Saab Sadness

Saab Sadness
Originally uploaded by Nina Pope

Have you seen this car parked on a Hackney Road near you!? Sadly I haven't ...

After a few days of disbelief I have had to accept that our much loved Saab, has, it seems, been stolen from near the P&M household.

Or was it? The whole saga has fuelled a rather paranoid "****ing council" element to my personality which I would rather not have encountered.
The saga began on the 19th of this month when I stepped out to drive over to Abbey Gardens and found that where I had left it a week or so earlier on Valentine Road there was now a series of road works and no car. After some rather worried calls to the council car pound etc. it seemed no one knew what had become of the car.
The next morning we took the approach of just directly asking the road works team what had happened. They gave us a scribbled address of where it had been lifted to and sure enough I found it in a disabled bay on Holcroft Road, I drove it back and parked on Poole Road a short distance from the road works.
A few days later I again went to find the car and found it gone, assuming the same thing must have happened (despite it not being in the road works area) I again went round the council car loop and no one had a record of moving it ... but come to that the company that must have moved it the week before also denied that.

Anyway to cut a very long saga short ... we have eventually had to accept that it was really stolen this time - or if it wasn't we will never find out where it was moved to until it's too late!

If it is parked on your road do let me know ... as I said to the police "I'm not saying the council stole the car I'm just saying it's all a little bit odd".

Local films for local people ...

Just before Christmas Karen & I heard that our film Living with the Tudors has been accepted for SXSW film festival in Texas, so possibly another trip there this year. Meanwhile all my activities of late have been focussed on a rather more local level...

Before we moved to the Pie 'n' Mash in 2002 I spent some time with Len Cook who had run the shop and was about to retire. We spent a funny day filming his routine built up over 20 odd years. After we moved in we were swamped with trying to turn the building into a home (the flat above was more or less derelict) and studio. Five years later I finally managed to edit together a short film from my footage which I sent to Len. Yesterday I took copies to the Hackney Museum and Hackney Archives. In the archive I looked through the 100 odd images they have of our market street, it made me rather sad to see that only 20 years ago the street market was still thriving, and that our shop front is now the only original one in the short run of shops at our end of the street. It's particularly sad that Tescos at the end of the road probably has a lot to do with the loss of the stalls when you know that Jack Cohen (Tesco's founder) started out with a stall on this market.

Anyway as I cycled back on a miserable Hackney evening I thought about our market street (which I love) and what it means to be 'local', how places change and if these changes can really mean 'improvement'. 

My other 'local' activities recently have really increased my sense of confusion about our own street and the part we play as residents here. Tim & I have been trying to make a project on the Boundary Estate called 'A Song for a Circus'. The Estate and the bandstand at its centre (Arnold Circus) are a unique part of East London. Built in the 1890's as one of London's first council housing projects, the buildings there now completely replaced former slums (the Jago) made up of tiny streets. Researching in the fantastically appointed (and not in a 'Ideas store' way) Tower Hamlets archive, I came across a list of the jobs held by all the inhabitants of the area before and after the estate was built. They are just lists, but somehow they are much more than this ... the lost occupations such as cats' meat sellers, japanners & wireworkers, box makers and French polishers speak of the changes in the area to me in quite a beautiful way.

I can't deny that we are part of the changing face of our East End market street, how you participate in this change is I guess up to each individual. Anyway, if you want to see our film by an artist and a Pie 'n' Mash maker take a trip to Hackney Archives and ask for us.