garden. Many of the elderly residents of this estate are the original residents who first took up residence when the estate was opened in 1959. The estate is well ordered and maintained by a residents committee straight out of JG Ballard’s imagination. A strict hierarchy exists, maintaining the ultimate power of the committee chairperson, Di , an elderly but powerful women always flanked by her vicious husband Alf. This is a ruthless dictatorship that ensures a beautifully ordered, clean, well maintained estate. Everyone knows who to contact if there is a problem and everyone knows the consequences of disagreeing with her.

As I enter the estate I am taken by an unidentified feeling of unease. There is a strange ambience perceptible. My nervous system is on high alert and my mind is drawn to that quote by Burroughs. There is nothing tangible, just a feeling, a mixture of threat and excitement. As I walk past the tower block a group of shifty characters are huddled behind the wall, waiting, with perspiring desperation. A row kicks off. A guy in a dirty denim jacket and a baseball cap holding a can of Tenants Super yells at a women sitting on a concrete step wearing clothes two sizes too small for her emaciated body. The voices are Eastern European, probably Polish or Lithuanian. I walk further into the estate and see two of the local residents, standing defiantly, eyeing up the Junkies. This is an unusual alliance. Elizabeth with her bright red died hair and Shell holding the leads of a pair of pit bull terriers. Elizabeth is what you would describe as a Cockney, must be going on 70, always immaculately turned out, hair flaming red in a 60’s film star style, still likes to get down to Bethnal Green for a drink on a Friday night, heart of gold, looks after the estates’ elderly residents, decks out her balcony in Union Jack bunting for any national occasion, Royal wedding, Jubilee or World Cup and is always the first to know when anything is happening on the estate. Shell is the tough matriarch of one of the maisonettes and Di, the chairperson of the residents committee, has repeatedly tried to obtain an ASBO to stop her kids sitting in the communal gardens drinking and smoking weed. Her front door is still boarded up after her estranged husband attempted to smash it through after been released from prison for bottling a bloke in a drunken argument. As I approach Elizabeth says, ‘The Junkies are back’, Shell joins in with a tirade about the polish couple leaving needles in the den. The den been a circular structure of trees and flowers in the centre of the communal garden, under which the younger estate kids use as a den and Shells dogs like to entertain themselves by chasing each other around and through. Whilst we stand there the dealer turns up, a tattooed hipster on a white folding bike with the arrogance of a public school boy. I don’t let on that I’ve seen him before and know he lives on one of the canal boats at the bottom of Broadway market. He looks straight through his hostile audience and caries on his trade. Less than a minute and he’s off again. ‘Why don’t you lot just fuck off back to where you came from and stop leaving your shit all over the place. We know what you’re up to, you junky pieces of shit!”, a shrill voice yells from behind us. We all turn our heads to see Courtney, Shell’s 19 year old daughter, standing at the door wearing a pink velour tracksuit. Her boyfriend, an Irish traveller with gingery blond hair, cut into a strict side parting, is stood beside her with an amused, slightly stoned look on his face. The junkies make a quick exit. I assume to find somewhere les hostile to shoot up their shit. This is spatial politics at both its most complex and base.

Ellingfort Road and London Lane in the 90’s. A brightly painted metal flower reaches out towards the sky from one of the gardens of this row of condemned Victorian terraced houses. Corrugated iron curtains hide rotting wood sash windows. The road is littered with vans in various states of rust and roadworthiness. A 60’s bus is parked under the railway arches at the end of the street. Multi-coloured fabric stretched across its windows and wood smoke drifting from a chimney cut roughly through its roof. You can enter the front door of one house and hours later find yourself on the third floor of a house halfway down the street from where you entered. Holes cut between buildings at various levels. This is a labyrinthine warren. Each room has a different ambience, but a constant pulsating, paranoid, trance inducing bass forms the dull background to the whole street. This is where many of the anarcho’s who hang around the Pepys live and where many of the after parties take place.

The collective occupants of Ellingfort Road and London Lane have proven themselves adaptable and have aged with their streets. By the end of the 90’s, sensing the end, as the council starting to wield its regeneration scrubbing brush, the occupants of Ellingfort Road and London Lane brokered a deal with the local authority to have their houses refurbished under a £2.5 million programme, transferring the ownership of the properties from the council to a housing association and guaranteeing cheap rents for the former squatters.

