Mick Hartley

We start, as so many journeys start, from the seemingly normal terraced streets of Stoke Newington:

A vision of Victorian suburban serenity. But the pretence is impossible to maintain. As we now realise – we've lived in this world for long enough, God knows: we've read all the right books - this is a facade. Reality crowds in on us; demands our attention. For every dream there's a nightmare; for every heaven there's a hell; for every thesis there's an antithesis; for every terraced middle class utopia there's a dark inner-city world of desperation, crime, and dodgy street art. We soon make the inevitable plunge into the seedy graffiti'd urban detritus of back streets in Shoreditch, where anarchist chancers meet the prophets of Blakeian decay (when they're not round at Iain Sinclair's place having a nice cup of tea):

…while right next door, near the financial centres where billions are made and lost in the open-plan institutiionalised greed of the markets, pigs are slaughtered and butchered whole to be eaten by corpulent bankers, fresh from their latest stock-market killing, as the grease dribbles down their chins:

…and, outside, the world pretends to a glass and steel dream of normality straight from the drawing boards of corporate architects and city planners:

Can we somehow retrieve, via an as-yet undreamed-of synthesis, the dignity and beauty of our urban environment?

or must we settle for the occasional patch of an artificial and kitschy jigsaw-puzzle vision of rural arcadia within the surrounding soul-less urban jungle?

I don't know. I only ask the questions…..and take the photographs.

[Google map here]