A 50p cuppa and a £2m flat: how one London street captures the divisions of Brexit
The pie-and-mash shop proprietor gazes out of his window at the craft beer store across the road. Outside the art gallery opening, a soup kitchen serves meals to locals in need. Billboards advertise new luxury apartments with concierge and gym while an old man beds down for the night under the footbridge. The baker closes after 150 years, while a media startup suggests sitting in a bathtub full of coloured balls to improve creativity.
The Street is a new documentary that captures the textbook contrasts of the shabby old East End and the new influx of hipsters, property speculators and entrepreneurs in the area. Filmed over four years in a single location – Hoxton Street in Hackney, a stone’s throw from Shoreditch – the film reflects a much wider picture. It is not just about gentrification, but all that feeds into it: history, economics, politics, urbanisation, immigration – how changes in national policy register on the human scale, decades later. It is Brexit Britain in microcosm.
Hoxton Street is a lively, fairly shabby market street, largely surrounded by housing estates. At one end the rising skyscrapers of the City close off the horizon; at the other the new residential high-rises that have sprung up. In between we meet a cross-section of local characters – some are comically “poncey” hipsters, admittedly, but most are ordinary folk: shop-owners, elderly council-flat tenants, estate agents, community and faith workers, rough sleepers. There is no Benefits Street-style editorialising; the director Zed Nelson, who is best known as a documentary photographer, listens to their views empathetically and records the visual minutiae of their lives with a keen eye.
“It started off almost like a Sunday afternoon project,” explains Nelson. “I didn’t have a grand plan. I thought if I start documenting this street, I’ll see how it changes, and see if that can be visualised. It was as simple as that.” We’re sitting in Paula’s Cafe, halfway down Hoxton Street, very much on the pre-hipster end of the spectrum. “If you sit outside here on a warm day it’s a complete social club. People smoking, chatting, just existing on a 50p cup of tea. People with mental health problems welcomed. The proper trendy cafes are not bad. I have seen them giving free coffees to people, but they’re not places that low-income, long-term residents feel welcome in. Even I struggle in some of them.”
Unsurprisingly, everybody seems to know Nelson round here, and vice versa. When one young man stops by our table, Nelson fishes out a photograph of him he took a few years ago. The young man used to work for Errol, the mechanic, whom we see early on in The Street boasting of being “the last man standing”. Later, we see Errol’s garage being demolished to be converted into new apartments. Like many, he has sold up and moved out.
Nelson’s work has chronicled gun culture in the US (which led to a short documentary with the Guardian), the new nation of South Sudan and the global beauty industry, but in recent years his focus has been getting closer to home, he says. A lifelong Hackney resident, he first chronicled the borough’s contrasts in his 2012 photo series Hackney: A Tale of Two Cities.
Then, in August 2015, he decided to start documenting the area on video. He didn’t know anyone; he just set up his camera and started filming, until someone started talking to him.
“Underpinning this was the idea that we were living in a time that was extraordinary,” he says. “There was a housing crisis in terms of unavailability of affordable housing, there’s also a housing crisis for reasonably well-off, middle-class people who can no longer afford to buy homes, or people with property whose children can no longer afford to live near them. It seemed to be driving a type of gentrification that was very different than before – a sort of hyper-gentrification.”
It is not just a matter of perception. Average house prices in London have risen from less than £100,000 in 1990 to nearly £500,000 in 2015. Since the Thatcher government’s Right to Buy policy in the 1980s, the number of council homes in Britain has fallen by nearly 70%. A decade of austerity cuts has reduced Hackney council’s budget by 45%.
In one scene, Nelson visits the home of Colin, a man he meets at the soup kitchen. It is a tiny, cluttered one-room apartment in an ex-council house that a private landlord has divided into three apartments, which are then being rented back to the housing association. Colin’s entire apartment is in what would have been the kitchen. Perched on a pile of clothes on the sofa, Nelson asks Colin where his bed is. “You’re sitting on it,” Colin replies.
Meanwhile, in the smart new highrises at the end of Hoxton Street, onebedroom apartments start at £640,000 and the penthouses are £2m.
It is easy to see how locals feel “pushed out” from both ends: the boom in new, expensive properties feeds into the feeling of being left behind; public-housing shortages feed into resentment of immigrant families, who are perceived by some as “jumping the queue” for accommodation. All of which set the scene for Brexit.
That vote revealed deeper divisions along Hoxton Street. On the morning after the 2016 referendum, Stefan, the German-born owner of the craft beer shop, says he has already been called a “fucking German bastard”. When Stefan sits down with Joe, the leave-voting pie-and-mash shop owner, Joe’s anti-European animus is almost comical: “I think we were massively conned when we went decimal,” he says.
Many elderly locals wax nostalgically about how Hoxton Street used to be like a village, where everyone knew everyone, but when Nelson asks one of them what change she doesn’t like, she bluntly replies: “Foreigners.” Characters we have come to sympathise with reveal startling prejudices, often borne out of ignorance. Their antagonism is primarily directed towards eastern Europeans, even if one woman accuses them of “sending their money back to Africa” and another is not sure of the difference between Greek and Pakistani.
Nelson has lived in Hackney since he was three years old. He says some things have improved, such as education and racial cohesion: “I remember on the corner of Brick Lane on a Sunday, there would be a mob of National Front skinheads doing Nazi salutes.” Ironically, the older white working-class locals in the film now exclude “the blacks” from their xenophobia “because they’ve been here since the 1940s”.
What is heartening to see is how community has a way of working itself out, regardless. The media company with the bathtub of coloured balls might look like something out of Nathan Barley, that prescient Shoreditch satire of 2005, but it has, it turns out, helped many local businesses with their websites and social media. The art gallery has long been involved in community projects and creating opportunities for locals. And Joe’s pie-and-mash shop is still there, as is Stefan’s craft beer store. At present, there is still room for both.
The Street is out on 29 November