A brand new web site finished around a cup of coffee ago, East of the City is the site for a show of photographs by Paul Baldesare, Mike Seaborne and me (Peter Marshall) which, fingers crossed, opens on Oct 1 at the Shoreditch Gallery, in the Juggler in Hoxton Market.
The Juggler is a café in a small square called Hoxton Market hidden between Pitfield St and the rather larger Hoxton Square, in an area that now has quite a few galleries including some very well-known ones. (Unfortunately there are signs around to ‘Hoxton Market’ which point in a different direction, to a street market held in Hoxton St.) The Shoreditch Gallery has been running longer than most in the area, starting when artists could still afford studios in what was then a run down area where the former furniture trade had disappeared.
Paul Baldesare has gone back over the past year or so to another area of East London that has changed dramatically over recent years. Perhaps Columbia Market was never quite as poverty-stricken as parts of Brick Lane, and certainly with all its flowers never as drab at that could be, but the accents you hear there now are certainly rather different. From an East End market it has changed with “a new affluent Londoner and tourists” thronging there on a Sunday morning.
Mike Seaborne is showing pictures from his ‘London Facades’, a series of shop fronts in inner city Shoreditch, Hoxton and Hackney on which he started working in 2004. You can see more about this project and some of his other work on the Urban Landscapes web site which he and I set up around 2002.
My own work in the show is from the book ‘Before The Olympics‘ which I’ve mentioned quite a few times here before. Like most Londoners I knew the Lea valley existed, and had even seen the river from the District line or the Eastern Region main line shortly before the train stopped at Stratford, but until the early 198os I’d not actually stopped to look at it.
I’d come into the centre of London one day to buy a new lens for my Leica, the 90mm f2.8 and wanted to try it out. I’d heard a few days earlier that commercial traffic on the Lea Navigation was shortly coming to an end, so decided to go and see if I could find anything to photograph. There wasn’t a great deal – I found a couple of laden barges moored by a wharf, rather more empty and abandoned looking ones. I don’t think I actually took many pictures on the 90mm either, but I did discover the edges of a fascinating area – and returned on later occasions over the years to explore and photograph it.
At the time there were few sources of information. Even maps and street plans were not too helpful, marking some paths that were guarded by locked gates and barbed wire while not showing others that I could walk along – though many were badly overgrown. I could find no books that mentioned the area – and of course there was no such thing as a web page. There were times when it felt almost like exploring and unknown continent, and for a while I carried a pair of secateurs in my camera bag to cut my way through brambles and small branches blocking my way and my view.
Interesting though the area and some of these photographs I took on my occasional visits over the next twenty or so years were, they were given a new value with the news of the London Olympic bid. Gradually I began to see more photographers on some of my visits to the area (though it was still unusual to see anyone in the remoter regions) and also I began to photograph some of the local resistance to the plans.
I still return to the accessible parts around the site occasionally, though I’ve been too busy to do so for a few months, but I will be there again shortly. A large part of the area is now behind the security fence and only visible from a few vantage points.
