Acquired For Development By… A Hackney Anthology is edited by Gary Budden and Kit Caless.

From its first electric crackle, Acquired For Development By… galvanises the landmarks of Hackney on the page. Short stories, journalism and poems cross paths as the flow of images takes you from a homely borough to the fringes of what you know via a future Dalston you’ll never visit.

The first, and most mesmerising, work of the entire collection is a love story that rises metallic out of Hackney Marshes – an obsession with a pylon.

Then journalists Nell Frizzell and Tim Burrows introduce us to canal-dwellers and kittiwakes, before the jolting experimental poetry of the Kingsland Road moves the collection on.

We ride up to Stamford Hill and Stoke Newington, pausing for an intimate conversation behind a pub and a glimpse of London 2061.

In Clapton, Sam Berkson’s poetry captures the moving margins of Hackney gentrification, and in Homerton Eithne Nightingale recounts the life and death of a Pole on Murder Mile.

The danger of writing about Hackney would be that it would get too close up, fall to common cliché and lack a sense of togetherness. But Acquired For Development By…  has detail without being meticulous, is personal without being obscure, and flows as smoothly as the N55 bus at 4am.

Editors Gary Budden and Kit Caless have previously worked on Ambit and Stalking Elk magazines, and it’s easy to praise their expertise in getting writers’ work to sit nicely together. Some notes jolt – the ever-present haikus that haunt most anthologies, for instance, and an article which starts, “An account of Hackney today wouldn’t be complete without exploring…”.

But there are strong notes towards the end: Budden’s pared-down story series, Tautologies, Rosie Higham-Stainton’s sensual ghost story and the last piece, Siddhartha Bose’s lyric free verse.

Hackney is home to some great young writers at the moment – rough gems a few of them, but also published and award-winning writers. All of the contributors to Acquired For Development By… have written just for the joy of it.

Acquired For Development By…
Publisher: Influx Press
Price: £11.99.

Hackney writer Jane Harris. Photograph: Jerry Bauer

Hackney-based author Jane Harris has recently learned that her second novel, Gillespie and I, has been longlisted for the prestigious Orange Prize for Fiction.

Ms Harris’ highly-acclaimed first novel, The Observations, was shortlisted for the same prize in 2007, and she is widely seen as a rising star in the world of fiction.

Gillespie and I is set in turn-of-the-century Glasgow and charts the tale of Harriet Baxter and painter Ned Gillespie. Full of mystery and deception, this Gothic tale has captured the imagination of numerous readers since its publication last year.

The Hackney Citizen met Ms Harris to ask her about history, place and writing.

HC: Congratulations on Gillespie and I being longlisted for the Orange Prize. How did you react to the news?

JH: I was absolutely delighted and a bit stunned, to be honest. It’s such an amazing list, and includes some real heavyweights, so it’s a huge honour that Gillespie and I is on there.

HC: Do you see yourself as a writer of ‘women’s fiction’? If so, what does this term mean to you? If not, how do you define your audience?

JH: No, I see myself as a writer of fiction. The term ‘women’s fiction’ means nothing to me. I don’t define my audience, since I have no need or desire to.

HC: The Observations and Gillespie and I are both historical novels. What attracts you to this genre, and why have you chosen the late 19th and early 20th centuries?

JH: It’s a bit of an accident really. My first novel The Observations began as a short story I was thinking of doing as part of a series of linked stories set during a variety of periods in history. To my surprise, the story expanded into a novel. After that it seemed to make sense to write another historical book. I like to make life difficult for myself which is one reason I may be writing historical fiction. It’s harder to write about another era than it is to write about now (despite what some contemporary novelists might claim!)

HC: You live in Hackney and write about Scotland. How does your distance from Scotland affect your work? And does any of Hackney rub off on your writing?

JH: My first novel is set in Central Scotland. The second is set in London and Glasgow. The novel I’m writing at the moment is set in the Caribbean. I love inhabiting the imagined worlds of my novels. Present-day Hackney provides a nice contrast.

Gillespie and I
Faber and Faber
RRP: £7.99
ISBN:  978-0-571-23830-9.

