BigShinyThing

This door-dropped card from Hackney Council offers their considered opinion on the subject — Yellow Pages is the only branded item on their list of useless waste (think engine oil and foil) to be put in their green recycling bins. We think they’ve got it about right.

UNDERCONSTRUCTION is a season of alternative cabaret and other innovative new works, every Tuesday evening at the rather wonderful Bistrotheque space in Hackney (or is it Bethnal Green? WHATEVER). Check details of future events in the season on the Bistrotheque site. More of our photos from UNDERCONSTRUCTION are on Flickr. [Image © Darrell Berry]

[Thanks to Lisa Lee]

More Broadway Market graffiti on Flickr.

[Picture credit: most images from Tim [thx!]. The feed is from the Tranny Talent pool on Flickr. If you’ve got more, add ‘em in]

Many Dalston residents are less than happy about plans for regeneration (or gentrification, depending on your politics and focus) of the Dalston Junction area. Regardless of local opposition, development seems to be powering ahead.

For the past couple of months, the banners and signs of the protesters have been fighting a propaganda war with official posters portraying the brave new world planned by London Transport, Mayors Pipe and Livingston, and a consortium of developers.

The battle for hearts and minds escalated over the Easter break: the blandly cut-and-paste architectural renderings of the happy happy ‘Dalston to be’ riveted to the hoardings at the 38 bus stop on Dalston Lane have accumulated some creative amends at the hands of anti-development activists.

Note the sinister concentration-camp motto over the razor wire penning in the citizens of the gated community: SHOPPING MACHT FREI.

We’ve uploaded more high resolution images on Flickr. As in Hogarth, there is much detail worthy of attention: ASBO-branded shopping bags, anyone?

If you want to visit, go soon before the Powers That Be erase all sign of it. Map here. The site is just across the road from the Dalston Peace Mural — a 1985 celebration of Hackney’s collective anti-nuclear action during the Cold War.

Hackney council has been awarded £300,000 in damages after filing a suit for copyright theft against Nike. Back in May we wrote about how the sportswear giant had appropriated the city council’s logo without permission for a range of sportswear.

The payout is based on a percentage of global sales figures for the range, which included trainers, footballs and T-shirts. Nike has apologised and has also agreed to pay Hackney borough’s legal costs as part of the agreement announced today.

Jules Pipe, Mayor of Hackney, described it as a “great result” for the council.

“This is extra money to spend on sports activities in Hackney, and shows that it was worth standing up to Nike,” Pipe said.

This was always about more than cash — there is a serious principle at stake here. Just because we are a public organisation, it does not mean that big corporations can take what they want from local people without asking.

Source: Brandrepublic.

As part of their World Cup promotion, Nike has put together a nice little ad set on the legendary football pitches of Hackney Harshes. They’ve also released a line of World-Cup sportswear emblazoned with the Hackney borough identity. Problem is they didn’t bother to license it from the council first.

Hackney’s newly re-elected Mayor — Jules Pipe — is understandably not amused:

We have been using this logo for more than 40 years — since before England last won the World Cup! I was shocked that such a huge global company would use it without even approaching us for permission. Nike is one of the biggest sportwear companies in the world. They are selling this stuff everywhere — some of our residents have seen it in shops in Spain, and we have seen it marketed on the internet in Japan, Germany, the US and Italy. They have not offered a penny in compensation to the people of Hackney.

One way of putting this right could be giving us a fair percentage of the retail price and some sportswear for every school child in the borough. Nike have taken, for their own profit, something that belongs to the people of Hackney. They have now offered to meet us for talks and I hope they will have the decency to offer a fair settlement and save this going to court.

We have asked them to withdraw all merchandise until this issue can be settled. I also want assurances from Nike that all this kit has been ethically produced.

Mayor Pipe has pledged to spend every penny gained from Nike on sports development in the borough. Given Hackney’s ongoing financial problems, every penny would help.

[Via CMM News]

CutUp have a new exhibition opening on 4th November, at Seventeen - 17 Kingsland Road, E2. They’re clearly not anti-corporate enough to refuse sponsorship for the show from Leffe…

Bigger photos are available on our Flickr photostream.