Walking down Ellingfort Road today it is quiet. There is the occasional pulsed sub-bass rumble of a train passing over the railway arches at the far end of the street. The vans and busses have gone, but traces of the alternative community are still present. In the refurbishment, the houses were converted into flats and ginnels created connecting the street to flights of metal stairs that run along the back wall of the houses providing access to the flats. The ginnels are gated with elaborate sun design metal work. Old habits die hard, old furniture and potentially useful finds are hoarded at various spots along the street. A set of small children’s clothes, toys and books are carefully laid out along a wall with a small hand written note, ‘Please Take’. The refurbished paintwork, now over ten years old is starting to look a little shabby. It gives the street a warmth not experienced on many of the other streets in this area.

The road surface is covered with a tarmac containing a large aggregate that emphasises a lone rectangular smooth black patch, the length of a car and a half, marking number 18 Ellingfort road. An angular warehouse with heavy metal security shutters, adjoining the Chinese cultural centre and facing the refurbished terraced houses. WARNING: Premises protected by Key security. Black scorch marks on broken granite curb stones mark the only traces of the night, in 2011, that Hackney’s myth of hermetic gentrification was shattered in a festive celebration of looting and burning. A red Mazda MX5 sports car burnt with a ferocious heat on this spot as rows of hooded and masked rioters barricaded the street with burning wheelie bins, holding the police from entering the road, whilst number 18, then a Carhartt clothing warehouse, was looted.

‘Looting is a natural response to the unnatural and inhuman society of commodity abundance’. The Situationists wrote in their 1965, ‘The Decline and Fall of the Spectacle-Commodity Economy’, as a response to the Watt’s riots. A Word document Find and Replace of this text, substituting the word ‘Watts’ for ‘Hackney’, still provides the best analysis of the 2011 riots.

I leave Ellingfort Road under the train bridge, emerging at a lockup for those large transparent blue bottles that sit upturned on water coolers in city offices. Deep blue fortified fences, topped with circular loops of razor wire, surround the compound. A high white painted wall, marking the boundary between this compound and the next, is adorned with bright blue graffiti, neat and expertly sprayed lettering spell out ACAB.

Between Saturday 6th and Thursday 11 August 2011, thousands of people rioted in several London boroughs and in cities and towns across England. The resulting chaos generated looting, arson, and mass deployment of police. Despite increasing reinforcements, the forces of order were unable to regain control of the streets. Stores were massively plundered and many were burned. Some of the fiercest rioting was experienced in the London Borough of Hackney. These events have been called the “BlackBerry riots” because of the centrality of mobile devices and social media in there organisation.

“This was not a race riot. It was a class riot.”

The Hackney rebellion was a rebellion against the commodity, against the world of the commodity in which worker-consumers are hierarchically subordinated to commodity standards. Like the young delinquents of all the advanced countries, but more radically because they are part of a class without a future, they take modern capitalist propaganda, its publicity of abundance, literally. They want to possess now all the objects shown and abstractly accessible, because they want to use them. In this way they are challenging their exchange-value, the commodity reality which molds them and marshals them to its own ends, and which has preselected everything. Through theft and gift they rediscover a use that immediately refutes the oppressive rationality of the commodity, revealing its relations and even its production to be arbitrary and unnecessary. The looting of Hackney was the most direct realisation of the distorted principle: “To each according to their false needs” — needs determined and produced by the economic system which the very act of looting rejects. But once the vaunted abundance is taken at face value and directly seized, instead of being eternally pursued in the rat-race of alienated labor and increasing unmet social needs, real desires begin to be expressed in festive celebration, in playful self-assertion, in the potlatch of destruction. People who destroy commodities show their human superiority over commodities. They stop submitting to the arbitrary forms that distortedly reflect their real needs. The flames of Hackney consummated the system of consumption. The theft of large refrigerators by people with no electricity, or with their electricity cut off, is the best image of the lie of affluence transformed into a truth in play. Once it is no longer bought, the commodity lies open to criticism and alteration, whatever particular form it may take. Only when it is paid for with money is it respected as an admirable fetish, as a symbol of status within the world of survival.