The Orange Prize shortlist will be announced on 17 April.

Gillespie and I explores loneliness and love

Haunting, romantic, gothic: The Whores' Asylum

The fine line between virtue and vice is a staple of narrative fiction, and in Victorian Britain the passage from gentility to depravity evoked both dread and fascination.

A light and subtly ironic meditation on these themes, The Whores’ Asylum is the début novel by Hackney-based author Katy Darby. Set largely in the sordid back streets of nineteenth-century Oxford, this gothic pot-boiler recounts the story of the ill-fated Diana and the various men with whom she becomes entangled.

At the centre of the tale are the classic romantic themes of lost innocence and tragic love. Love surfaces in all its various guides: as passion, friendship, devotion, and disease. Disease also becomes a theme in its own right, manifesting as physical ailment, mental illness, and moral degradation. With love and disease entwined in a grotesque embrace, the result is of course foreordained.

If the novel’s unwinding is predictable from the narrative norms of the genre it inhabits, it is none the less appetising. The story is quite convincingly narrated in nineteenth-century prose with period literary devices to match. Multiplying the classic novelistic conceit of the found document, Darby creates a patchwork of nested stories within letters within memoires. Each account sheds light on a part of the main character’s sorry tale.

The noble religious scholar Edward Fraser is followed by his friend and temperamental opposite, Dr Stephen Chapman, before Diana herself serves a stint as narrator. Interspersed are accounts by the dissolute cripple Hereward, the fiery painter Valentini and the evil Kester.

The novel has a playful tongue-in-cheek quality to it, but it is also a true page-turner. If the symbolism is at times a trifle laboured, the narrative is certainly entertaining and crafted in a style that only occasionally bears the marks of a twentieth-century keyboard.

The Whores’ Asylum is published by Penguin, ISBN: 978-1-905-49080-6. RRP: £12.99

Acquired For Development By… A Hackney Anthology is edited by Gary Budden and Kit Caless.

It began just after the bombs.

A shared house of post-graduates on Manor Road. The eccentric Chinese landlord would stroll in unannounced on New Years day to do some unneeded repairs. In retrospect, he was one of the good ones. An exploding extractor fan and a charred bathroom ceiling taught me that. The garden backed onto Abney Cemetery, and older tenants would tell tales of cottagers they’d spied in clandestine embraces, mossy condoms as evidence. Little Jewish girls would wave to us from next door’s upstairs window as we sat around bonfires or sat smoking and drinking late into the night.

I worked, in between shifts in a bookshop, on a dissertation about Derek Jarman and psychogeographic film. I’d obsess over The Last of England, Patrick Keiller’s London and Andrew Kotting’s Gallivant. I was confronted with the notion of ‘occult capitalism’ for the first time. I was listening to a lot of Crass and Conflict.

Pieces began to fall into place. For so long the world had seemed something that had happened to other people; that’s what the easy lies of the television had softly murmured into indifferent ears during my formative years. “Things don’t happen in England anymore; irony absolves us. You’re already dead.”

This notion was being shredded, scuppered and run aground. The talk of the paranoid psychogeographers, the Crass lyrics, a city shaded by the recent bombings and the Menezes shooting, the weight of so much information, all made a mockery of the irony-impulse and the idea that life was a spectator sport.

Psychogeography, inevitably, led me to London Orbital, the works of Iain Sinclair and a whole new world right on my doorstep. Place, as a concept, hadn’t mattered to me much then. I was, like so many, still more knowledgeable about the movements and people across the Atlantic than in my own postcode. Happily, that was soon to end.

I had to relearn the history and the meaning of my own country, and I did that in Hackney. I guess it could have been anywhere. But I did it here.

The first page of London Orbital spoke of the Lea Valley, where I ended up living, and Whitstable, the town of my childhood. It couldn’t be fate, but it was close enough.

I look at the fate of that seaside town and I compare it to Stoke Newington. They are oddly similar. Run down and the home of counter-culture residuals in the 1980s and 90s, then a new influx into the area bringing olive vendors, organic produce and increasing attempts by large corporations to cash in on the interest the area had generated.

