East London is my home. I've been living here for about 40 years. Hackney and east London, the whole of east London, is an incredibly politically charged place. It's always been a place of radical thinking, radical movements and unorthodox mentalities in a way. I’ve always felt, as soon as I arrived in Hackney, I was part of that, part of that history and tradition of questioning authority, not sitting down and being told what to do, but fighting for your rights, which has been so important for me.
I came out of the squatting movement in the ’80s and ’90s when lots of people were abandoning properties in east London. Squatting was legal so it wasn’t against the law when we were squatting. I became homeless – I was evicted from a flat I was living in with my girlfriend, and I was looking for somewhere and someone said, “oh, I know of a house which is empty on Richmond Road in Hackney.” So we went down there, the door was open, there was no water running, the gas was off, electric wasn’t working, there were holes in the roof, there were broken windows, and we recycled it, we recycled it. We did it up, we mended the windows, we mended the doors, we put locks on it and we got it into a liveable state. And it wasn’t just one house on that little street, there was 10 houses in the same condition. And over a year or so, all those houses became squatted and we got to know a lot of people. So suddenly I’m in a community. We had that DIY mentality and that led on to lots of ways of thinking about, how do we work, how we look after each other? So we ended up having communal kitchens, we ended up having squatting warehouses, we would have nights where we would put on film nights, we’d have music nights, nights where we do food for the whole community.
It seemed to me that when we were living in Hackney at that time, in the ’90s, we were fighting a battle to save our community. The council were wanting to redevelop the whole of the east side of London Fields, and they wanted to knock down the housing and to create industrial units. So we wanted to save our community, there’s about 100 people living there, and we wanted to keep the homes.
So, the idea of taking the pictures was to, in some ways, make a campaign. To turn my work into a campaign which would save my community. So the best way of doing that, I thought, was to depict my friends, my neighbours, my community in a way which gave them dignity, which gave them a humanity, so when other people looked to the pictures they just didn’t think oh they’re dirty squatters, they could be evicted. It felt very natural that I was living with these people, I was part of the community, then I was probably the best person to tell the story. It was my story, my community, and that’s become very important to me, to be working in collaboration – not having an outsider voice, although that can be important as well, but for me it was to be part of that community and to express that.
