London 2012 Hackney Citizens’ Diary: Day 7

Local champions. Photograph: Hackney Citizen

4.00pm. The Citizen’s undercover security guard writes:

“The private security staff on my gate have so far mostly been 18-year-old girls who have just left school and are being security guards as a summer job.

“They treat the whole thing like a bit of a holiday camp, and spend most of the day whining about the cold, the way their feet hurt, and the (free) food, because it contains too many vegetables.

“Otherwise they wonder aloud when their next break is, and discuss the ways they will spend their money, mainly “travelling South America… or India” and other gap-year fantasies.

“They mostly don’t seem to have ever done manual or physically draining work before, so they don’t know that the best way to get through the day is just to not complain and get on with it, and they’re also just pretty clueless and annoying.

“They often wander off, and I basically have to do the work of three people a lot of the time”.

11.40am: Dr Matthew Green writes in the Telegraph:

“On my debut voyage to Hackney in East London six years ago I noticed a wall spray-painted with the words “Middle Class Scum F— Off”. Smack-bang in the middle of gentrified Broadway Market, with its organic cheeses, exotic olives and adverts for baby massages (at £80 a whack), it was a chilling reminder of the social tensions that still gushed beneath the surface of the area’s bruschetta society. In the eyes of the graffiti artist, this strip in the centre of one of London’s most deprived boroughs was being colonised by bourgeois invaders. And at lightning speed. Six years earlier, graffiti in that spot had told a very different story: ‘Broadway Market is not a Sinking Ship, it’s a Submarine’. Looking at all the cocktail bars, galleries, florists and gastro pubs today, it would have been hard for that original scrawler to imagine what Broadway Market would become. But that’s the thing about Hackney: it’s always in a state of flux. And the deeper you delve into its past, the more surprised you’ll be”.