Sometimes, what makes a place desirable kills it.

I’d heard talk, via Sinclair, of Alexander Baron. In vain I tracked his novels; ever the completist I wished to own, not to loan, but loan I did, from the libraries now threatened with closure. Had they been absent I would never have read the first edition of The Lowlife. My eyes opened that bit wider, the streets seemed more solid and my world was somehow fortified. People like me, like us, had been here for a long time. One line still stays with me. Indirectly it led to the creation of this text you are now reading.

“And on the wall I saw that epitaph to all our yesterdays – ‘Acquired for Development By – ‘”

If ever there was a more fitting statement to describe what I was seeing, feeling, not just in Hackney but across the whole country, then I could not find one.

I’d been here so long that, yes, this was where I could now observe the very real effects of endless redevelopment taking place. But I only needed to go home, visit my mother, to see the same thing happening to high streets in small towns across the UK. Blink and you miss another Costa Coffee arriving fully formed. You never wanted it. But there it is.

Only in my late twenties, a world that I could remember seemed to be disappearing. Even the diversity of shops and businesses, surely OK in a capitalist world that promotes economic competition, seemed to be disappearing. The limited choices we had dwindling all the time as they were taken over by and throttled by conglomerates, chain supermarkets, the unfeeling indifference of property developers.

Development and progress, if handled sensitively, are clearly good and positive things. Yet all I see is an urban topography in constant turmoil, a concerted attempt to erase collective histories, to scrub the slate clean and force us to question our own memories.

If I cannot find any official documentation rubber stamping my past, the places I visited and the things I did, then did they really happen?

My memories are becoming opaque, betraying me. They are being taken from me and handed back deemed worthless. Unofficial. Bootlegged reminiscences only for the cult collector.

What this book contains are some small acts of reclamation. An attempt to say what we think before we forget.

Acquired For Development By… A Hackney Anthology is edited by Garry Budden and Kit Caless and published by Influx Press. It goes on sale this month and you can buy it in Hackney bookshops and on the Influx Press website at influxpress.com.

Zoe and her devoted dog Beans. Illustration: Mick Inkpen

The story of The Magic Hoop is one of the Zoe and Beans series.

It is a lovely book and has delightful illustrations that any child could see what they are meant to be.

The story is about a girl called Zoe and her dog Beans. They are good friends and have lots of fun together.

Zoe is a very different character to Beans. She is happy and always excited. Beans, on the other hand, is lazy and quite shy.

One day Zoe finds a hoop. They find out together that the hoop is a magic hoop. Read the book to find out what happens next.

I really like the fact that this book is written by a father and daughter. I think that it is a very inspiring thing to do with your parent.

Impressed: Róisín and Séamus Glancy

I read this book to my younger brother Séamus, who is aged four. He enjoyed it very much and gave it a score of 13 out of ten.

I liked it too and think it would be good for both boys and girls aged 3-6 years. It made me laugh and it was very compulsive. I hope you enjoy it as much as we did.

I live with my family in Clapton very close to The Bookbox bookshop. Last year I won The Bookbox’s story writing competition and was presented with my prize by a famous author.

My favourite author is Jacqueline Wilson and I adore her books to bits. I have two brothers, Fionn and Séamus.

–

Chloe Inkpen is a local author who creates her children’s book series Zoe and Beans in her studios in Hackney. Chloe works on it alongside her father, Mick Inkpen, the famous creator of Kipper and Wibbly Pig.

Zoe and Beans — The Magic Hoop
by Chloe and Mick Inkpen
Macmillan
Paperback
ISBN 978 0 330 51840 6
RRP £5.99

Don't worry: be happy

In the end, even pop psychology flows from Freud. It was the father of psychoanalysis who so eloquently described how our forebears banded together in the service of that most primitive of industries, agriculture. They diverted their energies away from satisfying primeval instincts and ploughed them into a project: civilisation.

Fast forward thousands of years and many of us are employed in office jobs, but the psychological mechanisms at work are no less powerful. They can crush our creativity and corrode individuality.

