Homegrown in Hackney: Sophie Heawood lives off the land in E8

By night Hackney may be all art-school hipsters and disco diners, but by day it’s a thriving marketplace of polytunnel-grown fruit and veg, freshly loomed knitwear, even home-brewed cola. For one week only, Victoria Park’s Sophie Heawood tries to survive on an exclusively E8 diet
Carsten Windhorst
Sophie Heawood25 October 2013

A Frenchman called Benjamin Carle is conducting a year-long experiment in which he only uses, eats and wears things made in France. I saw an interview with him and he looks quite sad, sitting on the only chair left in his empty Paris flat. Everything that isn’t produced wholly in his country has been chucked out — he says his girlfriend wasn’t very impressed when she got home. All of which gave my editor the bright idea for me to try the same experiment, only I wasn’t allowed a country, or even a whole city. No, ES asked me to survive only on stuff that is grown or fabricated in my local borough, Hackney. It’s almost as if they want me to die alone.

I said yes, since it would only be a week, and I wasn’t emptying my house, just seeing how much I could find in my hood. Not a great deal, I presumed. My daughter and I would just forage a bit of sourdough bread from the E5 Bakehouse, show willing at a farmers’ market or allotment on the weekend, and be home in time for our respective Peppa Pig and Facebook addictions, since nothing with a plug on it could possibly be made round here. Indeed, the only signs of Hackney’s industrial past in Victoria Park Village are estate agents advertising £1.2 million luxury flats in nostalgia complexes called things like The Old Oakum Workhouse for Foundlings and Rats. But beyond that I suspected this project was doomed. You can see the lovely glow of Westfield Stratford City from our roof.

Until I find out that, on the way to Westfield, Hackney Wick has many more factories than I realised. For a start, there is London Tradition, which makes coats for Jack Wills, Mulberry, Hackett, Margaret Howell and Aquascutum. All by the canal (near my house). It takes a bit of effort to buy the own-brand for myself, as it mostly exports to Japan: that Made in London label has more cachet in the Far East than over here it seems. Which is a shame, as I feel rather lovely in my new duffel coat — I had been considering buying one from Gap, now it feels rather special when people ask where it’s from. ‘An atelier in the shadow of the Olympic Stadium,’ I murmur pretentiously.

Then there is food. Bread and vegetables can be sourced locally — I get a Growing Communities veg box of Hackney-grown produce from St Mary’s Secret Garden off Kingsland Road, and force myself to stop being so lazy and make a wintry vegetable soup. I am not a natural cook, however, and my two-year-old remains unconvinced by this home-made fare, complaining that the carrot I give her to chew on is ‘still dirty, Mum’. She is relieved that Hackney Rooftop Honey turns out to be delicious — no wonder it won a blind taste test on Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s C4 show.

And there is so much booze available. Hackney’s greatest product appears to be craft beer. London Fields Brewery is the biggest — I’ve seen it on tap in plenty of pubs — but many prefer Hackney Brewery, Crate, Redchurch, Pressure Drop, or Beavertown. The Cock Tavern on busy Mare Street, surrounded by chains such as JD Sports and Pizza Hut, actually brews its own beer in the basement. That’s something Jon Swain of the Hackney Brewery approves of when he shows me round his vats, under an unassuming railway arch near Kingsland Road. ‘Beer isn’t like wine, it’s not supposed to travel. It’s a local drink,’ he says, continuing to explain the process. I nod profoundly at words such as lautering, sparging and wort. He and Peter Hills set up the brewery in 2011, after ten years’ working as barmen and managers in local pubs left them determined to embrace localism and see if they could do it themselves. In fact, there is so much beer around, I consider using some as shampoo. (No need — turns out the Golden Company, a local social enterprise, gives young people business training making beauty products via their beehives.)

Usually a guzzler, I find that it initially takes me two evenings to get through a fat bottle of craft beer. It just doesn’t slide down my unaccustomed palate like bland Stella does. I do like its earthy roughness, but a few mouthfuls are enough until I get used to it. So I am delighted when my sympathetic friend Wyndham brings round a bottle of

Butler’s gin — I insist it will ruin my experiment as it can’t possibly be local, but it is. Good old mother’s ruin, distilled in the Wick, with lemongrass and cardamom as well as the usual juniper. It seems to steam its way through us. I could get very drunk on this, very fast — and I think perhaps we did.

The next morning, sobering up with some tangy Dalston Cola (yes, really), I note that my bowels have become considerably more, erm, artisanal, since I started living locally, much to the amusement of my daughter. ‘MUMMY FART!’ she shrieks. I’m not sure if it’s the bread or the beer or both. For her part, she is also threatening to bankrupt me, since a trip to Broadway Market introduced her to the delights of Hansen & Lydersen’s smoked salmon. This beautiful product turns out to be the brainchild of a Norwegian called Ole Hansen, who smokes the fish in an old Stoke Newington printhouse that he converted himself. A small slither on toast costs £3 a pop, and my daughter is soon demanding her third.

