A Contested Dalston Space: Future Hackney and a Gillett Square Story

A bespectacled woman, dressed in a black turtleneck sweater and black trousers with a brunette collarbone bob, holds a mug in two hands close to her chest (Figure 1).¹ She stands expressionless, looking out of a huge singular picture window from an upper-level mezzanine floor of a new building wrapped in a homogenous translucent polycarbonate façade. The Bradbury Works building in Dalston, east London is described by its designers as possessing a ‘lightweight and reflective skin’, a feature that ‘creates the appearance of a singular form’.² Reflected in the window are the apices of the chimneyed roofs of the adjacent Victorian terraces, while reflected on the building’s polished façade are the faint vestiges of the surrounding neighbourhood, enshadowed, perhaps darker, less singular. Nonetheless, the image means to evoke the assertion of a productive modernity, revealing under its translucent skin a ‘unique new workspace in the heart of Dalston’.³ The other photos for the Bradbury Works project on the Hackney Co-operative Developments (HCD) webpage similarly evoke a so-called ‘Dalston Urban Chic’, as Rod Campbell-Taylor, Chair of HCD, describes it. These images show ‘a new glazed entrance’ and ‘reimagined … usable terraces and breakout spaces’.⁴ ‘Bradbury Works is open for business!’ the webpage announces, with Campbell-Taylor declaring that the building is ‘a community asset, part of the common good’. The press release goes on to proclaim Bradbury Works ‘the next step in the evolving story of one of the most unique and community focused public spaces in the capital’, a redevelopment story that began to be conceived in the late 1990s.⁵

Figure 1 Mezzanine promo image from Bradbury Works. Image by French and Tye (2023). Design by [Y/N] Studio.

But for many in this most unique community, the façade is just that. Many are unconvinced by the claims of its lead architect that the development serves as ‘an extension of the Gillett Square community’.⁶ Instead, it is widely regarded as an intrusion, an encroachment. Artists Don Travis and Wayne Crichlow, who coordinate the participatory arts project Future Hackney, argue convincingly that the heart of Dalston is its people. They say as much in describing the impetus behind Gillett Square Stories, their latest photographic street exhibition at The Red Cross Building on Dalston Lane in Hackney.⁷ Future Hackney is a grassroots-led initiative that documents social change in East London by using digital mediums to tell stories through street and documentary photography, oral histories, and current issues. They work at the intersections of social engagement and photography by co-authoring with communities, creating what they call ‘living archives’.⁸ They passionately convey this sentiment and the way it is ingrained in their grass-roots community archival work, explaining that ‘there is currently little in [traditional] archives that documents … from the perspective of people of African and African Caribbean heritage, and we recognise the importance of documenting these images and narratives, especially during this time of significant change’.⁹ Gillett Square Stories is Future Hackney’s third street exhibition, a year-long project installed in January 2023 that combines documentary and co-authorship to create a photographic story. The exhibition invites the denizens of the square to become rendered visible while appealing for a more immediate engagement with the art because of its public location. It is a project that recognises that despite ongoing arguments about corporate development, the square isn’t a corporate space, but a postcolonial one, and a space that has an important history.

When talking to Travis about Future Hackney’s work, she was immediately emphatic about its necessity: ‘there are great stories about all kinds of urban geographies that are sometimes unseen and unheard, that if you went there, you would never know. As artists, we have to listen to these stories and counter the historical erasure’.¹⁰ Gillett Square Stories is one such iteration of this counter narrative. It features one of Dalston’s remaining working class neighbourhoods, Dalston Kingsland, which was anchored by the transformation of an old car park in into a renowned public square in 2006. The site is opposite to the equally significant Ridley Road Market, situated on ‘a gritty one mile-stretch of low buildings … that houses a vibrant mix of life and is a social and public space’ for the local migrant and working-class community.¹¹ Future Hackney cites local press characterising this area as experiencing ‘managed decline’, with a slow demise of the space that discourages local traders and makes it less desirable as a social space for the local migrant community.¹² Yet, Travis and Crichlow are keen to highlight how the area ‘encapsulates East London’s rich diversity, activism and post-colonial history, now a rapidly changing demographic as creeping real estate and gentrifiers move in’.¹³