Looting is a natural response to the unnatural and inhuman society of commodity abundance. It instantly undermines the commodity as such, and it also exposes what the commodity ultimately implies: the army, the police and the other specialised detachments of the state’s monopoly of armed violence. What is a policeman? He is the active servant of the commodity, the man in complete submission to the commodity, whose job is to ensure that a given product of human labor remains a commodity, with the magical property of having to be paid for, instead of becoming a mere refrigerator or TV — a passive, inanimate object, subject to anyone who comes along to make use of it. In rejecting the humiliation of being subject to police, they are at the same time rejecting the humiliation of being subject to commodities.

A revolt against the spectacle — even if limited to a single district such as Hackney — calls everything into question because it is a human protest against a dehumanised life, a protest of real individuals against their separation from a community that could fulfil their true human and social nature and transcend the spectacle.

Sandstone paving slabs thread with a seam of rust on wet days give the impression the street is literally paved with gold. These must be the most expensive paving stones in the borough.

Broadway Market. Pages of printing ink have been expended on this tiny strip of road, psychogeographers, journalists, travel writers, travel writing psychogeographical Journalists. I could spend pages writing about the transformation of this street, about the battle to save Tony’s Café, it’s occupation and reopening, the construction of a Reclaim the Streets scaffolding pyramid on the roof as a final barricade. I could write about the eviction of Spirit, the last Afro-Caribbean food store in this area, but all this has already been historicised. I could write about the less known aspects of the street, the drive by shooting at the Broadway BBQ kebab shop, or the hostility of the locals in the pre gentrified Cat and Mutton pub with its UVF graffiti in the toilets. But what actually interests me is the street now. The post-hipster, less fashionable Broadway Market, inhabited by Hackney’s second generation media workers. This has been the epicentre of Hackney’s gentrification and looking through the cafe windows I can see huddles of fashionably dressed, late twenties early thirties, mainly males, working on laptops. Transient desk space and free WIFI for the latest kickstarter company, all for the price of an Americana. Crowd sourced capitalism with a social conscience. This is my first real trace of the digitally expanded city.

La Bouche a delicatessen and café midway down the street exemplifies the mixture of socialising, networking and entrepreneurialship espoused by the denizens of Broadway Market. Faces looking out through street fronted windows, large bowls of salad on show, a long central table hosts small groups having meetings, leaning endlessly over laptops. Glowing Apple Mac logos illuminate the table, large white mugs containing lattes with elaborate leaf patterns jostling with the anodized aluminium laptops. This street is a mirage within a desert of poverty and 60’s social housing. Stepping back from La Bouche there is a punctum in the dizzying spectacle. The meeting point of Broadway market and Benjamin Close marks the border between two worlds. Looking at La Bouche from this angle the old world charm of the Victorian, faux Parisian, frontage is dwarfed by Welshpool house, a 17 storeyed 1960’s tower block. The bench style seating lining the outside of the café is mirrored by the public benches on Benjamin Close, currently occupied by a group of teenage boys, mixed black and white, but all wearing dark winter coats with their hoods high over their heads. Here two groups collide in a conspiracy of mutual indifference. Neither group acknowledges the existence of the other. Two alternate existences share the same space. The boundaries are understood by everyone but never acknowledged.

Fucking noises!

Fucking. FUCKING NOISES!

I don’t know. I don’t fucking know.

Do you know. DO YOU FUCKING KNOW.

Cos I don’t know.

FUCKING NOISE.

Fucking. FUCKING noises!

If care in the community means anything, other than a budgetary cost cutting exercise, its exemplified by the community of outcasts who gather at the benches at the end of the cycle path that leads through London Fields to Broadway Market. A mixed and wretched community, black and white and varied in age. A tall thick set masculine white woman with cropped short greying hair and a hard face, wearing grey jogging bottoms and hoodie, sits with her arms raised like the outstretched wings of some large bird, elbows resting in the cuffs of a pair of NHS crutches. An ageing and overweight black man wearing an oversized blue raincoat with the hood covering his head and resting on the rim of a pair of large angular black wraparound sunglasses, face contorted as though he is concealing a segment of orange. A White man, probably in his forties, though it’s difficult to tell, drugs, alcohol, lack of food, and I suspect time on the streets have prematurely aged him. Hair shaven leaving long tails of unkempt and natty hair at the back, a crushed green plastic bottle of White Ace held between dermatitis inflamed hands.

