Extracts
Chapter 1. ‘Street-Corner Vision’
Among the under-estimated attractions of Dalston Junction is a street corner full of forgotten municipal services. The public lavatories are of the attended Victorian variety with wrought-iron railings, descending steps and lunettes in the pavement; and, on good days at least, they still function as originally intended – unlike many of their equivalents in more right-thinking and fortunately placed London boroughs, which have been sold into private use as wine bars, pool halls, and design consultancies. There’s a distinctly village-like Public Notice Board provided by the council but now only used by the fly-posting militants of the Revolutionary Communist Party and the exiled Turkish Communist Party. Proudest of all, however, is the ‘Hackney Town Guide’, which offers to orientate the enquirer with an apparently unambiguous message: ‘You are here’. Displayed inside a glass-fronted ‘Town Guide Cabinet’, the map is perforated with little holes harbouring tiny light-bulbs: the visitor is instructed to identify his intended destination by the ‘appropriate title’ and then press the button below it to ‘illuminate place/s selected’… read more »
From Chapter 17 ‘Excellence: From Fifth Avenue to Hackney Town Hall’
In 1989, the actor Bob Hoskins visited the Dalston Rio to publicize the London launch of his film Who Framed Roger Rabbit? In the course of this visit to the cinema he used to attend as a boy, Hoskins explained for the benefit of an interested enquirer that ‘New York is like Dalston, only bigger’. A similar proposition had formed in my mind a couple of years previously when I took a walk up Fifth Avenue one Sunday just before Christmas. The street was packed with shoppers and the Salvation Army were well dug in on the corners, tinkling handbells against the noise of blaring car horn… read more »