Despite having lived near the Hackney Road (a mile-long stretch from Shoreditch to Bethnal Green in East London) for many years, it was only when I moved away did I have the idea of running guided tours of it. I did this a number of times between 2014 and 2017, with the highlight perhaps being the tour of June 2016 which was conducted jointly with Dr Iris Taylor of the Museum of the Flat Earth.
On a recent visit to the area, I was therefore saddened to see that several points from the beginning of the tour (more formally known as The Secret History of the Hackney Road) were no longer there, largely due to the demolition of the large building on Cremer Street that had housed artists’ studios for some time. The missing sites included the Place du Chats (pictured above), a slice of wasteland home to a colony of cats and a variety of urban detritus. The only chimney on the Hackney Road has also vanished.
The tour itself was positioned as a version of local history, advertised as revealing new elements to this particular area, yet it was largely fictional, with invented characters such as Dr Simpson (a infamous Victorian surgeon), musings on queueing (outside the local Royal Mail sorting office) and anything else that popped into my head. It was in many ways a celebration of the everyday, and the idea that anything can be of interest, if communicated imaginatively.
I wonder therefore about the future of the tour, which in any case often veered off the Hackney Road itself. It might be appropriate to enshrine its memories within a publication, thus adding to the official literature of the area, or perhaps to find a new area in which to invent further urban folklore.