These benches create a permanent space of sociality for those with drink, drugs and mental health problems. It is a space that enables the isolation of the flat, bedsit or hostel to be overcome. A meeting point to drink, get wasted and forget. Temporary self medication from the permanent cycle of return that traps the mind, crippling it, refusing to allow it to move on from some unspeakable trauma. The dark thoughts that keep you awake at night fuelling self-loathing. The voices. ‘FUCKING NOISES’, I overheard a young black man yelling to himself. Whilst there are tensions here, sudden eruptions of violent shouting, the occasional fight, you also witness tenderness, a caring for each other, even splitting cash to buy more booze.

Hoardings have been erected behind the benches. Toilets are being constructed to service the masses that come every Saturday to shop in Broadway Market’s boutiques, restaurants, and wine bars. The plywood boards have been treated with a translucent green varnish that emphasises the grain. Hovering above today’s bench dwellers, is an oblong block of opaque green paint carefully rolled to mask the still visible graffiti, ACAB. I stand and stare. There is an obvious comic reference here to Mark Rothko’s abstract expressionism. On these large boards it does produce the kind of melancholy Rothko’s paintings can inspire. But as I contemplate this accidental work, I locate the melancholy not in the abstract but in metaphor. This acronym ACAB has punctured my drift at various locations. ACAB – All Coppers Are Bastards. An antipolice slogan used by working class hooligans and football Ultras from both the far left and far right. It is a sign of working class resistance and rebellion. Contemplating the oblong of green paint, with the graffiti lettering visible only when the light hits it at a certain angle, I start to think about disappearance. I had read the stories of Hackneys gentrification. But what I have witnessed on this walk is deep entrenched poverty and desperation. The artists, squatters and anarchists have either left, moving gradually further east, or managed to do a deal like the community from Ellingfort road and London Lane; The incumbent wealthy parade Boadway market, flamboyantly sitting outside bars and restaurants, drinking expensive wines and cocktails. The alcoholics, junkies and teenage gangs have a parallel flamboyance, gathering at public benches or in huddles on estates waiting for dealers; but the shops, cafes and pubs that serviced the working class community have all gone. The means by which Hackney’s working class can be public have been erased, like the lettering in this piece of graffiti, but the community itself remains for now.

Leaving the benches, the green hoardings and the stale smell of piss that hangs in the air over this corner, I head into London Fields and the newly planted Wild Flower Meadow. I walk along one of the mud paths that form a small network through the wild flowers. The flowers are in bloom casting an array of colour. Corncockles, poppies, Japanese anemones, oxeye daisys and a mix of wild grasses, gently sway in the wind. Insects are in abundance. A wild eyed but serious man in his early 20s with an incredibly tall body, that seams to bend far too much as he walks, stops to talk to me. ‘Ey! Av you noticed there’s no bees? …But there’s loads of wasps… These flowers are been pollinated by WASPS! ..Nature is cleaver like that. Upset the balance and it finds another way’. I nod politely in agreement contemplating the disappearance of the bees. Over the summer there has been local campaigns against the use of the weedkiller glyphosate on the meadow. I feel a heavy bleakness sink within my body. Hackneys middleclass are passionate about the environment but don’t give a fuck about the economic poison currently eradicating working class people from the borough. Glyphosate cleanses the ground of undesirable flora, making space for newly planted wild flowers to bloom on this faux meadow. London is in the centre of an economic centrifugal force violently spewing the working class, immigrants and the poor out of the inner zones and into the periphery. The free market deteritorialises space uprooting and ordering territories in a reflection of its own inner dynamics. The enemy here is an invisible force active in the city. Only the symptoms are visible, the new high rise penthouses under development on the sites of recently cleared social housing, surrounded by hoardings displaying images of the future residents of the cleansed inner zone, the excessive growth of estate agents and new coffee shops and of course the hipsters with their beards and 5 pound a bowl of breakfast cereal desperately trying to mimic the already dead lives of those future residents displayed on the hoardings. Caps on housing benefit, the on going destruction of social housing and the slackening of requirement for new developments to contributions to building affordable housing are weakening any economic counter forces, but some pockets of resistance have being gathering, raising demands of No Poor Doors! No to Social Segregation! Reclaim Hackney! STOP CLASS CLEANSING!