The studio where I will be based for the next eighteen months is triangular in shape. It’s on the ground-floor, with a dog-leg corridor. It has windows all along one side.
Looking out to the right, you can see the end of Lea Conservancy Road, with Mabley Green and the football pitches beyond. To the left a bollarded terrace with immortal up-lit plants, the canal and a line of trees concealing the Hackney marshes.
The leaves that are being shaken from the trees are swept up in piles and taken away. The windows get cleaned weekly by abseiling men on ropes. Inside it’s also squeaky and shiny. It still smells of paint and floor adhesive.
Perhaps most interestingly, all this sits on the site of the former Lesney ‘Matchbox’ factory – world famous for their miniature toy cars, but locally more significant as employers of nearly six thousand Hackney workers during their heyday in the mid 1960s. The factory’s closure in 1989 and demolition in 2010 rubbed out a hugely influential part of Hackney’s social infrastructure, making way for this glossy high-rise development.
After the building’s official opening, one of the developers gave me a stack of folders and photographs he had accumulated over the years: planning applications, documents and drawings, reports and surveys. His pictures do more than just analytically record the internal layout of the building, they detail the last empty days of the factory, a handful of workers scattered in the too-large spaces, stalled machinery, empty storerooms. Amongst the pile was a large, square-format aerial shot of the area, taken I suppose sometime in the 90s. I drew an orange fence around the factory. Orange is the colour of optimism I once heard...
