Made in Hackney
JAY BLADES: NO PLACE LIKE HOME
Channel 5, 9pm
THE Repair Shop’s Jay Blades revisits his childhood neighbourhood in this personal tour of his family history.
The 52-year-old, who grew up in Hackney, East London, says: “It’s only when you move away from it do you realise how much it made you, how much it is you.
“You can take the boy out of Hackney but you can never take Hackney out of the boy, and that’s me all over.”
Looking at the area through adult eyes for the first time, he’s blown away by the extraordinary history that was on his doorstep.
From Zeppelin air raids in World War One to Victorian stars of the Music Hall, the notorious Kray twins, a hidden history of fascism and a refuge for nineteenth-century women ex-prisoners, it’s a lot for Jay to take in.
His trip down memory lane begins at his first home where he and his mother were taken in by family in 1970 when he was a newborn. On that same street he learns about the terrifying Zeppelin air raids that saw the first ever bombs raining down on London in 1915 – the ‘Forgotten Blitz’.
He explores the mythology around the infamous Kray twins who once lived down his street and ran protection rackets, as he meets their friend, Maureen Flanaghan.
He meets his old childhood pal, Lee, and they remember times spent on Newington Green sharing sugary doughnuts.
Jay is shocked by revelations of local slave owners, before he finishes his journey at Ridley Road Market where he went every Saturday with his mum.
But things aren’t quite as he remembered.