Or as Professor Julian Birkinshaw of the London Business School puts it in his foreword to longtime Stoke Newington resident Henry Stewart’s book The Happy Manifesto: “The vast majority of workplaces are stultifyingly dull. The physical surroundings are drab. Many jobs are designed to be as repetitive and soulless as possible. Fear is endemic. Many bosses, as Stanford’s Bob Sutton would say, are assholes.”

Happy Manifesto author Henry Stewart. Photograph: Miriam Stewart

Mr Stewart, an entrepreneur and the chair of governors at Stoke Newington School, passionately believes it doesn’t have to be like this. Not only that, he insists companies can boost their productivity by being pliant to their employees’ wishes and removing obstacles that hamper their enjoyment at work: “Imagine a workplace where people are energised and motivated by being in control of the work they do,” he says. “Imagine they are trusted and given freedom.”

His book contains many useful, practical suggestions for heads of organisations, many drawn from his own experience as chief executive of the training company Happy Ltd, which he founded as Happy Computers in his back room in Hackney in 1988. The company now trains 20,000 people a year and has been widely commended both for the way it treats its personnel and for its work in the community.

Stewart dislikes excess rules. His manifesto calls for a less intrusive form of management. Managers, he says, often get in the way. Their desire to have ‘sign off’ on decisions, however well intentioned, can damage workers’ self-esteem. Give people the tools to make decisions themselves, and information such as the budget for a project, and they will find solutions just as effectively as more senior staff.

Another thing that gets Stewart’s goat is the unbending stance most companies take towards staff working specific hours. Who says the company’s routine will suit everyone? And if it doesn’t, are some people working less effectively than they might otherwise?

Stewart gives the example one of his employees who would always roll in for work exhausted on a Monday morning after going clubbing the previous night. Instead of giving the young scenester a slap on the wrist for letting his social life damage his effectiveness and rigidly insisting that he show up for work at precisely the same time as his more sober colleagues, Stewart agreed to the reveller working a shorter day on Monday by arriving later and making up the hours on other days when he was less tired. If only all bosses were this accommodating!

The importance of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is another theme of the book, and Stewart insists that companies’ involvement in communities should make a genuine difference.

He recalls giving a talk at a conference about CSR: “As I looked around the room, I saw companies which I knew treated their staff badly,” he writes. “I saw companies whose core product was bad for people and bad for the environment. And I saw one company who spent far more on advertising the good work they did than on the good work itself. I am reminded of a cartoon in a UK newspaper which showed a huge mining company despoiling the earth, but their protective helmets were made from recycled plastic.”

His slim volume ends with a call to arms, a kind of “Bosses of the world, unite!”, and the hope that more companies will learn from major corporations such as John Lewis, WL Gore and Google, which Stewart says put the happiness of their workers at the heart of what they do.

But Stewart’s is a brave new world and one suspects that for too many workers Sunday night will continue to be a time of great foreboding.

The Happy Manifesto by Henry Stewart is published by Happy, priced £9.99.

Histories of Cable Street, published by Five Leaves

Unemployment is high and proposed cuts are causing deep rifts in a government also struggling to maintain the value of the pound abroad. As familiar as it might sound, the year is 1936. Against a backdrop of Depression, hunger marches and rising fascism on the Continent a number of fascist organisations pop up in Britain.

Amongst those playing to popular prejudice and blaming the country’s ills on immigrants and Jewish people, Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists are particularly virulent. Emulating the fascist organisation Mosley had encountered in Italy, right down to their blackshirt uniform, the BUF’s activities were often violent.

During the summer of 1936, tensions rose as BUF activities increased and news that they were planning on marching through the East End in October was greeted with alarm. Sixty percent of Jews in London lived in the East and the march was a deliberate provocation, calculated to cause maximum confrontation and disruption.

After pleas for the march to be officially banned fell flat, the blackshirts assembled on 4 October, ready to march through Stepney.  Anti-fascists rallied, uniting under the battle cry ¡No Pasaran! – they shall not pass, adopted from Spain’s own fight against fascism.

Despite the six thousand police attempting to clear the route, the anti-fascists stood strong, blocking the way. The only route left was through Cable Street, barricaded by protestors who chanted, blockaded the street with whatever they could find and fought running battles with the police. Eventually the BUF were forced back and the march dispersed to great jubilation.