It didn’t have to be this way. Back in the summer of 2018, groups like the Dalston Conservation Area Advisory Committee, composed of independent local architects and heritage experts, had objected to HCD’s plans to redevelop Gillett Square, stating that the proposed building was ‘overbearing [and] inappropriate in the predominantly Victorian context’.¹⁴ This fuelled further objections that the development failed to understand the local cultural ecosystem and that any such work needed to happen ‘responsibly, with a common vision, crafted in coordination with the public, private and voluntary sectors’.¹⁵ Indeed, as one of the contributors at a recent symposium held at the Vortex Jazz Club on the square observed, it was ‘absolutely unique in the capital’ and felt like ‘the only place in London that is like the Caribbean where you can just sit and be’.¹⁶ A widely supported petition was gathered alongside a social-media campaign to #SaveGillettSquare. Significant objections were also made from locals who felt they were being forced out of a precious communal space with ‘zero satisfactory options for relocation’.¹⁷ Yet, even with outspoken support from Adam Hart, former director of HCD, who said the development would ‘rip out the heart of Gillett Square’, efforts throughout the summer of 2018 to ‘stand against [the] uniformization and sterilisation of Gillett Square’ ultimately failed and the new HCD development went ahead.¹⁸

It would be an oversimplification to paint the situation as a besieged community going up against villainous developers. While one article on the Open Dalston blog page asks whether the Gillett Square plans are evidence of co-operative development or gentrification,¹⁹ architect and educator Pablo Sendra considers the development of Gillett Square, from car park to public realm, as ‘an excellent example of the capacity of urban design to reassemble public space and encourage citizenship and sociability’.²⁰ It is therefore pertinent that at the core of Gillett Square Stories is an investigation into wider debates over the contested nature of Hackney’s public spaces. For the exhibition, this focus is developed both in the content of the artistic work and in the physical context of its installation running along the side of the Red Cross building on Graham Road, just a short walk from the square (Figure 2). Here, the photographs are placed in an environment that immediately appeals to community conversation and collaboration. As Travis and Crichlow make clear, this was an important and conscious decision. Rather than attempting to democratise ‘traditional’ exhibition spaces to make them more inclusive, their intentions were for more immediate interventions, with Travis reflecting that ‘we’re not against going into galleries, we just feel at the moment that some of the messages that we want to convey are better off conveyed on the street’.²¹ As art historian Cher Krause Knight reminds us, museum space is carefully marked off and culturally designated as special and elite, isolating art within its walls, and creating ‘art experiences’ in pristine, distinctive spaces,²² a far cry from inner-city settings with their dissonance of ‘competing visual stimuli’.²³ By contrast, the social space of the Gillett Square Stories exhibition places it directly amidst the cacophony of the local neighbourhood, ‘where it becomes part of the fabric of the city’²⁴ and reinforces Future Hackney’s ‘belief that the arts should be on the streets for everyone’.²⁵

Figure 2 Gillett Square Stories exhibition, Graham Road, Hackney. Image by Future Hackney (2023).

Street art has a significant presence across British cityscapes. From the ubiquity of Banksy to the famed street art of Belfast, to the Cable Street mural in Shadwell, London, it is a practice found in various British communities. But inclusivity is a feature that has historically been absent from understandings of street art in both popular and academic discourse. As the writer Hannah Jeffery articulates, Black public art and muralism specifically—with its deep connections among Black politics, art, memory, and space—is underacknowledged in scholarship.²⁶ In addition, authorities have long failed to look past street art as being anything other than vandalism or have considered it to be without artistic merit, and scholars have struggled to ‘encapsulate the complex, blurred and changing boundaries between the artistic and criminal’.²⁷ Tellingly, Travis herself recounted an incredulous story about Future Hackney’s concurrent street photography exhibition, Protest Stories, that remains located below the Mare Street bridge in central Hackney, which drew complaints from Network Rail who felt it was ‘too politically and racially motivated’.²⁸ Such misunderstandings overlook if not deny Hackney’s long history of street art seeking to represent the lives and politics of its diverse communities, most notably as depicted in Ray Walker’s Peace Carnival Mural on Dalston Lane, an enormous mural commissioned by the local community arts panel in the 1980s to echo the anti-nuclear voices of local residents.

