Portraits

A tiny, simple café, with a small door, wooden floors, the bar is made of rolled up corrugated iron holding up round wooden surfaces on top of which are the tills, the espresso machine, cake stands and everything else you normally find in a café. We are in the age of the uncomfortable, and this place is uncomfortably ultra-cool. The menu is a blackboard, the music seems to blare out of a corner labelled LFR - London Fields Radio - decorated with a 1940s microphone, but it is actually coming from a small, white Apple computer: Nicco, Reggae, Blues, Rolling Stones and Punk. The customers are all white, young people wearing vintage clothes and photographers sitting behind their laptops. There are benches instead of chairs and very few tables. This is Hackney in its utmost cliché, a few yards from London Fields and we are in Wilton Way, not far from the old Front Line, on the other side of Graham Road. But where has the Front Line moved to, I ask as the streets of London burn again as if we were back in the 1980s and where are the ex-Frontliners? Did they sell their ex-council period properties to the Artists and Architects that have taken over the more aesthetically pleasing areas of the borough and retired back to their Caribbean islands?

Further along in Hillman St., behind the Town Hall, is the Hackney Service Centre. It houses social services and the housing office. This is a state-of-the-art building, almost entirely made of light green glass on four floors, overlooking an open-planned patio which is also covered in glass. It gives the feeling of space, peace and modern efficiency, as if the building could do away with all the problems that each person brings along with them. Problems which, together, turn Hackney into the inner-city borough it is, with a higher percentage of problems than most other boroughs in the country. Drug problems, crime problems, adolescent gang problems, unemployment problems, alcohol problems and problems due to lack of time, stress and disregard for one's children due to drugs, depression, and disability, lack of understanding and illegality. A huge number of immigrants, children of immigrants, and old communities which were once immigrant. They all still speak their languages and maintain their customs. Hackney is a sort of a sieve that everyone falls into, a diamond prospector's sieve. The biggest and most precious stones appear after the first wash. They shine in their own dull way before being polished, separated from the common pebbles and washed clean from the crust of dirt that surrounds them - religion, traditions, anonymity, and are thus ready to make their way to other boroughs. Artists and also sportsmen, footballers, musicians, and successful members of the ethnic communities move west towards Islington, Camden or Hampstead. They spread themselves and are well-accepted, ready to be bought by British society.

But on the streets where a large number of Estates are found, bearing the name of some important but forgotten community worker, others are left behind. There they stay holding on tightly to their traditions, their customs, hiding themselves in their local shops selling ethnic food: halal or kosher, Vietnamese, Turkish or Nigerian. Intolerantly tolerating other people, only coming together in the Hall of the Housing Office, each huddled up in their bit of green sofa, ruminating on their personal problem: the strong smell of the neighbour's cooking, the member of the gang who is threatening to become their pure daughter's boyfriend. There they sit, people who have been deceived, disillusioned or disappointed. They are all sitting there in the faint hope that they will receive some sort of help or gone to complain about the landlord who takes advantage of them and their situation. They do not know their rights, or rather, some do but cannot fight for them, because they are too old or too young or don't have the time or because they are waiting for tomorrow - the 'tomorrow will be a better day' in the life of a druggie.

In the hall, with its giant roof which disperses human noise, there is a feeling of calmness, a quiet hum which anesthetises other people's problems. Inside the interview rooms, with telephones, computers and emergency alarms, people's lives come and go, personal problems, mouldy walls and children with serious health issues do not seem real and even if they did, the rules are strict. The system has been designed using the latest policy theories, drawn up and learnt in the most modern business schools. They deal with everyone efficiently, politely and within the time stipulated. The clients, these people full of problems, always have the right to challenge decisions: internal and external reviews, assessments and re-assessments, suggestions and comments, questionnaires, leaflets and complaint forms. They have access to the service through the internet, telephone and text messages. Everything is absolutely perfect! The only thing that is missing is help in solving their problems. But help cannot be materialised through a computer, it requires the human hand and the political will of those who no longer want, or have the time to waste with those that have fallen through the system. Especially if (What a crime!) they come from other places: they have been in the borough less than five years, they were not born in Homerton Hospital, or perhaps they have, but illegally, unEnglishly, or maybe they are Europeans that have left their homes on purpose, people who left their slums or rented shanty-town dwellings and their country of nationality to try a better life in the second capital of capitalism, with its open employment markets and its need for cheap immigrant labour. This is how they ended up in Hackney.

Hackney is their first experience of the First World they dreamed about for so long. First World? Well, sort of: its metropolitaness could not happen anywhere else. But Hackney is a halfway house. It is poverty amongst wealth and, in places, a wealthy gem in the midst of poverty. The white people in Wilton Way have chosen it on purpose. They elected this area because it is close to an otherness which is not their own and because they, the Wiltonians, are also in a halfway house. For them sometimes Hackney is only a window, somewhere where some people, sometime in their lives, can look through, stare at the huge precipice, the cliff which follows along our lives and beyond towards the expansive sea of possibilities. Some, perhaps more daringly, will follow the path on top of the cliff, but in the end they will turn inland and re-make their way home. Others still will look for and find the access to the beach, go down carefully so as not to fall, enjoy themselves and sometimes make their way back up, and sometimes not. Only a few will not be able to withstand the temptation and throw themselves off the cliff. They will fall, hobble down Wilton Way to arrive at the Town Hall where they will spend the rest of their lives hanging around, being now part of something that was once far away, talking in their loud voices, to whoever wants to listen, as long as they can find one more can of beer to anesthetise the painful drop, their past, their future and their lives.