The Battle of Cable Street, 1936 provides a thorough overview of the events. Born of a desire that this important piece of East London history is not forgotten, it was put together by the Cable Street Group and its reissue marks the 75th anniversary of the battle.

With black and white photographs and extracts from interviews with participants and witnesses it has been thoughtfully put together, capturing the heat and energy of the battle through the words of those who were there.

Everything Happens in Cable Street is an examination of the other stories the street has to tell, before and after its famous battle.  A fascinating collection of local characters and places emerge from the pages of this well-researched book by long-term resident Roger Mills.

October Day follows the event of 4 October through the eyes of seven different people.  Written by Frank Griffin, an eye-witness to the events, it offers a vivid insight into the people, the events and the politics.

These three very different books form an excellent record of an important historical event.  Alive with defiance and solidarity, they make for essential reading, particularly by those who have begun to forget.

Everything Happens in Cable Street, by Roger Mills, October Day: A Novel of the Battle of Cable Street, by Frank Griffin and The Battle of Cable Street, by The Cable Street Group are all published by Five Leaves.

Railtracks by John Berger and Anne Michaels: railways, love and loss

They may be sleek, clean temples of modernity, but airports aren’t a patch on train stations.

Where is the romance in what are essentially tightly controlled and hypersecure out-of-town shopping centres attached to runways?

Evocative reminiscences and meditations on the smell of coal at train platforms, of separations and reunions, are expressed in passages full of subtle cadences in this concise volume by the acclaimed novelist and commentator John Berger and the novelist Anne Michaels, which serves as a reminder of the beauty of our grandest transport interchanges.

These include the King’s Cross railwaylands – an industrial wasteland where you can still see “wires like ganglia hanging from the coarse brains of cement”.

Published in Hackney, the book reads like a less ornate version of something by Iain Sinclair.

The sometimes elegiac prose is finely written with a light touch, and it swirls around London treasures including the Hardy Tree in the churchyard of St Pancras Old Church, which was incidentally once the site of a pagan Temple of Mithra.

Stations, unlike airports, are surrounded and suffused with memories of this kind. They are “the shunting-yards of history”.

Take Washington DC’s most famous train station, from which many soldiers departed to travel on to fight in Europe in the war.

Berger writes: “For so many, Union Station is the place where fathers, brothers, sons, husbands were last alive. And, among all the partings, it is said, were lovers who had no place else to go, who came simply to join the anonymity of the crowd, so they could kiss with inconspicuous passion among the throngs crowding the platforms and the great hall, their public display swallowed up by the intense emotion all around them.”

With photographs by Czech artist Tereza Stehlíková, this sensitively written work, which contains not a word too many, will make you yearn to embark on a long return journey by train.

Railtracks
By John Berger and Anne Michaels, photographs by Tereza Stehlíková
Published by Go Together Press
Price £9.99
ISBN: 9780955767616

Animal magic: The Animalympics

The Animalympics by Hackney-based writer Julia Griffin and illustrator Hendrik Wittkopf is a wonderfully spun rhyming tale, inside the pages of a colourfully imagined children’s picture book.

Set in London, the story follows a group of animals who are fed up with the stinky pollution and rubbish of the city. In the hope of bettering the place, and with good old Fox at the helm, they plan to do “something big. A party! A feast! A sporting shindig!”

This can mean only one thing – the Animalympics.

The Queen, brilliantly realised by Wittkopf with a towering crown falling down over her eyes (and legs rather squat from the weight of it), is apprehensive that such an event could cause more congestion in her capital city. But Fox, being the sly old thing that he is, sends out a message to all the world’s creatures: “Please come to our Games. They’ll be fast, wild and free. London’s the top place for a creature to be.” (Environmentalists may snigger).

And so, disregarding ‘queenie’, a series of fantastically imagined sporting events take place, from Vole Vaulting outside the Tate Modern to ‘scratching and grooming’ down Savile Row. With its many recognisable landmarks and quips about dog poo and traffic, the layers of humour in this book will please both a young and mature readership.