Travis and Crichlow both live and grew up in the area, and have deep-seated, personal connections within the community that they document, engage, and collaborate with as a result. Years of working alongside residents to create images and oral histories of the local Caribbean and African communities under the auspices of Future Hackney has resulted in Gillett Square Stories serving as ‘a space of radical history through the Black experience and a living archive of memories and experiences, connecting past and present’.²⁹ This radical character extends to its public location, but it should be cautioned that merely being outside is not what makes it radical or even public, in the true sense. As Patricia Phillips argues, art only becomes genuinely public when it takes ‘the idea of public as the genesis and subject for analysis … because of the kinds of questions it chooses to ask or address, and not because of its accessibility or volume of viewers’.³⁰ The most radical art, as Robin D. G. Kelley insists, is such ‘that take[s] us to another place, that envision[s] a different way of seeing, perhaps a different way of feeling’.³¹

For their part, Future Hackney demonstrate a nuanced understanding of ‘community’ and a commitment to a process that mirrors Kelley’s idea of fostering a different way of seeing and feeling. It is a vital platform dedicated to encouraging people to ‘share their stories and images in their own way’ by creating ‘a new space for urban documentary work’ informed by principles of participatory and collaborative authorship. Gillett Square Stories is, in this sense, co-authored with various groups who are united through connections to the area, but also with a clear recognition of ‘shared histories that include diaspora, national borders, the Black Atlantic, double consciousness, Pan Africanism and Post-colonialism’.³² Such global histories are further nuanced by personal, intergenerational stories that include narratives of personal struggle ranging from mental health and gender norms, to institutional racism and sexism. The emphasis on co-authorship allows for participants to control their story, how it is shaped, and what it includes, while being grounded within recognition of ‘“the originals” who have lived in, created and enhanced inner-city areas’.³³

Gillett Square Stories is made up of sixteen black and white photographs that adorn the iconic Victorian brick walls of the Red Cross building. Featured in the photographs are the intergenerational life stories of the community that brings Gillett Square to life, accompanied with quotations from the collaborators when viewed in online platforms. These stories are united through shared histories of personal struggle, of music, of diaspora, and of London. For instance, one collaborator, Abigail Asante, uses her music career to speak about issues such as colourism and abuse that particularly affect women. Another, Clapper Priest, speaks about colonial ideology and its relationship to police harassment, while Tony speaks about his wish to raise awareness of the care system that he grew up in and how that experience, and the neglect he felt there, influenced the direction of his life (Figure 3).

Figure 3 Selected images (Abigail, Clapper Priest, Tony) from Gillett Square Stories. Images by Future Hackney (2023).

The black and white images against the earthy toned wall of the Red Cross building make for a fascinating juxtaposition, allowing for the photographs to blend in, settled and composed, while studiously contrasting with the polychromatic busyness of the wider environment. There is a harmony to the aesthetic choice that makes the photographs feel organic to the space, which operates as an apt metaphor for how the project itself operates. Taking my time to observe people walking by the works, I noted a few people pause to look, while others glanced at them as they walked past. I read this gentle form of encounter as a sign that the design of the exhibition made the photographs so much a part of the urban fabric that they were received as something familiar, quotidian, perhaps ‘native’. It was as if they had always been there, which is a testament to the success of the exhibition’s aim of portraying ‘belonging there, as a space re-imagined’.³⁴ The Red Cross building itself was a fitting choice for their location, having been a part of the landscape since its construction as the Hackney and Stoke Newington Orthopaedic Clinic in November 1919, which over the years provided essential support to ex-service members, asylum seekers, and refugees.³⁵

