When Alan Denney moved to Hackney in the mid-1970s, he started taking photographs of
Stoke Newington, Dalston and Stamford Hill. He unintentionally became an internet
sensation when he put them online in 2008, attracting millions of views. His pictures
document the change in Stoke Newington Church Street and the Dalston Kingsland Road.
Tell us about yourself.
I was born in 1952 and was brought up by my Italian mother in Gillingham, Kent. In the
1950s and 60s Gillingham was a town of soldiers, sailors, dockyard mateys and working
class Tories. Like a lot of young people at that time I became radicalised: another world
seemed possible! I gave up trying to become a lawyer and sold Red Mole-weekly left-wing
newspaper published by the International Marxist Group in the early 1970s, the editor was
Tariq Ali.
After university I worked as a teacher in a small town in Northern Italy and in 1974 I came
to visit friends in Stoke Newington for a weekend. I stayed, got a job and made my life here. Back then I lived in some dreadful slum flats in Hawksley Road and on Stoke Newington Common.
Jay Estates, the Hawksley Road landlord, invented a devious plan to deny tenants the
protection of the Rent Acts by renaming their properties “bed and breakfast” and so every
week a man would bring my breakfast: usually just a variety pack of Kellogg’s cereals but
sometimes a packet of toast.
I’ve lived in Dynevor Road since 1983. I spent most of my working life as a mental health social worker for Islington Council and retired 5 years ago.
Why were you interested in photography? Why did you want to document political
protest, police, and strikes?
I grew up carefully studying a boxful of my mother’s old family photos. I was fascinated to
see what I could learn about my relatives just by looking at photographs of them…and
stories emerged. I wanted to take my own photos to add to the collection so mum gave me
a camera when I was 10, a British-made Coronet Viscount.
I started taking photos of friends, family, outings and holidays – but when I came to Stoke
Newington I heard rumours about socially-engaged documentary photography. I began to
get an idea of what this looked like from Camerawork magazine, produced by the
Halfmoon Photography Workshop in Bethnal Green.
I decided to make a photographic record of life around me here in Hackney, I wanted to tell
the story of a working class neighbourhood blighted by poverty, unemployment, racism
and awful housing and how local people responded to this onslaught with resilience. I took
my camera everywhere and photographed anything that caught my eye: derelict houses,
urban decay, uncollected rubbish mountains on the Common in the winter of discontent,
people busy being themselves, community festivities, protests, the Astra turning into a
Turkish mosque, the first signs of gentrification on Church Street.
I more or less stopped taking documentary photos after the mid-80s. Thatcher and the
defeat of the miners’ strike numbed me. I photographed my children as they grew up
instead. In 2008 I uploaded some old photos to the Flickr website, I was surprised by the
response, it encouraged me to start photographing Hackney again and I’m still at it.
I’ve used several 35mm film cameras: an unreliable East German Praktika SLR, Yaschica
and Contax SLRs, and my favourite Olympus XA, a tiny rangefinder camera. I use a small
Panasonic digital camera now. A few years ago I started doing kite aerial photography,
taking photos from a kite flown in local parks, I love looking down at familiar places.
You’ve captured the funeral of Michael Ferreira, what’s the reason for so many
people attended this funeral?
Michael Ferreira was a young black man who bled to death in Stoke Newington police
station after he’d been stabbed nearby in a fight with two white teenagers. Hundreds of
people from Hackney’s different communities came together on a wet Saturday morning in
January 1979 to show their grief and anger in front of the police station – as they did again
just a few weeks ago when Rashan Charles died after a violent encounter with local police.
You have a lot of pictures taken in Sandringham Road. What was happening on this
road? The photo with four men must have a story.
The local Afro-Caribbean community called Sandringham Road “the Front Line”. At one
end was the West Indian café and barber and at the other end was the Lord Stanley pub and derelict shops. It was where black youths rubbed up against the local police and it could get very rowdy. The 1981 Dalston riot started there.
My partner lived round the corner in Colvestone Crescent so I often walked along
Sandringham Road and it felt pretty ordinary most of the time: groups of young black men
being young men, outworkers making their sewing machines screech, loud voices and
thumping reggae from open windows and, if you wanted to, you could buy Jamaican weed.
It was rumoured that officers from Stoke Newington police station controlled the marijuana
trade on Sandringham Road. I can’t tell you what I think is going on in the photo with the
four men, some of them may still be around!
How does Stoke Newington/Hackney look compared to when you started to take
pictures? What was the community like?
In the 1970s Hackney was a solidly working class area made up of lots of different
communities: Jews, Afro-Caribbeans, Irish, Cypriots, Asians amongst others.
Manufacturing industries had virtually disappeared; there were local jobs in clothing
sweatshops, retail or the Council/NHS but unemployment was high and deprivation
indicators put Hackney at the bottom of the pile. Hackney looked terrible too: derelict
Victorian houses on every street, boarded up shops, piles of rubbish, burnt-out cars,
deserted factories and empty workshops.
The physical environment looks better now, there’s less visible urban decay and there are
fewer tower blocks. Stoke Newington is still a hodgepodge of working class communities.
What’s new is the recent arrival of white middle class newcomers and the social cleansing
of the Woodberry Down Estate. What hasn’t changed is Hackney’s high level of poverty
and social deprivation.
How would you describe Church Street when you compare it to the present?
Church Street in the 1970s was just another run-down street in Hackney: junk shops,
sewing machine and haberdashery suppliers, sweatshops, workmen’s caffs, a few
struggling shops and pubs. Now it’s mostly posh shops, cafes, restaurants and very few
ordinary Hackney people to be seen.
Is Stoke Newington living its best time? What is your prediction for the future?
Stoke Newington’s golden age is yet to come. I don’t know what the future holds but I hope
that we don’t have to wait too long before the wealth of this country is shared out more
fairly.