These stunning photographs capture Hackney’s rich, diverse history
Hackney Museum’s new exhibition explores the everyday lives of the borough’s people
Hackney hasn’t always been saturated with overpriced sandwich shops, natural wine bars, mullets and platform Doc Martens. While the canal-side Hackney Wick is being hailed as an alfresco dining hotspot by Aperol-wielding drinkers on TikTok, some artists are trying to preserve the history of an area that has become an HQ for the young and trendy.
Opposite the Hackney Picturehouse, Hackney Museum’s new photographic exhibition ‘At home in Hackney: a community photographed 1970 to today’ explores the celebrations, disruptions and everyday lives of the borough’s people. The collection documents the way the area has been transformed from the 1970s until now, painting a vivid picture of what Hackney is and has been: a mosaic of cultures, religions, music and activism.
Photograph: Sarah Ainslie
The seeds of the exhibition were planted almost three years ago when the award-winning photographer Tom Hunter approached the museum with the idea of showcasing the community. ‘The exhibition is a celebration of the radical culture that has made Hackney – which is such an embracing and exciting place to live,’ says Hunter.
‘Hackney, being the East End, has always been a place of immigration,’ he says. ‘It has an amazing history, from the Huguenots, to the Jewish, to the Vietnamese, to the Turkish; it’s almost a stepping stone for people to arrive [in London], bringing their cultures and diversity.’
Photograph: Don Travis
Museum officer Jessie Goodison-Burgess echoes these sentiments. ‘The exhibition was about showing how people feel at home in Hackney – so we have lots of pictures of people just going about their normal lives,’ she said.
The darker underbelly of the borough’s experience with dispossession and demolitions is also documented. Hunter’s photograph, ‘Woman Reading a Possession Order’, depicts his neighbour receiving an eviction notice in 1997 while her newborn baby looks expectantly over at her. Hunter himself squatted in Hackney from the 1980s to the noughties, and says his photographs seek to present those with housing problems who were ‘demonised under Margaret Thatcher’s government’ in a more positive light.
Photograph: Tom Hunter
Also on display is Rachel Whiteread’s photo of tower blocks that were about to be knocked down while she was living above a Dalston chicken shop in the 90s. ‘So many people turned up to watch these demolitions,’ Goodison-Burgess says. ‘They were treated as community days out, and they even sold t-shirts almost to say, “I watched the demolition”.’ Been there, watched the tower block get blown up, got the T-shirt, I guess.
Photograph: Rachel Whiteread
From Dennis Morris’s photos of Hackney’s Afro-Caribbean community and 1970s soundsystem culture to Neil Martinson’s documentation of old Hackney factories that have now been destroyed, these photos remind us of Hackney’s deep history – the effects of which are still felt today, despite the borough’s changing landscape – and reveal that there’s much more to the borough than £5 oat lattes and ungodly rental property prices.
‘At Home in Hackney’ is running from September 14 to February 24. Hackney Museum, 1 Reading Ln, E8 1GQ.