Banned author, Iain Sinclair, to visit Dalston's Vortex Jazz club. Tuesday 28 June at 8pm.

Iain Sinclair, the banned author,will be reading and discussing his new book "Ghost Milk" at Dalston's Vortex jazz club on Tuesday 28th June at 8pm.

As part of the Vortex Wordplay series the evening will also feature music from the Dulce Tones - the musicians who performed at OPEN Dalston's St Barnabas event last September.

You can buy tickets here for £5 in advance

Ghost milk. "What does this mean?" Sinclair is asked

"CGI smears on the blue fence" he replies. "Real juice from a virtual host. Embalming fluid. A soup of photographic negatives. Soul food for the dead. The universal element in which we sink and swim"

"You can't write about this. They'll never believe it" Anna Sinclair warns Iain, her husband.
But now he has written about it. All of it. Ghost Milk.

"A wonderful kind of alchemy is at work" J G Ballard observed in Sinclair's writing. The Sunday Times described his work as "remarkable, compelling, bristles with unexpected, frequently lurid life".

Photo copyright of Mike Wells

Hackney's ban on Sinclair was imposed in October 2008 just prior to the publication of his last book "Hackney,that rose-red empire. A confidential report"

"We should not host an event which....actively promotes an opinion which contradicts our aims and values as an organisation - in this case the 2012 games and legacy. I have discussed the PR ramifications of this with Jules Pipe [Hackney's Mayor -Ed.] and he is comfortable with this approach"
Polly Rance, Head of Media, Hackney Council

Photo copyright of Alan Denney

The Council's invitation to Sinclair to speak in Stoke Newington was withdrawn even before the book had been read.
"Now I was one of them, promoted to the status of non-person" writes Sinclair in Ghost Milk. "I took it as a tribute, after all this time, to be thought worthy of being invited to leave the premises....My docu-novel closed with the erection of the blue fence around the Olympic Park...".
Burrowing under the perimeter fence of the grandest of Grand Projects - the giant myth that is the 2012's London Olympics - Ghost Milk finds a landscape under sentance of death...
"Sinclair's most powerful statement yet on the throwaway impermanence of the present."

Photo copyright of Mike Wells - 2.5 million cu metres of spoil, including radioactive material, is moved around the 2012 Olympic siteSinclair's Acknowledgements in Ghost Milk includes a final dedication to Hackney's Mayor Jules Pipe "...a constant inspiration as he remakes the borough of Hackney as a model surrealist wonderland".

Dalston's Transport Interchange "vision" to be realised (not)

Transport for London and Hackney Council may be triumphant now that their vision for a rail/bus Transport Interchange for Dalston will be realised when the 488 bus route extension from Clapton to Dalston Junction starts running this Saturday 4th June. However we were originally told that 70 buses an hour would use the Transport Interchange but it now turns out that only the 488 bus will use it (That's five 488 buses an hour, at peak times).

The bus stop is on The Slab, a massive concrete raft which was built over the Dalston Junction railway station so that bus and rail passengers could conveniently 'interchange' within the site. It was said at the time that there was nowhere else that the buses could stop. So The Slab had to be built - along with hundreds of private tower block flats for sale to pay for it. But TfL has since decided that other buses must continue to use the old bus stops after all because driving onto The Slab would just delay passengers. The cost of The Slab has risen from £26millon to £39 million and is now expected to cost £63million - just for one bus stop to service the 488.

At the time of the last Mayoral election Hackney said it was "fighting for a Transport Interchange" but it is not yet known if Hackney's Mayor Pipe will be on board the first 488 when it pulls onto The Slab on Saturday. Nevertheless if you want to line the route cheering and waving (or whatever) as it progresses from Clapton to Dalston you will find the route here.

Local people have not shown enormous enthusiasm for the £63million of public expenditure and the bus stop was sold for just £7.50 at OPEN's mock public auction last September. The lucky purchaser from Clapton, who preferred to remain anonymous, said "The 488 will be really handy for me to get the train from Dalston but I do agree that a £63million Transport Interchange seems a lot for the public to pay just for my convenience"

Redevelopment proposed for 67A-76 Dalston Lane

This is the image presented for a redevelopment proposal which is now out for public consultation. It will shortly be considered for planning permission. The site is at 67A-76 Dalston Lane next to Martel Place mini-roundabout leading to the car park at the back of Matalan and the Kingsland Shopping Centre.

This view is facing south from the Dalston Lane bridge over the North London Line

The high density development, promoted by a private developer, will consist of 2 blocks - the block facing Dalston Lane is for rented flats and is between 5 - 7 storeys and, behind it, the second block for private flats ranges from 7 - 10 storeys. The development will include 119 new flats in all - 66% of the flats are one and two bedrooms and 5 flats are 4 bedrooms. 40% of the habitable rooms are to be in the 44 "affordable" flats of which 26 are for social renting. No 'key worker' accommodation is identified in the scheme. The development will be "car free" but there will be 8 "disability spaces" and 130 bike spaces.

The site is within a Priority Employment Area (PEA)) where the Council’s policies seek employment-led mixed-use development. The development also comprises "modern, flexible business space suited for office, studio and light-industrial activities and capable of supporting in the region of 90 jobs." Presently, the developers say, there are a range of light industrial "dilapidated and unremarkable" buildings which accommodate a second-hand car parts dealer, a car and van hire business, a paper supplier and "20 studio spaces used by artists and designers". In fact there are over 40 artists and designers using the studios at present. All the existing buildings will be demolished and transformed into a "coherent piece of townscape" - in which affordable studio space for artists will be absent.

