Race row after Hackney Council ‘whitewashes’ Narrow Way

The Narrow Way image, published by the council, which the BEMA Network objected to. Credit: Studio Weave

Hackney Council has been forced to go back to the drawing board and commission new images of the Narrow Way after an artist’s impression of the street was slammed for being ‘too white’.

The Town Hall published this image (above) of the historic Hackney Central thoroughfare to illustrate planned changes to the recently pedestrianised street.

But after the Black and Ethnic Minority Network (BEMA Network) pointed out that almost everyone in the image was white, the council removed it from their website.

A page about the Narrow Way on the Town Hall’s website now displays this image (below).

A detail from the image Hackney Council has used in place of the ‘whitewashed’ one. Credit: Hackney Council website

In a press release entitled “Future of Hackney won’t be whitewashed”, BEMA Network chief officer Ngoma Bishop said of the original image: “The image revealed Hackney’s transformation into a borough inhabited almost entirely by young white people. The diversity of the borough has almost completely disappeared and the different communities, cultures and people of all ages and abilities have been replaced with white children and cyclists.”

The release added that after several complaints the image had been removed and replaced by one that was “more acceptable”.

Mr Bishop said: “To us to have an image which is so clearly one dimensional, we and other people found that quite strange and puzzling and offensive.”

A Hackney Council spokeswoman said: “We were provided with images by the architects to illustrate the changes to the Narrow Way’s public realm. We have requested more images which better represent the Hackney community.”

A spokesman for architects Studio Weave, who produced the image, said the council had contacted them to say there was a problem with it.

He said: “We didn’t publish that image, although we did generate it. It was generated to show how the paint works rather than to represent Hackney.

“We didn’t want to offend anyone. We are Hackney based and most of us live in Hackney.

“We are embarrassed people feel it has somehow misrepresented the racial mix of Hackney. The whole idea of the scheme is to get as wide a range of people as possible using a public realm space.”

He said other images showing the Narrow Way populated by a more diverse range of people had also been produced alongside the one to which BEMA Network took exception.