The much loved Eastern Curve Garden is a community asset created on a former railway line that once linked Dalston Junction with the Mildmay Line to Stratford. The line was closed in about 1965 and the land remained empty until 2009 when it was reopened to host the Dalston Mill public art event . I was part of the campaign with OPEN Dalston and other community groups to keep it open to the public as a community garden. After battles against redevelopment, as a shopping circuit linking up with Kingsland Shopping Centre, in 2020 the Council finally agreed to protect it as a community garden.
The Eastern Curve Garden hosts events for community elders, school children and its “Woodburner’ music nights. I made this short film about its hugely popular annual pumpkin festival when local residents carve hundreds of pumpkins which are lit up in the evening to provide magical illuminations.
I first met Winstan in 2005 when he was making his documentary about Dalston’s legendary Four Aces Club. At that time I was leading the OPEN Dalston campaign to try and save the former 1886 circus building at 14 Dalston Lane where the Four Aces Club had its home for 33 years. Winstan identified with the local community’s desire to preserve our local architectural and cultural heritage and made the film “Save our heritage” which told the story of our campaign. We later collaborated on a second documentary film “Hands off” which was made on behalf of the women who owned two striptease bars in Shoreditch, and the dancers who performed there. The film played a key part in the successful campaign opposing the Council’s plan to ban them.
During the period of Covid lockdown in 2020 Winstan made a series of short art films at home in which he experimented with colour, light and liquid. I was pleased to be asked to write the music for two of them which feature my saxophones and keyboards.
Part of the E8 Arts and Crafts Trail, I contributed to this collaborative art work which tells the story of Hackney’s Shopping Village traders’ resistance to evictions and the re-development of the Ridley Road covered market by their off-shore landlord. The art work only survivied a few days before it was torn down by the Council’s Street Cleansing team and sent to the. North London Incinerator to be burnt. The background story can be found on the OPEN Dalston blog. The work was captured on film by Tony Price with music by Adam Parry-Davies.
I first bumped into Iain at a heated public meeting where the community were demanding that the Council explain itself for auctioning off all of its shops over the heads of its tenants in Broadway Market. One of the speakers was Spirit who, from ruin, had built his Nutritious Galley and his home above the shop and who’d become a figurehead of the campaign. I’d also spoken up about the plight of the surviving Dalston Lane Terrace traders – whose shops had also been sold off at auction in one lot to an off-shore developer. Iain cornered me as we dispersed and he later wrote about our conversation in his book “Hackney, that rose-red empire”. It was later, at the OPEN Dalston meeting to celebrate the re-opening of St. Barnabus church and hall, when Iain heard me play music and invited me to collaborate. I’d performed Michael Rosen’s “Regeneration Blues” that night , on alto saxophone in the Dulce Tones jazz quintet, and Michael had then auctioned the Dalston Slab’s £63million bus stop for the bargain price of £7.50p.
After a trial run with Iain at Dalston’s Vortex jazz club, I found myself on stage with him in the South Bank’s Queen Elizabeth Hall talking and playing tenor saxophone to extracts from “Ghost Milk” on the theme of exhumation of the radioactive wastes buried in the landfill dumps beneath London Olympic 2012 site in Hackney Wick. Hearing of the event a friend, the photographer and investigative journalist Mike Wells, came with a film camera and recorded our performance for posterity in his film “Gold Dust”.
More gigs followed – an art event fundraiser for the Golden Lane Estate campaign, performances at the Poets Library and Passing Clouds and others, all in the jazz tradition of ephemeral improvisation. Then Iain suggested we commit something permanent to vinyl. Our CD “Under Offer” resulted, with my son Adam handing the recording and production as well as contributing compositions and playing. It was released alongside Iain’s book “The Last London” – famously banned by Hackney which was a great boost to sales. We performed to a sold out Cafe Oto crowd with the gig building to a frenetic climax with “Shardenfreude”. I was well chuffed by a glowing review in the Financial Times.
