Pages of Hackney

Independent Bookshop, Hackney, since 2008

Event - London Clay: River Lea Walking Tour with Tom Chivers and Siddhartha Bose

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September 19 @ 14:00 – 16:00 BST

£6

Join author Tom Chivers and poet Siddhartha Bose for a unique walking tour exploring the River Lea’s deep history

BOOK TICKETS

We’re thrilled to be hosting a special event to celebrate the arrival of Tom Chivers’ new book, LONDON CLAY: JOURNEYS IN THE DEEP CITY! Spend the afternoon of Sunday 19 September strolling along the River Lea with us as Tom leads a tour exploring the deep history of one of London’s most iconic waterways. Tom will be joined by poet Siddhartha Bose for what promises to be an unforgettable insight into the river’s historic depths.

About the Walk

We will meet at Hackney Marshes Pavilion (E5 0DH) at 2pm for a walk we expect to last between 2 and 2.5 hours. We intend the pace to be comfortable for most walkers, and will provide more specific route information as well as an anticipated end point shortly before the event. Please don’t hesitate to contact us if you’d like more information regarding the walk and it’s terrain, or any other details connected with the event.

About the Book

What secrets lie beneath a city?

Tom Chivers follows hidden pathways, explores lost islands and uncovers the geological mysteries that burst up through the pavement and bubble to the surface of our streets. From Roman ruins to a submerged playhouse, from an abandoned Tube station to underground rivers, Chivers leads us on a journey into the depths of the city he loves.

A lyrical interrogation of a capital city, a landscape and our connection to place, LONDON CLAY celebrates urban edgelands: in-between spaces where the natural world and the metropolis collide. Through a combination of historical research, vivid reportage and personal memoir, it will transform how you see London, and cities everywhere.

Copies of LONDON CLAY are available to buy with your ticket for collection at the start of the event (select the Add a Copy of LONDON CLAY option at checkout), and there will be a very limited number available to purchase on the day.

About the Tour Guides

Tom Chivers is a writer, publisher and arts producer. He was born in 1983 in south London. He has released two pamphlets and two collections of poetry, the latest being Dark Islands (Test Centre, 2015). His poems have been anthologised in Dear World & Everything In It and London: A History in Verse. He was shortlisted for the Michael Marks and Edwin Morgan Poetry Awards and received an Eric Gregory Award in 2011. Tom has made perambulatory, site-specific and audio work for organisations including LIFT, Cape Farewell, Humber Mouth and Southbank Centre. He was writer in residence at Bishopsgate Institute and associate artist of the National Centre of Writing. In 2009 he presented a documentary for BBC Radio 4 about the poet Barry MacSweeney. In 2011 an animated film of his poem ‘The Event’ was broadcast by Channel 4’s Random Acts. He lives in Rotherhithe with his wife and daughters.

Siddhartha Bose is a poet, playwright, academic and theatre-maker based in Hackney, London. He was born in India and spent seven years in the US. Siddhartha is the author of two poetry collections from Penned in the Margins, and has written and performed three works for theatre: Kalagora (2010), London’s Perverted Children (2012) and The Shroud (2014).

BOOK TICKETS

Hackney Marshes Pavilion

Mandeville St
London, E5 0DH United Kingdom + Google Map
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Event - So We Live – The Novels of Alexander Baron

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We’re very excited to welcome Susie Thomas, Nadia Valman, and Ken Worpole to discuss SO WE LIVE, a new collection of essays exploring the work of Hackney novelist Alexander Baron.

The novelist Alexander Baron (1917-1999) was born into a working class Jewish home in Hackney, joined the Communist Party as a young man, saw the thick of battle in Sicily and Normandy, and became one of the most admired writers of post-war Britain. His first novel, FROM THE CITY, FROM THE PLOUGH (1948), was acclaimed as the definitive novel of the Second World War, the first of a trilogy including THERE’S NO HOME (1950) and THE HUMAN KIND (1953). This was followed by a string of novels about working class life in post-war London, including THE LOWLIFE (1963) a cult novel for many other writers ever since. In recent years his reputation has flourished with many of his fifteen novels back in print. This is the first detailed study of the man and his work.

Dr Susie Thomas has taught Baron’s London novels on her literature courses to American undergraduates in London for many years. The students always say the same thing: “The Lowlife is awesome. Why isn’t Baron better known?” It is difficult to know how to answer. She has published articles on British Literature from Aphra Behn to Martin Amis. She edited HANIF KUREISHI: A READER’S GUIDE TO ESSENTIAL CRITICISM and she is the Reviews Editor for the The Literary London Journal.

Dr Nadia Valman is Reader in English Literature at Queen Mary, University of London. She has published widely on British Jewish literature, including a survey of the postwar British Jewish novel in the Oxford History of the Novel in English, editing British Jewish Women Writers and co-editing the Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Jewish Cultures. She is the creator of Zangwill’s Spitalfields, a walking tour app using Israel Zangwill’s classic novel of Jewish immigration, Children of the Ghetto (1892) as a guide to Spitalfields, east London, where the novel is set. She is currently researching the literature of east London.

Ken Worpole is a writer on architecture, landscape and public policy, and was Emeritus Professor at the Cities Institute, London Metropolitan University. He has a particular interest in the literature of east London and Hackney, where he and his wife, the photographer, Larraine Worpole, have lived and worked since 1969. Ken’s 1983 interview with Alexander Baron formed the basis of his pioneering re-appraisal of Baron’s fiction in his first book, DOCKERS & DETECTIVES, a study of post-war British working class fiction, published in 1983 and re-issued in an updated edition by Five Leaves in 2008.

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Event - The Adulterants: Joe Dunthorne in conversation with Jon Day

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Ray is not a bad guy. A thirty-something freelance tech journalist living with his pregnant wife in Clapton, he is staring down the barrel of long-deferred adulthood. He mostly did not cheat on his wife. He only sometimes despises every one of his friends. And, while he spends his afternoons churning out third-rate listicles in his boxer briefs, he dreams of making a difference. But Ray is about to learn that his special talent is for making things worse.

With lacerating wit and wry affection, Joe Dunthorne dissects the urban millennial psyche of a man too old to be an actual millennial. The Adulterants is an uproarious tale of competitively sensitive men and catastrophic open marriages, riots on the streets of London and Internet righteousness, and one man’s valiant quest to come of age in his thirties.

Joe Dunthorne was born in Swansea, and his acclaimed first novel, Submarine, was adapted into a film directed by Richard Ayoade. His second novel, Wild Abandon, won the 2012 Encore Award, and he was featured in the Faber Young Poets series in 2016. He lives in London.

Jon Day is a writer, academic and cyclist. He worked as a bicycle courier in London for several years, and his book, Cyclogeography: Journeys of a London Bicycle Courier, was published in 2015. He is a lecturer in English Literature at King’s College London, and he writes for the London Review of Books, n+1, the New Statesman and others.


Opening Times

Monday – Friday: 11-6
Saturday: 10-6
Sunday: 11-6

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