Playstation Portable has collaborated with Showstudio.com — Nick Knight’s ambitious online fashion/art/photography lab — to hold Amaze Me. Using webcams and photobooths, the event will be staged at London’s Dover Street Market [see previous post re 'Anti-Chic' ]. Anyone and everyone is invited to present themselves for 30 seconds - dancing, singing, hawking designs whatever. The presentations will then be uploaded onto the Showstudio site for the public and the judges to scrutinise. The one that simply amazes the most will win. The PSP blurb reads:

AMAZE ME is inspired by the brief issued by art director Alexi Brodovitch to photographer Richard Avedon — simply to ‘amaze him’.

The challenge asks you, the public, to respond to a brief set by a panel of six leading creative industry figures. Come along to one of our micro-studio booths and make a 30 second video pitch.

The best six entries will win a Sony PSP Playstation Portable, plus an exclusive opportunity to connect with the panel member of your choice.

Brands trying to buy their way into youth/fashion/whatever culture is nothing new. Only this week, Coke announced that it had briefed Warp Record’s design agency (Designers Republic) to come up with packaging ideas.

What is interesting about Playstation is that they have started with relatively niche — but increasingly important and radical — cultural properties right on the edge of the mainstream. Perfectly in tune with their brand and right on the money in terms of audience as well. Sister brand PS2 (notice the extremely subtle branding) also hosts the stage that Hackney’s weekly ‘Tranny Talent Night’ is held on at Bistrotheque. Very ‘out there’. Very cunning. Very right.

See also previous posts:

• Popular culture bites back: street artists attack ad agency ‘graffiti’.
• Hackney resists gentrification

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From the first reports on LBC to the BBC website, main media providers were initally clueless as to what was going on and reliant on (and imploring for) those on the ground (ie ‘ordinary people’) to report what they saw via email, photophone and digital camera. Within 30 minutes of the tube network lockdown, blog search engine Technorati provided links to people’s personal reports. Bloggers who covered the atrocity saw their web access statistics skyrocket as the public voraciously sought first-hand breaking news.

Even after the rolling news services such as BBC 24 were in play, they needed images such as these to ground their reports. Also, these ‘amateur’ witnesses may yet hold the vital evidence and key images of the attacks that escape CCTV in the most watched city on earth. Flickr already has a dedicated page to the events and Wikipedia the most exhaustive (and accurate) account of what actually happened. Multiple media providers have since analysed how the blogs reported the story first.

Note: shortly after this was posted the UK police started appealing for footage and photos as evidence - the UK public is also providing its own panopticon.

The photo above was taken outside a bus stop in Hackney on 8th July 2005. It reads, in bright pink lipstick, “Do we have to pick sides?”

Whilst putting the fear of god into new homeowners might not be the best solution, gentrification is a genuine problem in Hackney and many other poor areas of London. It’s a problem shared with many other big urban centres worldwide.

Whilst DINKies (Double Income No Kids) are marketed to with promises of ‘loft city living’ and ‘Armani-suited concierges’, council lists are getting ever longer and those in genuine need of sustainable housing not getting it.

Some property developers have recognised that there is a problem and are blending public and private sector interests. Just up the road from this graffiti stands 16 Hoxton Square, a listed old school and community centre. It has been converted into two luxury (but not overtly so) flats overlooking the square and some community offices. The downstairs holds a Prue Leith restaurant (the Hoxton Apprentice) that doubles as a culinary training school for the long term unemployed and Bob Breen, one of East London’s most celebrated martial arts specialists, who has been given back his old place in the building, with an expanded and modernised gym.

According to Sylvie Pierce of Capital & Provident Regeneration who managed the project (full interview in the Financial Times - subscription required):

We all talk about regeneration but what does it really mean? You produce beautiful loft apartments and you bring the wealthy in. They spend money in bars and restaurants and eventually it trickles down. Or you take a more sophisticated view. What does it mean to live on a local estate and see all this affluence around you?

The graffiti in Hackney should give her a fair idea.