gentrification

Kleine Pause, a busy little family-run café in Wohlwillstrasse, Hamburg. Currybratwurst, Rostbratwurst, Schinkenwurst. Sam, Lucy, Alex and I have reached the end of a day endurance drifting the city. Losing our bearings, finding them and losing them again, phew. Our approximate route identified with heavens gaze (google-earth), views sought from local friends, (spotted-by-locals), and sweeps of The News for Street Activity (Das Real Life Game in der Gefahrenzone Hamburg). The drift sampled a range of conditions encouraging comparisons to be drawn with Hackney Wick and Poplar - areas of East London that have been the focus of two years of drifting by myself and Chloe Street creating ‘Lea Valley Drift’.

I have taken the opportunity to revisit Hackney Wick after the Olympic Games (read about my previous ventures in the area in part 1 of this blog), through tutoring the Urban Transcripts workshop. The interdisciplinary workshop under the umbrella topic London the (n)ever Changing City was alluding to the nature of London as a juxtaposition of the old and new, and came very timely as the public eye shifted from the success of Team GB to the legacy of the Games. In collaboration with my guest tutor Joanne Pouzenc we decided to focus on Hackney Wick and its transformation From Fringe to Centre. We wanted to investigate whether it is possible to integrate the unique and until now relatively protected existing community with a completely new part of the city with a fundamentally different character, without losing some of the diversity and richness that Hackney Wick has developed in the last decade.