Interested In Outstanding Beauty?
Step this way.
Where else but in Deepest Hackney?
Malcontents impersonating Labour Councillors, closet gays in Stamford Hill, Post Offices turning into dens of sin. Anywhere else would be dull.
What a relief.
I wrote this for Guardian/Cif, where it went live on Tuesday and inspired a higher percentage of constructive comments than is usual. I've tried to open up some issues that seem increasingly relevant across London as a whole. See what you think.
Two week ago at my local blog, I linked to an article in Socialist Worker by Michael Rosen. In it, the distinguished children’s author and broadcaster resumed his long-running opposition to a major regeneration project in Dalston, east London, where he lives and which lies within walking distance from my home in another part of Hackney.The scheme centres on the redevelopment of the old Dalston Junction railway station (closed in 1986) as part of the northern extension of the East London Line, but also includes the construction of new shops and homes, a library and a public square. Its backers – Hackney Council’s Labour leadership, former Labour mayor Ken Livingstone, Transport for London and the London Development Agency – say it will regenerate the centre of Dalston. So do the house builders Barratt, whose East London MD claims that the scheme “will finally lift Hackney into another league.”
For Michael Rosen, though, “regeneration” is a fig leaf word to cover something else. “What’s happened,” he writes, “is that the Labour Party has lubricated the wheels of big property developers and retail magnates in order to ‘regenerate’ an area. But it hasn’t been ‘regenerated’ for the people living and working there. They’ve been shoved out.”
To see it, step this way.
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