The Future Hackney exhibition meshes with what art critic Arlene Raven defines as ‘art in the public interest’, something ‘activist and communitarian in spirit’ that forges direct intersections with social issues and encourages community coalition-building in pursuit of social justice.³⁶ Importantly, Future Hackney’s approach is also alive to what art historian Miwon Kwon urges as the necessity to ‘think beyond formulaic prescriptions of community, to open onto an altogether different model of collectivity and belonging’, where community members are not ‘common beings’ but rather ‘beings-in-common’.³⁷ Kwon argues forcefully against the ‘typical essentializing process in community-based art’, which is often built upon

the isolation of a single point of commonality to define a community—whether a genetic trait, a set of social concerns, or a geographical territory—followed by the engineering of a ‘partnership’ with an artist who is presumed to share this point of commonality. ³⁸

Gillett Square Stories’ nuanced understanding of ‘community’ is demonstrated through its emphasis on intergenerational stories, diverse across gender lines and lived experiences, with the framing commonality being the geographic community space, not an essentialised community. Kwon’s solution, which has consistently been the focus of Future Hackney’s collaborative work, is to advocate for ‘collective artistic praxis’, a reflexive practice that is

produced as a function of specific circumstances instigated by an artist and/or a cultural institution, aware of the effects of these circumstances on the very conditions of the interaction, performing its own coming together and coming apart as a necessarily incomplete modeling or working-out of a collective social process.³⁹

Such a practice, as Kwon insists, is the only way to recognise a coherent representation of a group’s identity as always out of grasp and unsettled, and to imagine past the burden of affirmational siting of community to its critical un-siting. This is especially significant when at the heart of Gillett Square Stories, and indeed the stories of the square itself that exceed it, is a complex debate over a physical location just beyond the Kingsland Road, about what it means to be a part of the community who have become anchored around it, and who holds the power to shape it in their own image.

The work of Gillett Square Stories and other such documentary participatory arts projects comes with significant challenges.⁴⁰ For one, the effort to nurture authentic collaborations is time and energy consuming. But these challenges do not temper the reward of producing portraits and oral histories that reveal Hackney’s rich past in the words of its own citizens. The distinct character of this singular urban space, while often heavily impacted by developments such as HCD’s light-skinned Bradbury Works—which Travis dismisses teasingly as looking ‘like a cattle grid’⁴¹—is still determined by those who inhabit it and interact with it. This story over contested space is a complex one. Urban designer David Rudlin calls the contestation a ‘complicated truth’ about ‘a loss of faith’ that the community has in the idea of regeneration.⁴² Interestingly, in what might be considered a token of good faith, HCD have offered Future Hackney a subsidised space in the new building, which should they take it up, Travis promised that the local community would be coming in with them. Here it is useful to reflect on a key point that Cher Krause Knight compels us to consider:

the users of a space are also its producers; without their agency a place lies dormant, awaiting human interactions and interventions to shape it. Urban spaces change not only through the turbulence of collective social forces, but in the accretion of personal experiences over time.⁴³

Gillett Square Stories, and the wider community archival work of Future Hackney, stand in powerful testimony to what is at stake when this becomes disregarded.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kwame Phillips

Kwame Phillips is Senior Lecturer in Media Practices at the Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton. His work uses multimodal and experimental methodologies, grounded in remix and repurposing, to focus on resilience, race, and social justice. He is co-author of ‘“The People Who Keep on Going”: A Radical Listening Party’ in The Futures of Black Radicalism, and producer of the visual mixtapes The Imagined Things: On Solange, Repetition and Mantra and Lovers Rock Dub: An Experiment in Visual Reverberation. His upcoming publications include ‘Dub, Ecstasy and Collective Memory in Lovers Rock’ in ReFocus: The Films of Steve McQueen (Edinburgh University Press) and ‘Creating an Ethnographic Exhibit’ in The Creative Ethnographer's Notebook (Routledge).

