On Monday the Museum of London was going to show The Street - a beautiful, touching and ultimately rather sad film about gentrification in Hackney. It is a must-see for anyone in the development business. Like a lot of things this week, the showing was cancelled but the film is available online at Curzon Home Cinema. So well worth catching.

 

Cameraman, director and producer, Zed Nelson spent three years filming in the half-mile-long Hoxton Street which runs northwards from Old Street, within not far from the Square Mile. Nelson tracked the changes that took place in the street during that time.  Pubs and garages were converted into flats, offices, art galleries and hipster coffee shops; Grenfelland Brexit spread a pall of gloom. He interviewed the older cockney residents. Cheerful Colleen describes the close-knit community but hints at a darker past: “There was more prejudice against the Jews - because they were clever.” Joe Cooke of F Cooke Pie and Mash shop, whose great grandfather started the business 160 years ago, doesn’t like the fact that the handmade bike shop that has just opened across the road is French. He counts 30 food outlets, not including street food, in the street and remembers when there used to be just three. A more recent incomer from the Black Church recalls the National Front. The garage owner says “You feel like you’re being pushed out”; by the end of the film, he had been. Homeless Serge, who lives under a bridge, quotes Stendhal: “Beauty is the expectation of happiness”. Soon after, he finds all his belongings burnt and is left with nothing, “I’m seriously fucked”. A priest says: “My motivation is based not on love but on anger” at the injustice of it all.

Property agents are the unwitting victims, hoisted on their own petards as they quote prices for multi-million-pound penthouses and say things like “This is now just an investment”. But Nelson treats his participants fairly. His approach is non-partisan, non-judgmental. His aim is to highlight the way change happens and raise serious issues around the impact of gentrification.  And it works.  Watch it.