Pages of Hackney

Independent Bookshop, Hackney, since 2008

Event - Ruins of Modern London: Peter Watts and Owen Hopkins in conversation with Dave Hill

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Lost Futures: The Disappearing Architecture of Post-War Britain by Owen Hopkins

In association with On London.

We are delighted to welcome Peter Watts, London specialist and author of Up In Smoke: The Failed Dreams of Battersea Power Station, and architecture writer Owen Hopkins, author of Lost Futures: The Disappearing Architecture of Post-War Britain, to discuss the mixed fortunes of some of the capital’s most striking modern buildings.

Peter and Owen and will discuss the heroic ambitions, falls from favour and sometimes total demolitions of London landmarks ranging from the East End’s Balfron Tower and Heathrow’s Terminal One, both of which were built after the war, to the legendary BPS itself, which was mostly constructed in the 1930s.

All of these buildings were bold and new in their visions and designs, reflecting values and ambitions of their eras. Yet many have struggled to stand the test of time. Their fates raise large questions about the purpose of architecture, Londoners’ feelings about their physical surroundings, and the current, heightened tensions between the desire to conserve and arguments for change.

Peter Watts is one of the best contemporary writers about London, contributing pieces about aspects of the capital to the Times, the Guardian, the Observer and a host of magazines. Up In Smoke tells the extraordinary story of Battersea Power Station, from its magnificent, cathedral-like creation, through its long years as a loved but functionally redundant Thames-side icon, the succession of ambitious and eccentric plans for its re-invention that never happened, to its partial preservation within the opulent and controversial Nine Elms development scheme. Peter also keeps a blog called The Great Wen.

Owen Hopkins is not only a writer but also a historian and senior curator of exhibitions and education at Sir John Soane’s Museum. He was previously architecture programme curator at the Royal Academy of Arts. Lost Futures documents the high ideals that informed a great variety of new, modern buildings of many kinds in the capital and elsewhere in Britain and how those ideals were often lost. The book describes the rise and demise of housing estates, restaurants, offices and schools in the capital which were often praised when they were born only to descend into disrepute and rubble.

The event will be chaired by Dave Hill of On London, with which this event is co-promoted.

Event - Dispersal – Picturing urban change in East London

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*Please note that this event will take place at Pages of Hackney, and not at Sutton House as previously advertised*

Join Marion Davies, Juliet Davis and Debra Rapp as they discuss their new book, Dispersal: Picturing Urban Change in East London, with Hackney resident and former Guardian journalist, Dave Hill.

Unparalleled in its detailed investigation into the impact of the 2012 Olympic Games on London’s East End, Dispersal paints a dramatic picture of the people and businesses displaced and affected by the development of the Olympic site, through documentary photography and investigative reportage.

Though often represented as an industrial ‘wasteland’, this book reveals Stratford in the Lower Lea Valley as a melting pot of people from different races and religions, working side by side across a huge variety of trades and professions. Photographers Marion Davies and Debra Rapp documented 60 of the area’s most notable businesses before they were forced to move from the area following the 2007 Compulsory Purchase Order, including 3rd generation salmon smokers H. Forman & Sons, couture fashion manufacturers Panache Outerwear Ltd, set builders for the Royal Opera House, family run upholsterers Adssiz Ltd, Parkes Galvanizing Ltd which ran out of Marshgate Lane since the 1950s, donner kebab producers Harringay Meat Traders Ltd and internationally renowned stained-glass artists Goddard & Gibbs Studios Ltd whose pieces feature in Westminster Abbey and St James’ Palace.

Featuring over 200 stunning black and white and colour images, many of these photographs and the personal stories behind them have never-before been published. With specialist academic insight from Juliet Davies, Senior Lecturer in Architecture and Urban Design at Cardiff University, Dispersal provides a uniquely detailed investigation into the relocations and the knock-on effect this dispersal has had on the lives and success of the owners and staff of a multitude of businesses, and one of London’s most interesting boroughs. Dispersal is the ideal book for anyone interested in photography, history, social change and the ever-changing landscape of London and England.

Marion Davies is a fine art documentary photographer with a social science and social work background, whose work centres on the themes of remembrance and memory. Her published work includes Absence and Loss: Holocaust Memorials in Berlin and, together with poet Jane Liddell-King, Faces in the Void: Czech Survivors of the Holocaust.

Juliet Davis is a Senior Lecturer in Architecture and Urban Design at the Welsh School of Architecture at Cardiff University. She studied Architecture at Cambridge University and has worked as a practicing architect. She completed her Ph.D. ‘Urbanising the Event’ on the planning and design processes associated with the Olympic Games and Legacy at the London School of Economics in 2011. Her research explored the politics of regeneration, the ethics of planning and design, and ways of approaching urban futures. Juliet’s grandparents lived in the East End of London from the 1920s onwards, and Juliet herself lived in the East End for seventeen years, in Leytonstone, Whitechapel and Hackney respectively.

Debra Rapp is a documentary and fine art photographer, and has an MA in Art History from Goldsmiths College, University of London. Debra’s family also has links to East London as her grandfather grew up and ran his own business in the East End.


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Ben Judah and Rowan Moore

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Slow Burn City by Rowan Moore

This is London by Ben Judah

This is the new London: an immigrant city. Over one-third of Londoners were born abroad, with half arriving since the millennium. This has utterly transformed the capital, for better and for worse.

Ben Judah is an acclaimed foreign correspondent, but here he turns his reporter’s gaze on home, immersing himself in the hidden world of London’s immigrants to reveal the city in the eyes of its beggars, bankers, coppers, gangsters, carers and witch-doctors. From the backrooms of its mosques, Tube tunnels and nightclubs to the frontlines of its streets, Judah has supped with oligarchs and spent nights sleeping rough, worked on building sites and talked business with prostitutes; he’s heard stories of heartbreaking failure, but also witnessed extraordinary acts of compassion.

This is London explodes fossilized myths and offers a fresh, exciting portrait of what it’s like to live, work, fall in love, raise children, grow old and die in London now. Simultaneously intimate and epic, here is a compulsive and deeply sympathetic book on this dizzying world city from one of our brightest new writers.

Ben Judah was born in London. He has travelled widely in Russia, Central Asia and the Levant. His writing has featured widely, including the New York Times, the Evening Standard, the Financial Times and Standpoint. His first book, Fragile Empire, was published by Yale University Press in 2013.

Slow Burn City by Rowan Moore

London has become the global city above all others. Money from all over the world flows through it; its land and homes are tradable commodities; it is a nexus for the world’s migrant populations, rich and poor. Versions of what is happening in London are happening elsewhere, but London has become the best place to understand the way the world’s cities are changing.

Some of the transformations London has undergone were creative, others were destructive; this is not new. London has always been a city of trade, exploitation and opportunity. But London has an equal history of public interventions, including the Clean Air Act, the invention of the green belt and council housing, and the innovation of the sewers and embankments that removed the threat of cholera. In each case the response was creative and unprecedented; they were also huge in scale and often controversial. The city must change, of course, but Moore explains why it should do so with a ‘slow burn’, through the interplay of private investment, public good and legislative action.

Rowan Moore is architecture critic of the Observer and was named Critic of the Year at the UK press awards 2014. He is the author of Slow Burn City and Why We Build.

Ben and Rowan will be in conversation with Guardian writer and Hackney resident Dave Hill.

Opening Times

Monday to Sunday: 12 – 6

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