Notes

1 See: ‘YN_BRADBURY-22-Mezz.jpg’ on https://hced.co.uk/premises/future-property-developments

2 ‘Bradbury Works’, https://hced.co.uk/premises/future-property-developments [accessed 9 August 2023].

3 ‘Bradbury Works’.

4 ‘Bradbury Works’.

5 In 1998, Hackney Council’s Regeneration Committee confirmed plans to transform what was a car park into what is now Gillett Square. This work finally began in 2006 after planning permission was approved.

6 ‘Bradbury Works’.

7 See: https://futurehackney.com/gillet-square-stories.

8 ‘Future Hackney’, https://futurehackney.com [accessed 28 March 2023].

9 ‘Future Hackney’.

10 Don Travis, interviewed by Kwame Phillips, 23 February 2023.

11 Don Travis and Wayne Crichlow, ‘Gillett Square Stories’, City, 27.3–4 (2023), 655.

12 Travis and Crichlow, ‘Gillett Square Stories’, 655.

13 Travis and Crichlow, ‘Gillett Square Stories’, 655.

14 ‘Gillett Square plans – co-operative development or gentrification?’, https://opendalston.blogspot.com/2018/04/gillett-square-plans-co-operative.html [accessed 23 August 2023].

15 ‘Help List Gillett Square as An Asset of Community Value’, https://www.change.org/p/mayor-of-hackney-help-list-gillett-square-as-an-asset-of-community-value [accessed 23 August 2023].

16 ‘The complicated truth behind a regeneration success story’, https://www.academyofurbanism.org.uk/the-complicated-truth-behind-a-regeneration-success-story [accessed 28 March 2023].

17 ‘Developers are closing in on Dalston’s local communities’, https://www.huckmag.com/article/dalston-gillett-square-gentrification [accessed 23 August 2023].

18 ‘Help List Gillett Square as An Asset of Community Value’.

19 ‘Gillett Square plans – co-operative development or gentrification?’.

20 Pablo Sendra, ‘Rethinking Urban Public Space: Assemblage Thinking and the Uses of Disorder’, City, 19.6 (2015), 825.

21 Travis interview.

22 Cher Krause Knight, Public Art: Theory, Practice and Populism (Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2008), 62.

23 Harriet Senie, Contemporary Public Sculpture: Tradition, Transformation, and Controversy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 230.

24 Travis and Crichlow, ‘Gillett Square Stories’, 667.

25 ‘Future Hackney’.

26 Hannah Jeffrey, ‘A Monument to Blackness’, Kalfou, 7.1 (2020), 64.

27 Samuel Merrill, ‘Keeping it real? Subcultural Graffiti, Street Art, Heritage and Authenticity’, International Journal of Heritage Studies, 21.4 (2015), 370.

28 Travis interview.

29 Travis and Crichlow, ‘Gillett Square Stories’, 654.

30 Patricia C. Phillips, ‘Temporality and Public Art’, in Critical Issues in Public Art: Content, Context, and Controversy, ed. Harriet F. Senie and Sally Webster (Washington: Smithsonian Books, 1992), 298.

31 Robin D. G. Kelley, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (Boston: Beacon Press, 2002), 10.

32 Travis and Crichlow, ‘Gillett Square Stories’, 656.

33 ‘Future Hackney’.

34 Travis and Crichlow, ‘Gillett Square Stories’, 655.

35 ‘Lost Hospitals of London’, https://ezitis.myzen.co.uk/hackneyandstokenotc.html [accessed 28 March 2023].

36 Arlene Raven, Art in the Public Interest (New York: Da Capo Press, 1993), 4.

37 Miwon Kwon, One Place after Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002), 7.

38 Kwon, One Place after Another, 151.

39 Kwon, One Place after Another, 154.

40 See also: Roland Ramanan, Gillett Square, https://vimeo.com/69977701 [accessed 28 March 2023].

41 Travis interview.

42 ‘The complicated truth behind a regeneration success story’.

43 Knight, Public Art, 131.