What a difference a year makes: a look back at Hackney in 2013

Hanging out: artist Leandro Erlich’s  Dalston House installation was a gravity defying feature of 2013. Photograph: Leandro Erlich

The notion of our borough as the home of trustafarian bourgeois bohemians is, well, hackneyed, but there is no doubt the screamingly fashionable reputation of Hackney burgeoned in 2013.

Being cool doesn’t come cheap though. Reasonably priced digs became a critically endangered species, and Hackney Council came in for flak for permitting developers to fling up towers containing scant affordable housing.

According to the charity Shelter, Hackney now ranks alongside Kensington and Chelsea in terms of affordability of housing.

Meanwhile, schemes like the Morning Lane designer fashion hub, waved through by Hackney Council in October, provided fodder for conspiracy theorists who fear there is some diabolical scheme afoot to Kensingtonise Hackney.

The Morning Lane Fashion Hub. Image: Manhattan Loft Corporation Ltd

Those who pledge allegiance to so-called Old Hackney (whatever that means) are yet to wage war on the newcomers on the beaches and the landing grounds, and on the battlefields of Millfields Park and London Fields, but on Hackney Citizen comments threads the dreaded word ‘gentrification’ has had its fair share of use amid incensed invective about organic bread.

Kensington goes east

In June Dalston took over part of Kensington’s Victoria and Albert Museum as part of an artistic initiative that might have been designed to allow Sloaney gadabouts from the land of the basement super-conversion the chance to get a taste of that edgy place their kids have talked about without having to drive their Aston Martins eastbound down the A501.

If Dalston was already reeling from being named the coolest place in Britain by the Guardian in 2009, this, surely, was its death knell.

Speaking of the Guardian, 2013 was the year the Daily Mail’s nemesis committed the ultimate act of self-parody when it opened a ‘pop-up destination’ (i.e. coffee shop) called #guardiancoffee in the Shoreditch Boxpark.

Wags joked American whistleblower Edward Snowden was hiding out there, gaily sipping macchiatos while snitching to Alan Rusbridger’s finest.

The Guardian’s great scoop of 2013 was that the sinister flip-side of smart phones and innumerable YouTube videos of grumpy cats is that governments can snoop on us at will.

In the year that Google (motto: ‘Don’t be evil’) purchased military robot maker Boston Dynamics, it was heartening to see Hackney Council trumpeting the wonders of Silicon Roundabout. The council even led a technology trade mission to the annual SXSW media festival in Austin, Texas (who says all they do is collect our bins?).

Let’s just pray no twisted tech genius is camped out in a bunker beneath the Old Street roundabout, perfecting the ultimate artificial intelligence system with the aim of exterminating all mankind, or else we’ll be among the first to be terminated.

Not black and white

In July Hackney Council was forced to go back to the drawing board when it commissioned new artist’s impressions of the Narrow Way after an image produced to show the benefits of this street’s pedestrianisation was slammed by the Black and Ethnic Minority Network (BEMA).

BEMA’s chief officer Ngoma Bishop said: “The image revealed Hackney’s transformation into a borough inhabited almost entirely by young white people.”

This ‘whitewashing’ row came just months after new census data showed Hackney was becoming younger, more economically active and more ethnically diverse.

The data showed the proportion of black people living in Hackney has dropped over the past 10 years, but then so has the proportion of white people. Residents belonging to ‘mixed and other’ ethnic groups are apparently on the rise.

Long-serving leader

In terms of politics, 2013 was largely business as usual. Hackney’s democratically elected Mayor Jules Pipe (Labour Party) announced he will run again for the borough’s top political job in May’s local elections.
Hackney Conservatives, whose candidate Linda Kelly used to be in the Labour Party before switching sides in 2011, have accused Mr Pipe of running a dictatorship.

Though this is obviously a gross exaggeration, Mr Pipe has been in the job since 2002, meaning he has so far served in high office for more years than the late North Korean leader Kim Jong-il.

Born to run: Mayor Jules Pipe. Photograph: Hackney Council

And finally…

2013 will also be remembered as the year Russell Brand took Jemima Khan on a date to Song Que, the Vietnamese restaurant in Hoxton.

It was the year we bade farewell to gig venue Stoke Newington International Airport, Clapton’s vegan café Pogo and thousands of fish in the River Lea that were sadly choked to death by pollution.

In a separate incident, an artist appealed for information about the whereabouts of a gigantic pike head sculpture pinched from the Middlesex Filter Beds on Hackney Marshes.

At the nearby waterworks centre the Lee Valley Riding Centre began offering pony treks, and Stoke Newington’s West Reservoir was flung open for wild swimming.

Taking the plunge: West Reservoir swimmers. Photograph: Greenwich Leisure Limited

Meanwhile in Dalston, artist Leandro Erlich’s gigantic artwork saw visitors queuing to dangle upside down from the second floor of a terraced house as part of an optical illusion.

Here’s to a surreal past twelve months in the life of our borough!

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In memoriam

Emma Dunning
Derek Boateng
Joseph Burke-Monerville
Miroslaw ‘Miro’ Glazy
Lamarni Hylton-Reid
Antonio Rodney-Cole
Phil Scott
James Sweeney
Suleman ‘Solly’ Vesamia
David White
Bakre Yesufu