Our iPhone app Hackney Hear is now on iTunes.

There are more details on our Hackney Hear web site but a quick reminder for those who haven't been following us. The app triggers sound via your GPS. It works anywhere in London Fields or Broadway Market (London, E8) and it's free! Just download, put on your headphones, and explore the area – either stopping to hear more of each story or moving on to hear something new.

We've commissioned some of the borough's artists to write pieces specially for us and you'll hear our Hackney Podcast regulars too:

• Writer Iain Sinclair unravels the layers of history in his beloved local park
• Performance poet Shane Solanki's new piece, "Lido"
• Photographer Tom Hunter tells tales of the 1980s Hackney squatting scene
• Composer Kaffe Matthews' "London Fields", commissioned for us
• Commentator James Meek outside the Dove pub to consider multiculturalism
• Local residents tell secrets behind their neighbourhood, from first kisses to gang etiquette

This Hackney Podcast gives you a sample of some of the stories you'll hear, but if you live in London, or are visiting, we really recommend you download Hackney Hear and give it a go on-site as it's really a different experience!

Hackney Hear was nominated for a TechCon Award by the Radio Academy (just beaten by the BBC) and the judges said it had "potential to really change the game in the radio industry." We think they're right. This technology means for the first time you can integrate sound and place and play with non-linear storytelling: the walker decides the narrative of the documentary. If you're a fan of the Hackney Podcast we know that we don't need to convert you to the wonderful world of audio, but this app really proves why sound is such a strong tool for the imagination - as you wander the area your eyes are wide open, but the sounds and stories are taking you to different eras, and your mind to different places.

If you don't live here, we encourage you to visit our official Olympic borough and try Hackney Hear to learn the stories behind the closed doors! But if you can't make it, you can at least have a listen to some of the stories here in this, our 22nd Edition.

Wild Hackney is a docu-drama taking you through an imaginary landscape of the Lee Valley after the seawater has risen.

Made in response to the canal and the surrounding ancient flood plains, the piece takes as inspiration the Victorian Gothic novel After London by Richard Jefferies. Written in 1885, the book imagines London reverting to nature after a flood, with only a few survivors roaming the marshland.

Using field recordings of the area, the feature moves through scenes of a future Hackney combinging elements of documentary and fiction to reflect on the allure of urban ruin.

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We take four authors for a walk through Hackney. Sean Borodale's poem Notes for an Atlas guides us through, we rise early to join Iain Sinclair for his morning perambulation to the A12, Lemn Sissay takes us from his local shop Palm 2 (where all walks begin) to hear of his tale of going barefoot for a year, and Stewart Home walks us from Kingsland Basin to where he used to live in the 80s near Victoria Park, finding it now just a pile of rubble.

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The Third Wave of Coffee is pouring its way in to Hackney. Cafes such as the Penny University, Mouse & De Lotz and the Counter Cafe pride themselves in their artisan beverages, meticulously measuring the temperature of the milk and the pressure of their carefully ground beans. But while this demand for the artisan cup might be a 21st-century phenomenon, coffee has a role in Hackney life that goes back to the age of the Enlightenment. Dr Matt Green takes us into the world of the 18th-century Hackney coffee house, a bustling social space but also a hub of news information. The substance they drank may have been served from cauldrons and tasted like soot, but this was the place for journalists to find stories on finance or religious dissent.

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"Night in London is a brief period of infinite possibility" wrote the journalist and travel writer HV Morton in the 1920s, and nowhere is this truer than in Hackney, which from doors open till dawn chorus becomes an asphalt jungle for revellers, criminals, artists, lovers, all night eateries and taxi drivers.

In the latest and most extensive in a series of themed editions, the Hackney Podcast brings you a night in the life of this 24-hour borough through the words of its inhabitants, as we meet Mare Street's moonlight bookseller, skirt the edges of a Dalston stabbing, rescue a lost and disillusioned party-goer, feast on a Turkish spread at Somine, trail a Homerton rubbish truck, and greet dawn with the street traders of Broadway Market. Along the way we hear readings from HV Morton and commentary from Night Haunts author Sukhdev Sandhu, helping to reveal some of the strange allurement of the dark unknown.

