Author Archives: Hackney Podcast

[Audio clip: view full post to listen] 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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

“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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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.

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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, [...]

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 [...]