The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

Part IV: Tactical Filters
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Patrick Wright
has stood boarded up and empty since early in 1990 when the police withdrew
to their new “supernick” up in Stoke Newington, where Chief Superintendent
Twist offers visitors guided tours of his new “cell-suites,”
stressing the ameliorating effects of a modern architecture that brings light
into recesses where horrible acts of brutality might once have taken place.
Then comes a terrace of stuccoed Victorian houses, set back a few yards and
shielded from the road by a little strip of corralled dirt where heroic shrubs
struggle up through the litter and four plane trees rise up to lend an unexpected
touch of nobility to the area. Beyond this residential terrace, there’s
a nondescript factory, a large and surprising Georgian house used as workshop
space by the Free Form Arts Trust, and, finally, a second Victorian ruin
to match the shattered railway station with which this atmospheric stretch
of English street opens. The old vicarage of St. Bartholomew’s may be
derelict, but it can still be said to command the north side of Lebon’s Corner.
It stands like a hollow-eyed skull just across the road from the Unity
Club where local Labour MP, Brian Sedgemore, goes to try his luck as a
stand-up comic. 1 Saplings sprout from the vicarage’s brickwork, and so too
do the shattered marbled columns and ornately sculpted capitals left over
from the church that was once adjoined to it. New settlers in the area often
mistake the ruin for a bomb-site left over from the forties, but it is actually
the much more recent work of the Church Commissioners who, finding
themselves lumbered with too many churches in this apparently Godforsaken
place, called in the demolition men and never bothered to tidy up
after them. The vicarage was listed, but due to the “ecclesiastical exemption”
that removes churches from the protection of the law, nothing could
be done to protect the church from its fate. So this Gothic hulk stands there:
a huge pigeon roost, a poster stand, a terrible warning of the destiny that
awaits listed buildings in Hackney.
I’ve come to know this stretch of Dalston Lane well in recent years.
I walk along it most days of the week and I’m familiar with its vicious side:
I’ve seen the squalor and the many signs of grinding poverty; and like many
other people round here, I’ve studied the psychotic antics of the man who
spends a lot of his time on the traffic island at Lebon’s Corner, reading the
cracks in the asphalt and cleaning them out with a stick. I’ve walked into
the aftermath of a mugging that could have been scripted by Sir Alfred
Sherman: an elderly and blind white man had come out of the sub-post office
at Lebon’s Corner, having just collected his pension. Seeing his opportunity,
a black youth had leapt off a passing bus, hit the man at full tilt,
leaving him in a battered and terrified heap on the pavement, and made off
with his pension. By the time I arrived on the scene the victim was lying in
the stationary bus, surrounded by a great efflorescence of helpless concern: