I've mentioned in previous blog posts that I was involved in a project from 2014-17 called A Hackney Autobiography. This Arts Council-funded endeavour, in conjunction with not-for-profit organisation On The Record, looked into the history of Centerprise, a community centre that existed in the borough, and was at its peak in the 70s and 80s. Centerprise housed a bookshop, café, crèche, youth arts and learning space, local publishing project, meeting place for many radical groups and left-wing newspapers such as the now-defunct Hackney People’s Press, housing advice centre (which my father was involved with), and more. In 2012, it finally closed doors after a long battle with Hackney Council.

Based at Bishopsgate Institute, which contains a huge archive of material, myself and other volunteers began the huge task of digitalising, archiving, and mapping Centerprise’s archive, while many other volunteers on the project interviewed key people who were involved in Centerprise in the 70s and 80s. Along the way, we explored the history of Hackney during that time, from the riots on Sandringham Road to lost communities and the strained relations between police in Stoke Newington and the local Afro-Caribbean community. The fruits of all this work were a website, book – The Lime Green Mystery: An Oral History of the Centerprise Co-operative – and an app, which offers GPS located auto-tours of Hackney. Get on the 55 bus from Shoreditch to Clapton with the app on your headphones and you’ll find yourself transported back to the day when the area was full of factories, with stories narrated by the ordinary people who worked in those factories and lived nearby. I’ve used the app and it works!

Centerprise in the 1990s - photograph courtesy of Bernadette Haplin

Starting from this Saturday (3rd November), the Hackney Wick arts centre Stour Space will be hosting a free retrospective exhibition of A Hackney Autobiography, which includes photography of many of those who were involved in Centerprise during its heyday. There will be an opening event on Saturday from 3-6pm, after which the exhibition will run daily from 9pm-5am until 21st November.

Stour Space is located near Hackney Wick station; click here to see how to get to the venue. I've also included a map below.

I mentioned in a previous extensive blog post some volunteering that I've been involved in, in conjunction with an organisation called On The Record, a not-for-profit organisation looking into oral and visual history in London – especially that of ordinary people and the working-class whose accounts of life may have been marginalised.

The project that I have been working on, A Hackney Autobiography, has been a deeply personal dimension for myself, given that I grew up in the borough. Even more specifically, though, the project has focused on Centerprise – an organisation that my father was involved with in the 70s and 80s. A community centre that housed a bookshop, a cafe, a youth arts and performance space, a publishing project, and a housing/welfare advice service (the latter of which my father was involved with), Centerprise was unique in a pre-gentrification Hackney, where adult illiteracy was still relatively high and the borough remained one of the most deprived in the country.

The project involved unearthing an enormous archive, most of it at Bishopsgate Institute, to do with Centerprise: from the books released as part of the publishing project (which I then converted into digital), to the audio interviews that other volunteers conducted with those who were involved with Centerprise at the time (including with my father), to researching vast back catalogues of the Hackney People's Press, a left-wing newspaper based at Centerprise.

Last November, there was the first launch party for the project, at Hackney Museum, as I mentioned in this other blog post.

Now it's the turn of a second launch party, this time to celebrate the culmination of the volunteering into a book, The Lime Green Mystery: An Oral History of the Centerprise Co-operative. Accompanying the book will be an app and a website, both of which will be announced at the end of April.

Details on the flyer above (click on it for an enlargened image), and here:

A Hackney Autobiography: Launch Event
Sunday 7th May 2017
5-7pm
Sutton House, 2 & 4 Homerton High Street, London, E9 6JQ (map)

There are limited places, so booking is advised: email info@on-the-record.org.uk

Just before the party, there will be a unique chance to preview one of the audiowalks featured on the apps as part of a group. To book a place on the Inside Out Homerton audiowalk, please contact On The Record by Friday 21st April. Later bookings will be accepted if places remain available.

Event organised with Pages of Hackney.

More missives from me will be coming soon after the festive period, but for now I thought I should mention that following on from the post below about the launch party for A Hackney Autobiography: Remembering Centerprise at the Hackney Museum with On The Record, there is a temporary exhibition at the Museum that leads on from the launch party and contains plenty of the work that myself and On The Record have been involved with for the last two years (again, see the post below and this post on the project).

The exhibition is entitled People Power: Black British Arts & Activism in Hackney 1960s-2000s, and contains much of the work that Centerprise was involved with, along with related accounts of life in the borough between these periods. Entrance is free and the exhibition runs until the 21st January 2017. General details of the Museum’s address and opening hours can be viewed here.

A Merry Christmas and Happy New Year from GoodnightLondon to all.

I mentioned a while ago in a previous blog post that I have been involved in a project looking into the history of Centerprise. Centerprise was a cafe, bookshop, youth arts space, publishing project, and housing advice service (the last of which my father was involved with).

The project has taken place over the last two years or so, with people volunteering in their spare time. A huge amount of material has been drawn from Bishopsgate Institute's vast archive among other source (covered in my previous blog post linked to above). This work archiving, mapping, interviewing, scanning and digitally converting will culminate in a launch party on Saturday 26th November, from 11:00-16:00, at the Hackney Museum, Ground Floor, Learning & Technology Centre,1 Reading Lane, Hackney, E8 1GQ [map], where a website, book and mobile phone app will be launched.

Entrance is free but people interested need to register first at this Eventbrite page. There are still some tickets left. If the tickets sell out, it may still be possible to turn up.

The order of the day will be:

- 11am – 11.30 Welcome to the day, including words from Margaret Gosley (co-founder) on how Centerprise began.

- 11.30-12.00 Tours of the People Power exhibition by curator, Niti Acharya

- 11:45 – 12:45 Panel Discussion 1 -  Centerprise and education, past and present

- 12:45 pm- 13:45 Light lunch available in learning room

Tours of the People Power exhibition by curator, Niti Acharya

- 13:45 – 14:45 Panel Discussion 2 – The legacy of Centerprise

- 14:45 – 15:30 Open mic: performances and readings from Centerprise and beyond

- 15.30 - 16.00 Plenary discussion: have the final word on A Hackney Autobiography

There will also be coffee and snacks available.

Details of the app, website and book will be put up here subsequently.

For the last few months, I have been involved in volunteering for an organisation called On The Record, a co-operative based in London who are interested in oral and visual history. The project I have been specifically involved with is called A Hackney Autobiography, and focuses on the history of Centerprise, an organisation that was based in Hackney from its inception in the early 70s to around 2012 – a period of 40 years.
My father was involved in Centerprise in the 70s, and I was raised in Hackney, so the project has had some personal dimensions for me. I went to secondary school right near where Centerprise was based, in Dalston, and remember going there as a child.
It's easy to forget, strolling around Hackney now - with its myriad bars and coffee shops, and trendy-looking young population – just what it was like at the beginning of the 70s. To give you some perspective, when Centerprise opened its doors, there was not a single bookshop in the entire borough. There were libraries, obviously, but no bookshops – a remarkable statistic given that Hackney had and has a population of roughly 200,000. Stoke Newington Bookshop had yet to open. Not only did Centerprise introduce a cafe and a bookshop (below) together – something that was a regular feature in founder Glenn Thompson's native USA – but it also housed an advice centre, a reading centre, a publishing project, youth club, creche, and more. In addition, many groups, ranging from female-dominated collectives such as the Hackney Flashers to Chilean exiles from Pinochet's brutal regime in that country, took advantage of Centerprise's free meeting spaces. 

Centerprise bookshop. Photo by Ken Worpole

This was highly unusual in a Hackney which at that time remained desolate, largely ungentrified and working-class, with large swathes of unemployment. In contrast to the insanity of today's London housing boom, there was plenty of dilapidated housing and declining industry in Hackney during that period, much of which was taken over by squatters. The 70s was a dark time for not just Hackney, but for London and the rest of the UK as a whole. The economy remained in recession, framed against the backdrop of the 1973 oil crisis. In the late 70s, around the time I was being born, the 'Winter of Discontent' hit. Successive bin strikes ensured that rubbish lined the street as abnormally freezing weather hit. Three day working weeks were introduced to conserve electricity. It's almost unthinkable today, given the ubiquity of technology, but for some of the 70s television companies had to cease broadcasting at 10:30pm – again to conserve technology.
Operating with this as a context, Centerprise's publishing project allowed local working people's voices to be heard, with books released chronicling Hackney history and the autobiographies of those who had lived in the area for a lifetime. In addition, Centerprise Publishing Project released editions of poetry by local students, as well as housing left-learning publications such as Hackney Action and the Hackney People's Press. This flurry of activity was conducted while Centerprise was being operated as a collective co-operative, in the true spirit of the time. Every Monday, staff would meet and collectively make decisions on the running of Centerprise, with a rotating of duties. Many other organisations operated in a similar manner during those halcyon, heady, politicised days as the 70s blurred into the early 80s, reflected in the tense post-punk of the time (Gang of Four, The Slits, The Raincoats, Scritti Politti, Joy Division, and other acts too numerous to reel off) that was released from labels like Rough Trade (itself a co-operative), Factory, Mute, and many others. Feminism, anti-nuclear demonstrations (the CND were at the peak of their popularity) during the Cold War era, squatting and anarchism (exemplified by anarcho-punk bands such as Crass) were all prevalent during the period.
I got in touch with On The Record after writing, first, an article on an exhibition at Bishopsgate Insitute by OTR showing images of orators at Speaker's Corner; and then on Centerprise itself (the latter of which can be viewed below – there's also an extended version of the article here).

For the project, I have been based at Bishopsgate Institute, near Liverpool Street Station, which contains a huge archive of material relating to London, scanning much of the books released by the Centerprise Publishing Project, and archiving the seemingly inexhaustible various documents that have came our way relating to Centerprise – everything from old copies of Hackney Action to photographs, letters, and assorted ephemera.
I have also been researching numerous photos of Hackney during the 70s and 80s – the period that the project is particularly interested in – at the Hackney Archives on Dalston Lane, and have took part in workshops mapping the history of Hackney, and of events surrounding Centerprise and related to it.
These workshops led to a presentation by myself and another volunteer of the history of protest and confrontation in Hackney, beginning at the end of the World War II with revolts by The 43 Group – an anti-fascist group set up by Jewish ex-servicemen in London - against the fascist agitator Oswald Mosley, whose Union Movement rallies in Ridley Road (now famous for its multicultural street market) were disrupted by the group. Various battles against Mosley's 'blackshirts' had culminated in the infamous Battle of Cable Street a decade earlier, when Mosley was leader of the British Union of Fascists.
Meanwhile, in the 70s, there would be repeated battles between anti-fascists (including the Anti-Nazi League) and the National Front, who had essentially inherited the raison d'etre of Mosley's mob, in Hoxton and Shoreditch. Again, given the gentrification of these areas today, with Old Street's nightlife strip and the seemingly never-ending night traffic, it seems difficult to imagine that in the 70s, these ares were desolate, violent places, on the frontline of these battles. The connection drawn between The 43 Group and Centerprise was that Centerprise Publishing Project would go on to publish a book on the history of the 43 Group in the early 90s (below).

From this, we focused on how Sandringham Road, in Dalston, had become another frontline of tension – this time between the local police and the West Indian community, after a raid on a local cafe. Related to this, we documented cases where a number of young black men had died in mysterious circumstances in Stoke Newington Police Station during the 80s, such as Colin Roach and Michael Ferreira.
The presentation can be heard below. 

The project will culminate in a book, a website and an app, which will map the history of Centerprise in Hackney. Links will be posted on here.