‘Sooo great for her brain development!’ says the lady on the stall, just as I am considering getting her some Cheesy Wotsits instead. My daughter’s BRAIN, you say? Oh God, all right then — I buy a massive slab with a massive price tag to take home. It makes me wonder what the cheaper salmon I’m used to has been covered in, as this tastes so much rawer and cleaner. An investment, yes, but obviously worth it when the toddler wins Mastermind.

It starts bothering me that snug though I am in my duffel coat, the fabric was imported from Italy. So I am delighted to be introduced to Daniel Harris, founder of London Cloth Company, who shows me round his factory down an overgrown alleyway in Clapton. It turns out to be the only cloth mill in London — the first to be built in 100 years — making woollens for the garment industry. I must admit, when I’d seen his website full of photos of reclaimed old looms, I did wonder if it was some mad hobby for art-school hipsters with a hoarding problem. If it is, then they’re working their highly skilled arses off, supplying companies including Ralph Lauren. They also sell to individuals. A man from Kensington had just been in to buy fabric that he will then take to Savile Row to be stitched into a suit. I opt for the teddy bears instead — a little bit stiff but ever so noble-looking. In fact, they have a lovely new project, working with city farms (yes, plural) across London to turn their spare sheep shearings into bears, which they then return to the farms to sell to youngsters.

And so it goes on — under every railway arch, down every alleyway, it turns out there is industry aplenty in Hackney. Steelworks, bakers, light-fitting makers. The music producer Rory Phillips tells me he gets his vinyl pressed at Curved Pressings — they can master your music and produce CDs, too. A friend who works in fashion recommends Kathlyn Toth Fejel’s permacouture nights, where she teaches you to forage for dyes from plants found on Hackney Marshes, though there are none on this week.

But best of all is FARM:shop, just moments from Dalston Junction. Ignore the silly internet-friendly name, and offputting shopfront of bright white lights and lettuces — it’s because they’re using hydroponics to grow farm foods indoors. There are even shoals of tilapia, swimming in tanks. Out the back, there’s a polytunnel greenhouse complete with a disco ball for parties.

Yet it’s not as if growing food in Hackney is anything new — Samuel Pepys wrote about his trip to an exotic garden where he saw, for the first time, an orange growing on a tree, and tasted it with some delight — in 1666. You will be delighted to hear that the garden has now been replaced by the Upper Clapton roundabout. I do consider going fishing in nearby Clapton Pond, but a quick Google of ‘fishing Clapton’ reveals only pictures of Eric looking moody by a river bank. Hmm.

None of this quite replaces the historic role of the borough in providing electricity, though — think of the motto above Shoreditch town hall: ‘More Light, More Power.’ What can I do about my dependence on the grid, and on technology? This is where London Hackspace, based on Hackney Road, comes in. Pay what you can, and learn to program a computer, use a laser cutter, a 3D printer, or make something in their metal and wood workshops. Hackspace encourages self-sufficiency and inventors — no project is considered too ambitious or too bonkers. If you go in there saying you want to make your own telly, or build an electricity generator in your backyard, nobody will look in the least surprised. (When I visit, someone is wiring up a normal bike to make it into an electric one, and a caravan in the car park has been converted into a lifesize video-game simulator, wherein vicious nerds are drinking beer and killing each other repeatedly.)

This fills me with the strongest surge of hope yet — I could work out electronics for myself. ‘Oh, of course you can,’ says Jonty Wareing, one of the collective’s founders, despite me telling him repeatedly that the last time I looked at a circuit board was when I failed Physics GCSE. Somehow I find myself signing up for a course. This feels… wonderful. It’s something meaty to get my teeth into. Speaking of which — mmm, meat. The rosemary growing in my backyard longs to accompany something tasty.

But the Ginger Pig butchers source everything in Yorkshire, which is why I ring up Hackney Council and ask the nice man who answers the phone if it is legal to shoot squirrels for food. Surely the local authorities will have to accept that I am living as a hunter-gatherer in Hackney now — I have the extortionate deli receipts to prove it.

‘Well,’ says the man from the council, ‘off the top of my head it depends what you would use to shoot them with. Do you have a registered weapon — a gun, or perhaps a crossbow?’ A crossbow. I immediately wonder if Barnaby Carder, who sits in the window of his spoon shop on Hackney Road, carving wooden spoons all day long, would like to fashion me one. Probably not, given what he says about watching the traffic go one way and then the other, while he sits there peacefully carving spoons. I decide to let the squirrels live.

Increasingly desperate for local thrills, I learn of an erotic film called Hoxton Honey and find it on Amazon (not very local, I know). OH MY GOD! It really is porn set in the East End. The flirting starts in vintage clothes shops on Brick Lane, the snogging starts outside the White Cube gallery, and the wham-bam rogering takes place in glass kitchens in Hoxton Square, beside angry designer fishtanks.‘Porno films never seem to have trendypeople in them’ reads the tagline on the DVD case. ‘Check them out here going at it like animals in their stylish pads.’ It makes me feel worse than if I had shot a squirrel.

After more than a week surviving (mainly) on what you can get in Hackney, I am astonished by the number of people all around me who are using their hands and their brains to make the things we need, rather than import them. Still, thank God I’m not doing a whole year like that poor French bloke. Let’s hope he’s got bowels of steel.

Photographs by Carsten Windhorst

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