Although the development comprises two blocks the mix of black and gray cladding "in different densities creates the actual visual effect of the scheme is that of a number of much smaller blocks of varying height" which, it is said,"responds to the varied character and form of the townscape around the site" ( the area is predominantly 2 -4 storey houses) and which "won’t dominate the skyline or views from the conservation areas" (of which the 4-storey Victorian terrace directly over the road in Dalston Lane is part).

"Sustainability" features prominently in the promotional material - the development will achieve "an overall reduction in CO2 emissions of 21.2% when compared with a comparable baseline building".

If you want to learn more about the scheme follow this link by clicking here

The consultation officially closes on 30.5.11 but the Council will usually consider comments received up to the date of the Planning Committee hearing. If you want to comment on the scheme follow this link by clicking here.

European Court to consider UK's failure to provide environmental justice

The European Commission has asked the European Court of Justice to consider whether there are adequate legal remedies available to UK citizens challenging environmental injustice.

The European Court of Justice

Since 2005 the UK has been a signatory to the 1998 Aarhus Convention which recognises that protection of the environment is essential to the health and well being of present and future generations. Aarhus requires the UK to ensure that the public have access to information about development proposals which could adversely affect our environment, including cultural sites and buildings, and that the public can participate effectively in decision making and have affordable and fair access to the Courts to obtain adequate and timely remedies.

The huge cost, and the financial risks to individuals, of Court action is one of the main barriers to citizens challenging environmental injustice. As a result wealthy developers are free to adopt hazardous procedures and transform areas of the UK into monocultural natural and built environments so that local character and bio-diversity is lost.

Earthworks, containing radioactive thorium & other toxic waste, in progress on the 2012 Olympic site. An individual was refused legal aid to challenge the authorities methods despite the wider public interests involved.

By adopting a company format OPEN has been able to protect its individual members from the risk of personal liability but, despite several legal challenges on behalf of local communities, the Courts have always refused to place a cap on the legal costs which a developer could claim against OPEN if a legal challenge were to be lost.

In a report about environmental justice in May 2008 Lord Justice Sullivan said "Unless more is done, and the Courts' approach to costs is altered so as to recognise that there is a public interest in securing compliance with environmental law, it is only a matter of time before the UK is taken to task for failing to live up to its obligations under Aarhus".

Happily, with the UK's referral to the European Court of Justice, that time may now have come.

PS Last week the UN ruled that the European Court must stop barring citizens from challenging European Union decisions that affect the environment. The European Union itself, as well as its member states, is subject to the Aarhus Convention.

Under the Cranes

Don't miss this new film shot in Hackney and directed by Emma-Louise Williams. ‘Under the Cranes’ is showing at the Rio on Saturday 30 April at 1.30pm.

The film is a meditation on place as central to our experience of history. Using the script of poet Michael Rosen’s documentary play, the film is intercut with rarely seen archive footage, much of which shows the locality’s commitment to social housing. As we hear from the famous – Shakespeare in Shoreditch, Anna Sewell, Anna Barbauld – alongside a Jamaican builder, a Bangladeshi restaurant owner or the Jewish 43 Group taking on Oswald Mosley in Dalston, we see past and present streets, parks, cemeteries and markets.

‘If you let it, a street will grow,’ says a voice as the film shows ‘layers of lives’, offering a lyrical, painterly defence of the everyday even as it raises questions about the process of ‘regeneration’

While David Cameron claims that ‘multiculturalism has failed’, this film celebrates how ‘the world comes to Hackney’.


In terms of both the visual and the aural, the film heightens the real: the soundscape mixes documentary with poetry, music, song and location recordings, while the picture juxtaposes slow, still shots with paintings by East London artists, Leon Kossoff, Jock McFadyen and James MacKinnon. Breaking with the linear narrative convention, the audience is invited to apprehend the city as fragmentary and multi-layered. – “past in the present; present in the past.

The films Director, Dalston resident Emma-Louise Williams, had produced and directed numerous radio and television programmes. One theme running throughout her work is how we experience the metropolis. Emma has sought to counter the prevailing attitude to the inner city as a site of failure, ugliness and misdeed, through what she terms a‘socio-poetic of everyday life’.

Planners get hyped in Dalston

You can visit this exhibition City Visions 1910/2010 in Dalston Square from 9th April until 14th May (including Sundays but not Mondays) . It's about 100 years of great planning projects. Apparently Dalston Square is rated as an exciting example of 'regeneration' (Regeneration? Don't they mean replacement? Ed).

Here's a take on another development that's worth a look.


THE DUBAI IN ME - Christian Von Borries
Uploaded by reseaumarseillais. - Classic TV and last night's shows, online.

Let us know what you think - leave a comment.

Shoreditch needs your help to Ditch the Block

OPEN Shoreditch member Jago Action Group is taking up arms against the gross over development of the Huntingdon Estate, the light industrial estate bordered by Bethnal Green Road and Redchurch Street. Developers Londonnewcastle are so passionate about the neighbourhood that they want to bless this low-rise mixed residential quarter with a 25-storey tower block

( Err...surely "to dig themselves out of the large hole in their balance sheet, as a result of taking an option on the site at the height of the property boom." )

ACT NOW - the planners have asked for any objections by 19th April.

You'll find all the key information here .

Click on image to enlarge