Mick Hartley: Round Hackney Wick

According to Iain Sinclair, "Hackney Wick, once home to more artists per square mile than any other part of Europe, is already gone in spirit, if not in actuality." It's now, as he mentions in the short film at that Guardian link, on the edge of the Olympic site. I headed down there today.

Here, where Eastway crosses the Lea Navigation, looking south, the Olympic site is on the left, and Hackney Wick's on the right.:

I'm going right, down Eastway:

Apart from this one terrace - not in the best condition, as you can see - there's some new housing by the river, looking across to the blue fence of the Olympic site:

but then, apart from a few echoes of the old area, like the former Lord Napier pub:

...it's all run-down industrial estates and warehouses:

with car-breakers yards:

and African churches:

In fact it's just like it was over on the eastern side of the Lea before it was fenced around for the Olympic development. Except that was worse. Cycle round there on a summer evening, as I used to do, and the only sound you'd hear would be guard dogs at the car-breakers yards bounding up to the fences as you cycled past, and barking furiously. It had that certain kind of post-industrial atmosphere, but apart from the Manor Garden allotments there's surely little that anyone could legitimately claim to miss about it. The way Iain Sinclair tells it, you'd think that the Olympics were somehow the cause of all this dereliction, but it's been happening for years.

It reminds me of one of Sinclair's anecdotes - I don't remember where I came across it, but it always stuck in my mind. It was about Victoria Park, and he was reminiscing about the good old days, before it was smartened up and gentrified, when he'd be walking through and come across these hard East-End types training their pit-bulls by getting them to hang on to balls or whatever suspended from the tree branches, strengthening their jaws ready for the illegal dog fights held in pub car parks after closing time. Cue the usual stuff about the Krays and the Blind Beggar and all that Cockney history. There was the implication, I thought, that this was the real old working-class East End, whose loss as a result of all this middle-class park beautification we should somehow be deploring. I can see his point: I can understand getting some kind of frisson from seeing that, just as I could get my post-industrial frisson cycling round the deserted bleak rusty-padlock-and-corrugated-iron landscape of the pre-Olympic Hackney, but, really, it may be a loss from a Romantic point of view, but for everyone else it's very good news that's it's all history now. Victoria Park is back to what it was intended to be - East London's answer to the Royal Parks - and, who knows, the Olympic development might just turn that derelict scrap-land into a great modern urban space. Yes, I know, no one has a good word to say for it, but when Iain Sinclair pronounces about the folly of the Olympics that "It's catastrophic. Apocalyptically catastrophic", I wonder if he might not, for all his undoubted rhetorical skill, be overstating the case just a teeny bit.

So I head back over the East Cross Route:

Through the gentrified Victoria Park:

London Fields:

Stopping to admire some houses in Sandringham Road on my way home:

[Google map]

Comments

Great! Thanks for the Google link; the sat. version resolution is amazing.
The imagery over our place is well over two years old and pretty poor quality. I'm envious.
I also retract my much earlier comment re London being bleak...

Posted by: DaninVan | March 31, 2009 at 03:50 AM

Thank you Mick for having posted all your placemarks in Google Earth! I followed your route. Did you know that you can see also street view on Google Earth? I compared your pictures to those from G.E. and I can validate that you have been where you said you were.

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Certificate of Autenthicity
to
Mick Hartley
of London
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Posted by: Fabian from Israel | March 31, 2009 at 07:29 AM