East London Photography Festival: The Last of the Real High Streets?

Shoe repair shop Chatsworth Road. Photo: © Colin O'Brien

Could Chatsworth Road in Hackney’s E5 really be The Last of the Real High Streets? Artistic collaborators Colin O’Brien and Jane Egginton fear it may be. That bold yet regretful claim entitles their exhibition of words and pictures opening at Chats Palace arts centre on Friday 8 October. The work is part of the East London Photography Festival, now in its tenth year and the biggest in Britain. Cutting across medium and genre, the renowned street photographer and travel writer bring us face to face with shopkeepers in their workaday contexts, whilst telling stories not usually shared over the till.

The gesture is elegiac in tone yet the focus is decidedly contemporary, not an exercise in nostalgia. O’Brien and Egginton don’t present a polished image, visual or literary. The shots and snippets to which we are made privy are rough around the edges, bursting with colour and idiosyncrasy. They reveal the richness of whole worlds hidden behind unassuming shop fronts. These are the original live/work spaces shaped by a lifetime’s hard graft amid the flux of family life and social change. These buildings stand in stark contrast to the squeaky-clean corporate veneer that has homogenised so many of our high streets. I met Colin and Jane to learn more.

KM: How did the project come about?

JE: Well we’d never worked together before; I’d seen an exhibition of Colin’s work at Chats Palace last year and loved it.

CO: Jane was organising a street party and sent me an invitation – we both live on Dunlace Road, you see.This project has been a labour of love but has taken a lot more time than we anticipated. We started a year ago, we’ve been meeting up once a week. Jane was doing the interviews while I was taking the photographs.

KM: How long have you each been connected with the area?

JE: I moved here five years ago. We were originally looking at London Fields, but this was much cheaper at the time. Estate agents warned us off it – now it’s quite the opposite.  I work from home so I’m always up and down Chatsworth Road.

CO: I moved here 26 years ago. I love it. We only came here temporarily because my mother was ill and we couldn’t afford to live in Islington. I was born in Clerkenwell but we moved up from the country where we’d been running a business for some time, and so we came to the only borough we could afford, Hackney. We got our house for about 34 grand – that was a lot of money in those days, but we scraped it together.

KM: How have you seen the vicinity of Chatsworth Road change?

JE: Gentrification is moving east, Dalston and London Fields becoming more expensive – relatively affordable housing, compared to somewhere like Islington – you can buy a three-storey Victorian house quite cheaply. I don’t think we’ve seen much of the Olympic effect yet. It feels like an incredibly positive moment for the street – in a year’s time we’ll have a clearer idea of where it might be going.

CO: The Olympics will definitely be a catalyst for change, though there may be an anticlimax factor when the Games have gone, there may be more empty shops, but then that lets the street keep renewing itself.

KM: Is the street robust enough to absorb significant change without losing its identity?

CO: We don’t want is a whole street of coffee shops – what we want is the mixture, a rich mixture – there’s everything in this street. As Jane said in one of her pieces: “you can be born here, you can do everything you need to do in your life right here and then at the end of your life there’s a funeral parlour at the end of the road so you can be buried here as well!” It’s a self-sufficient satellite. The perception from some of the locals is that it’s just not the same, but it’s too early to tell.

KM: Can you each tell me your favourite Chatsworth Road story?

JE: Herbert was my favourite raconteur, born minutes away from here – he’s just about to turn 88 – he’s going to buy himself a tricycle! He’s always walking up and down the street looking really well turned-out and he tells the best stories. He says “I remember when you could hear the birds singing, but at the same time it was like Oxford Street, there were department stores, two cinemas, thee pie and mash shops, seven butchers…” and people had all their entertainment here – it sounded idyllic.

CO: The one I was most fascinated with was the Wrigley’s Shop – it had these huge Wrigley’s packets in the window, although they’ve gone now. One day we saw a rather old man looking cold and dishevelled and trying to get in – we realised he was the owner of the shop – he’d closed it three or four years earlier – the shop itself was a time capsule. He lived on his own, he hadn’t touched the interior since the 1940s. He wanted to keep himself to himself, he scuttled away, then later I saw an auction sign go up above the shop, so he’d died not more than a couple of months after I took his photograph.

KM: What sort of reception were you greeted with from the shopkeepers?

JE: Some were suspicious and thought they had to pay us money.

CO: They were just trying to get on with their jobs on the whole.

JE: A couple of people said no, but other than that people have been incredibly open and welcoming.

CO: Not all of those that said no were polite; strangely, some said “you can take the shop, but not me.”

JE: Some people have been a bit funny about having their photographs taken.

CO: Yes, some of the managers wouldn’t be in the shots, they’d use members of staff.

JE: It may have been vanity, or shyness, or sometimes I think it was cultural, to do with privacy, and we were strangers turning up on their doorstep.

CO: The cobbler though – he’s a real character! 50 years he’s been doing it – he does it more for the company than anything else. Jane wanted to buy a pair of shoes, he wouldn’t let her! But you can stay chatting in there for hours.

JE: The interviews varied a lot – obviously people were working and we were having to do it around them serving customers. It was very fluid – a lot of these people don’t have any free time.

KM: Did you manage to get any candid shots or were they all posed?

CO: You can either wander into the shop with a hidden camera – which would be stealing an image – or you can ask their cooperation. It was very natural – I photographed them while they were talking to Jane. They are portraits, like August Sandler, a famous German photographer.

JE: You did consider doing more formal studio shots though…

CO: I did, but then there were issues of equipment, lights, health and safety. Anyway, this was on the hoof, more authentic, just shot with available light and customers coming and going.

JE: We never pre-arranged either, we just turned up. We always took people as we found them.

CO: They were very accommodating, most of them. Although one lady said no because the business was doing so badly!

KM: Where in the world is the road most reminiscent of?

JE: Oh there’s a little pocket of India, flavours of lots of places I’ve been to – Jamaica – it’s been an education – I never would have gone into the Nigerian butchers or met the guy in the kebab shop and learnt about Kashmiri politics and the border issues, also from the guy in the Qu’ran shop. I thought I knew Chatsworth Road really well, but just as travel broadens the mind, delving deeper on my doorstep was really fruitful.  This is why it interests me as a travel writer – the whole world is represented here – it’s the world in microcosm – Turkish, Jamaican, Asian, African. It’s multicultural, it’s multinational.

KM: How does it compare with your previous projects, Colin?

CO: It’s been very different to the stuff I’ve done in the past – social documentary, street photography. This has been more focused. People today seem to be obsessed with the idea of series – a series of snooker players on Dartmoor, whatever, but I get slightly annoyed by it – you can’t just go out, choose something that interests you, grab it and move on. I’m more spontaneous, which this has been.

KM: Can you each define the identity of Chatsworth Road in three words?

CO: Very working class.

JE: Diverse, colourful, rich.

CO: On the edge – that’s a very Hackney phrase!