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Hackney depends on buses. With no tubes, they're how we get around. But what do you do while you're on the bus? Read, eye up the guy opposite? Is it a space for reflection? Or just irritation? Hackney's bus riders tell us. We hear from Alfie Dennen about his Bus-Tops project, from Anthony Morris the bus mechanic who keeps the wheels turning behind the scenes and from driver Pauline Jacobs and passenger Carole Allen who helped deliver a baby on the 394 last year. Plus bus-themed performances from poet Michael Rosen and musician Earl Zinger.
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In this programme we trace the shifting guises of the Hackney Empire - from music hall to bingo hall, from television studio to wrestling venue, to its current incarnation as a home for populist theatre and comedy. Elisha Sessions and Francesca Panetta follow a group of local Hackney Empire aficionados who call themselves The Elders as they prepare to say goodbye to another era in the theatre's history. The gang of mates who ran the Empire since its resurrection in the mid-1980s have been shown the door, and as a new chief exec reconsiders the theatre's "business model" the Elders want to know what happens next. Read More »

Photographer Stephen Gill talks to Francesca Panetta about his particular fascination with Hackney Wick, an area he has documented over the last eight years in noisy images ranging from the backs of advertising boards to the banks of the River Lea.  A Series of Disappointments brings together discarded betting slips picked up from the floors of Hackney's bookies over a period of six weeks, and which for Stephen portray fragments of human emotion.  Inside these shops we hear from the punters themselves, before questioning the Mayor of Hackney, Jules Pipe, about his campaign to reduce the concentration of betting shops in the borough. Read More »

This Sony Award-winning programme looks at water and how it fits into the lives of people in Hackney. Author and psycho-geographer Iain Sinclair follows the route of Hackney Brook, a subterranean ghost river which runs from Highbury to Hackney Wick and still makes its presence felt in ways both immediate and oblique. Then to Clissold Leisure Centre for Wet Sounds, a new music event in which electro-acoustic composers Francisco Lopez, Stefano Tedesco, Tom Haines and Leafcutter John serenade their floating audience through speakers both above and below the water. Read More »

Francesca Panetta meets the dogs and dogwalkers of London Fields, London Review of Breakfasts editor Malcolm Eggs goes in search of the Magic 9 ingredients at Stoke Newington Farmers Market, and we visit the Dalston Mill, modelled on environmental artist Agnes Denes’s New York work of 1982, and providing a rural retreat on some disused railway line in Dalston. Plus a report from the Drawing Room's recent season of events celebrating the work of experimental English composer Cornelius Cardew, whose graphic score for Treatise will be on display from November. Read More »

Francesca Panetta joins John Hopkins - the Olympic Delivery Authority’s Project Sponsor for Parklands and Public Realm - for a tour of the site in East London.  This will be London's first major park since Victorian times, and is intended as a contemporary take on the great British landscape and garden tradition.  The 100 hectare parkland will accomodate an 80,000 capacity stadium, a velodrome, a Zaha Hadid-designed aquatic centre and a media centre for 20,000 journalists.  How sustainable is the development and what will be its legacy for Hackney? Read More »

Recorded at London Fields between 04:00 and 04:30 on Thursday 21st May. 

London Fields East Side from 00:00 to 03:32, Lansdown Drive (crows) from 03:32 to 04:10. 

Edits in the recording are indicated by tape generated sounds at 02:27 and 03:32.

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Buzzing, maddening, chaotic, dirty, dangerous and fun is how locals describe this section of the A10 between Old Street and Dalston Junction.  Hackney poet Shane Solanki has written us a song all about the Kingsland Road, starting a bit further north, up in Stamford Hill.  We meet some of the stall holders at Kingsland Waste street market to find out what drags them out of bed even on the bleakest and rainiest Saturday mornings. Then it's down to Crooked Billet Yard to meet Oliver Bulleid of Cox Bulleid Architects for a tour of their Shoreditch Prototype House - a model for low energy living in dense urban environments. Read More »

Richard Shed, creator of the Here Hook, is our guide to some of the borough’s interior design workshops including Studio F1, where we meet Simon Maidment, Gitta Gschwendtner and Sam Johnson. Sheridan Coakley, director and founder of manufacturer and retailer SCP, describes recent trends in British design and how the industry will be affected by recession. Meg Hillier, Home Office minister and MP for Hackney South and Shoreditch, talks to Francesca Panetta about immigration and English language learning. And we end with a glimpse into the kitchen of the F Cooke pie shop, established over 100 years ago. Bob Cooke shows us how they make their pies. Read More »

Off Broadway’s cocktail consultant Benji reveals his method for the perfect Martini.  Jennette Arnold, Chair of the London Assembly, explains how she and the rest of the Assembly hold Mayor Boris Johnson to account, and why the Dalston regeneration scheme may have to reconsider their goals and think about new partners.

