A new open-air photography exhibition celebrating Dalston’s street culture is calling on locals to support a community kitchen that feeds people on Kingsland High Road.
Love Your Streets by local collective Future Hackney launches next week on the walls of the British Red Cross centre on Dalston Lane and will run until next summer.
The photographs, both analogue and digital, were co-created with Idia’s Community Kitchen, The Silhouette Project and Dalston Superstore.
Together, they capture the neighbourhood’s “third spaces”, the places beyond home and work where people meet and look out for one another.
A QR code (see below) will also be on display to allow visitors to donate directly to the kitchen.
Systems of care
Future Hackney said: “As Hackney continues to change, this gallery is an invitation to notice what already exists here.
“We ask you to respect the systems of care and love already in place, to support them, and to remain accountable to a community that was here long before today.”
Members of the collective spent the past year with the kitchen, producing a series of black-and-white documentary prints of the team, which are presented as part of the exhibition along with colour images showing a wider sweep of Dalston life.
These include dancers at Dalston Supersquare - a celebration of Dalston Superstore's 16th anniversary - and The People's Festival by the Silhouette Project. Both events were held in Gillett Square.
Dalston Superstore, which hosts nightlife and creative events for the queer community and locals, is described in the exhibition as Dalston’s “mecca”, a space of joy, safety and music.
The Silhouette Project produces The People’s Festival in Gillett Square, where locals dance together, and supports emerging hip-hop, jazz and soul artists.
‘Eating together from the same pots’
Idia’s Community Kitchen cooks from food that would otherwise go to waste, and from whatever is to hand rather than from recipes.
It is run by Aina, who named it after her daughter, Idia.
In an interview with Future Hackney, Aina recalled how the pair began feeding people long before the project became a charity, taking a trolley of tea, coffee, biscuits and sandwiches to the Strand.
“She was so small, but she wasn’t afraid of anybody,” Aina said of her daughter, who would talk to the homeless men they served and come back with their stories.
On the way to school, Idia would stop to share her lunch with a homeless man outside Hackney Empire. “That day I started making two lunches – one for her, one for him,” said Aina.
After the death of Idia’s father, the family spent a summer with Aina’s mother in Nigeria, where Idia asked to attend the village school. She drank water from the school tap, contracted typhoid and died, aged 11.
“On her dying bed she told my mother, ‘Mama… who is going to help my mom?’” Aina said.
The family raised money for a borehole so that children in the community would have clean water. Then, Aina said, “We must continue her work.”
‘No recipe – just love’
Aina said the kitchen grew out of how she was raised. “My mother never cooked for only her children. No. Big pot. Anybody passing by – she would call them. Nobody walked past my mother’s door empty-handed.”
Today, the kitchen takes what shops no longer want. “If shops don’t want it, bring it. I sort it, chop it, cook it. No recipe – just love,” she said.
Guests share plates and pass bread around, and Aina asks volunteers to serve with care. “Even if it’s only cabbage and potatoes, we cook it with love.”
She warned that community in London is disappearing as everything comes down to money, with halls locked up, food prices rising and loneliness taking its toll.
“People come here instead of sitting alone in their rooms hearing voices. People come here because they need other human beings.
“This place is saving people more than you know. But government doesn’t see that. The council doesn’t see that. Everything is money. But real community is free.”
Art on the street
Future Hackney, which combines documentary photography with co-authorship, says its work sits at the intersection of photography and social engagement.
The decision to show the work outdoors is deliberate.
“We believe that the visual arts should be on the streets for everyone,” said the collective.
Love Your Streets is at the British Red Cross Hackney Centre, 92 Dalston Lane, E8 1NG, until summer 2027.
The exhibition is supported by The National Lottery’s Awards for All programme, Hackney Parochial Charity and Red Cross Dalston.
To donate to Idia’s Community Kitchen, scan the QR code below.
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