COLUMN: Culture Fulcher

“TOTAL Regeneration, Total ASBO.” Scrawled across a wall near Mare Street, this graffiti serves as an indictment of Hackney’s current situation and a warning of the way things could be going, writes Jane Fulcher,


Regeneration is coming. The Olympics are only five years away and the City is expanding ever eastwards, but we need to be careful not to push out what makes Hackney interesting. As the East London Line creeps northward we must make sure that commuters flooding into Hackney don’t take the borough’s spirit with them when they travel into their banks and management consultancy firms in Canary Wharf.

If snot-nosed advertising executives can persuade talented East End artists to use their work as no more than a cynical marketing ploy, how long is it before other things fall by the wayside?

If we start to marginalise our artists, teenagers and subcultures at a grass roots level then Hackney could soon become just another London borough. If regeneration means labelling anything that gated communities don’t want on their doorstep as “antisocial”, then maybe Hackney should be left as it is.

In Bristol they are painting over Bansky’s artwork. He may have sold pieces to such Heat favourites as Angelina Jolie and Kate Moss but when he started, he started on the streets. Urban artists may not follow the letter of the law, but they make living in the East End of London a lot more interesting.

If the graffiti artists, who often have a more insightful social commentary than most local politicians, are warning that regeneration is leading to a culture of ASBO, we should take notice. Another scrawl in Hackney says simply: “Fuck the Little Man.” Which is what we could be very close to doing.

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