Guardian journalist and Clapton Pond blogger Dave Hill takes us to his local corner shop Palm 2 to meet proprietor Abdullah and his wide range of olives. Read More »

Francesca Panetta is joined by Joanna Smith from English Heritage for a tour of the buildings at the heart of the furniture trade in Victorian and Edwardian Shoreditch. Brad Lochore from the campaign group OPEN Shoreditch and George Galloway MP for Bethnal Green and Bow argue for sustainable development on the advancing City Fringe. Children’s Laureate and Hackney resident Michael Rosen performs his agitprop Regeneration Blues, recorded at a recent OPEN event at Cafe OTO.  Plus we visit the art gallery FormContent, a curatorial project space in Ridley Road. Read More »

London chronicler and Haggerston resident Iain Sinclair talks to Francesca Panetta about Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire: A Confidential Report.  It's his eagerly awaited ‘documentary-fiction’ based on forty years of living and working in Hackney, a borough he describes variously as exotic, seductive, radical, difficult and bloody-minded.   Hear about the author’s walks with photographer Stephen Gill and fellow psycho-geographer Will Self, the mysterious world of Kingsland barbershops, and how the Olympic vision is set to erase Sinclair’s own beloved topography. Read More »

Francesca Panetta attends the premiere of Legacy in the Dust, a film charting the history of the Four Aces in Dalston. She talks to the club’s founder Newton Dunbar, singer Winston Reedy and the film’s director Winstan Whitter. As construction is underway to redevelop the site into a major transport interchange, we hear the views of OPEN chairman Bill Parry-Davies and Hackney mayor Jules Pipe. Our resident philosopher James Wilson offers his thoughts on healthcare and quality of life in Hackney, and we end up on board a British Waterways maintenance boat in the company of Alan Farmer and Colin Wright. Read More »

Francesca Panetta reports from the first Hackney Wicked, a festival showcasing emerging artists and galleries in Hackney Wick.  We join Hashley Brown of the London Review of Breakfasts for some Turkish menemen at Cafe Alizza on Kingsland High Street.  The council's Cabinet Member for Environmental Sustainability Sophie Linden is questioned on green issues by our dedicated Environmental Advisor, Duncan Clark. Finally, with all eyes on the US presidential race, Jane Howe of the Broadway Bookshop recommends some American literature, from John Updike and Philip Roth to Jonathan Safran Foer and Don DeLillo. Read More »

Francesca Panetta visits Cafe OTO, the new music venue in Dalston run by Hamish Dunbar and Keiko Yamamoto, and meets one of their regular performers, Atsuko Kamura.

After a lesson in brake tuning at bicycle cafe Lock 7 and a bell-themed sonic adventure along the Regent’s Canal, we conclude with an architectural tour of one of London’s key post-war social housing developments, Woodberry Down, with the Twentieth Century Society’s Suzanne Waters. To join other walks like this visit the Hackney Society. Read More »

Francesca Panetta joins Hackney artist Tom Hunter for a stroll down Mare Street whose many and varied shops are the subject matter of his latest exhibition of photographs currently on display at the V&A Museum of Childhood. In the first of a series of ethics lectures James Wilson ponders the question of difference in Hackney, while Diane Abbott MP offers her views on education in the borough and London mayor Boris Johnson. Plus we catch up with the Manor Garden Allotment community of Hackney Wick at their watery new home in Leyton. Moro restaurant's Sam Clark was there to sort the leaves from the weeds. Read More »

Francesca Panetta invites Hashley Brown of the London Review of Breakfasts to sample an alternative Full English at Little Georgia at its new home in Goldsmith’s Row, Haggerston - never before have baked beans come under such close scrutiny.  She drops in on Ridley Road market where she meets some aggrieved stall holders, and questions Hackney mayor Jules Pipe on market regulation.  We end up at the Arcola Theatre in Dalston in the company of arts correspondent Andrew Dickson who reviews their latest production, Torn by Femi Oguns. Read More »