However, this is not to be mistaken for one of those annoying children’s books that are really aimed at adults. It draws from the classics, such as Dr Seuss and other books in rhyme, and any possible grown-up subtexts remain subtle.

Wittkopf’s colourful collage-style illustrations of hamsters running loops on the London Eye bring the surreal and bizarre to life. His scratchy line-drawn creatures evoke the work of Quentin Blake, with a psychedelic undertone.

If there is a moral for everyone here, it is that nature often knows best. And for those of us a little older and bored by the glut of rather serious Olympic-related literature, The Animalympics offers both a droll and entertaining breather.

Julia Griffin and Hendrik Wittkopf will be at The Book Box, Chatsworth Road E5 on 21 January 2012.

The Animalympics
By Julia Griffin and Hendrik Wittkopf
Publisher: Clapton Commons 2011
£7.99

School Wars: The Battle for Britain’s Education by Melissa Benn

We all had labels at school. Maths geek. Good with your hands. Sports star. Creative. The dumb kid? The smart one? The rich kid? Poor?  I often look back on the assumptions a made about myself as a child and think how absurd they were. Lofty aspirations yet to enter the picture, my eleven year old self dreamt of becoming a teenage supermarket cashier whose mum let her smoke and chew gum.

It now seems absurd to classify ourselves, and allow our peers to classify us, at such a young age. But in her new book School Wars: The Battle for Britain’s Education Melissa Benn provides some retroactive comfort in suggesting that these childhood labeling rituals aren’t just playground politics. Rather, they are rooted in the very structure of British education.

Benn illustrates a long history of classifying children in stages. Unfortunately the first one is birth, when a family’s financial status dictates a child’s prospects of being educated at a top fee-paying school — or not. Let’s face it, even if the state system were entirely egalitarian, it would still have this huge disparity to contend with.

But without needing to address the comparatively simple question of haves and have-nots, Benn tells us that the state education system has always been, whether we noticed it or not, a political minefield.

Built upon what Benn describes as a ‘pyramid of provision’, the system uses exam results and league tables to ‘cream-skim’ the top students early on for better-funded state schools, like the early grammars and more recently, the new academies and free schools which set their own admissions policies, using what Benn calls ‘soft-focus selection’ to edit their intake.

With these structures, Benn argues, Britain has invited a version of ‘educational apartheid’ that, like the global economy, diverts resources to where it sees most potential, and challenges the rest to catch up.

But what of education as a human right? There’s no question of Benn’s stance — she is a staunch advocate for comprehensive education, an often-muddied term which for Benn means non-selective, all-ability schools, run by a local authority, implemented on a national level.

The current ‘new schools revolution’ pushing forward free schools and academies promises more choices, Benn explains, but at what cost to the quality of learning? Well, that depends on how you measure a good education. But now that an opportunistic third party has visited the front lines promising peace, the official definition of good education, warns Benn, will be subject to the free market, and all its volatility.

Unsurprisingly, then, the book is sharply angled against the expansion of academies and free schools, which are central-government controlled and often funded by private companies or charities.  Benn acknowledges that many sponsored academies produce excellent results (though perhaps through an overly results-driven system). The question Benn asks us to consider involves the bigger picture; if schools are not accountable to the local authority, how can we ensure they have the community interest in mind?

And if comprehensive education continues to dissolve, Benn predicts a “landscape of branded diversity” will emerge, and “the fast pace of technology, and the temptation to cut costs, will increase standardised, centralised learning methods.”

All parents want a top school for their children, which in the current climate requires exhaustive research of the buffet of options available, from faith schools selecting on religious criteria to free schools specialising in, say, Latin, and everything in between, with only the expanding market of education chains staying ahead of the game, ready to supply, and profit from their invitation to join in the conversation via the materials they provide.  This, Benn makes clear, is the most significant development of our generation.

Choice is good, but Benn’s real question is, who’s doing the choosing?

School Wars: The Battle for Britain’s Education by Melissa Benn
Published by Verso
ISBN: 9781844677368
RRP £12.99

Related:

Interview: author Melissa Benn on her new book, School Wars