Titbits – Locks, frocks and five-year plans
■ One hundred days – Hackney marches forward
Comrade Zoë Garbett, first Green mayor of the borough of Hackney, has completed one hundred days at the helm — a period during which, by her own testimony, the tempo has been such that the ordinary reckoning of time no longer applies. One hundred days, she reports, have been lived as twenty years. Such is the accelerated rhythm of the new epoch.
The masses will recall the historic reversal of May, when the Green party overturned twenty years of hegemony and captured thirty-eight additional seats in the chamber. The manifesto Hope for Hackney has passed from paper into life.
In the battle for the budget, a gap of £53 million over three years confronts the borough — the inheritance of wrecking and sabotage in the austerity years, now being liquidated with exemplary vigour. The cuts of the coming period are therefore to be understood not as retreat but as the necessary clearing of ground.
Who Owns Hackney? The great audit proceeds apace. Meanwhile, drones appear over the estates: where formerly the tenant waited upon poles and boards, now the machine ascends.
The mayor — who describes herself, to the amusement of her office, as a governance obsessive — has established a new tone throughout the apparatus.
There is much in the pipeline, comrades, coming to fruition within three to six months. Life has become better. Life has become more joyous. Forward to the new tone!
■ Paddling with the enemy
Six and a half years. That’s how long the London Fields paddling pool has been dry — shut by Labour in February 2020 for “major works” that turned out to be a euphemism for a hole in the ground with a fence round it.
Enter Cllr Anntoinette Bramble, Labour group leader, who is now disappointed to hear no firm commitment to reopening it. Asked what she’d done about it while actually in charge of things, she offered a wildflower meadow, some solar panels and a refurbished toilet.
Green cabinet member Cllr Jacob Cable, meanwhile, has discovered the joy of the maths-based putdown. The pool, he notes, sat derelict across three administrations, two of which had Bramble in the cabinet — while the Greens have got a working group going in “just five per cent of time elapsed in our first term.” Nothing says hope for Hackney like a man doing percentages about a paddling pool.
■ Gates of hell
Foxes. Actual foxes. They burrowed under the safety surfacing at Buxton Gardens play space in Hoxton, left a trip hazard, and the gates have been padlocked for over a year.
Down the road at Bletchley Court, the wooden climbing frame failed its RoSPA inspection so long ago that “several years” is as precise as anyone’s willing to get.
Riding to the rescue: Labour’s Cllr Ben Lucas of Hoxton West, who has launched a campaign called Unlocking Play, has been photographed looking sombre beside a locked gate, and declared he won’t stop until those gates are unlocked and given back to the community for good.
Small print: both playgrounds were locked shut while Labour ran Hackney Council. Deputy mayor Dylan Law says Buxton’s repairs are ordered and will be done shortly.
Bletchley Court needs officers, a tenant management organisation, residents, a plan, an investment assessment and universal agreement before anyone even mentions a date. Kids of Hackney: bring a book.
■ Sheds, threads and mayoral spreads
Titbits was tickled to find Hackney’s deputy mayor gracing the September issue of British Vogue, no less. Cllr Dylan Law, all of 20, arrives in the nation’s fashion bible seven weeks into the job.
Law tells Vogue that he joined his party without much idea of what it was for, having assumed the Greens were “plants and flowers and bike sheds”. Two years on he has a stylist, a groomer and a digital artworker. Give it until Christmas before the collection drops.
Titbits cannot imagine that the Town Hall comms team set this one up. Then again, perhaps this is simply what becomes possible once you free up the bandwidth by no longer publishing Hackney Today. Welcome to Hackney Tomorrow!