Pirate Radio in Hackney, early 1990s

Pirate Radio – authentic expression of working class youth culture, but also a right pain in the arse if you happen to live in the same block…

That aside, this is a nice documentary about Rush FM (in what appears to be an abandoned block anyway) with ‘ardkore aplenty. Rush was based on the Nightingale Estate in Clapton.

Amazing that Stoke Newington Police can be talk with a straight face in the film about being “vigorous about the misuse of drugs” when they’d recently been exposed for planting them on people and dealing out of the police station.

More info on Rush FM:

DTI investigators faced one of their toughest jobs yet when they found the pirate station they were attempting to raid barracaded behind a wall of concrete. Rush FM had installed its transmission equipment in a disused flat on the 21st floor of a council tower block in Hackney, East London.

To prevent access, the entrance to the flat had been sealed up with three tons of concrete. Programmes came from a studio some distance away, connected over a radio link.

Contractors called in by the council to enable them to gain access to the flat hit a scaffolding pole wired up to the mains while attempting to drill through the concrete, causing a small explosion. Phials of ammonia and CS gas were also reported to have been found embedded in the concrete. A Police guard was needed to prevent the contractors being attacked while the flat was secured. Hackney Council are currently carrying out work to secure their tower blocks from use by unlicensed stations.

Police have suggested that for the station to go to such lengths to protect itself there must be a drugs link. They say they believe a number of unlicenced stations are part of a network of pay party operators and drug dealers. This has been denied by deejays at Rush FM who say they aren’t making any money out of the hardcore techno station. They also denied that they had installed booby-traps, saying they were simply trying to protect their equipment after facing 10 raids already this year.

Showitzer has an amazing photo of the Nightingale towerblocks here, as well as some gruesome Rush FM recollections.

Hackney Council has some film of a couple of the blocks being blown up in 1998 and 2003.

There’s a slightly weird site about the estate being regenerated here.

See also: Alexis Wolton’s “Tortugan tower blocks? Pirate signals from the margins” from Datacide Magazine.

Mark Metcalf on the 2011 riots – and the Colin Roach Centre

Exceprt from an entry on Mark’s blog (well worth reading in full):

Last Saturday afternoon I took a stroll down Clarence Road in Hackney. Having travelled down from West Yorkshire we were en route into central London to show my three-year old son around the capital for the first time in his short life.

I have largely good memories of Clarence Road, it runs down the side of Pembury Estate and I worked on it for many years during the 1990s – even occasionally getting paid for my ‘co-ordinating’ efforts – at the Colin Roach Centre.

This was an unfunded radical centre that had originally opened after the council took away the funding at my workplace, the Hackney Trade Union Support Unit, and rather than see it close down it was merged with Hackney Community Defence Association [HCDA] that had been formed in 1988 to successfully oppose the criminal – including drug dealing – and brutal activities of the police. Prominent within HCDA was Celia Stubbs, the partner of Blair Peach who was killed by the police in Southall in 1979.

Colin was a young black man shot dead in Stoke Newington Police Station in January 1983, sparking a campaign that achieved much but has still failed to catch what most then and now believe are the cops who killed him. That’s the problem with cops who kill – they get away with it. In 1995 David Ewin, who wasn’t a nice man, was shot dead in Hammersmith. His wife, Sarah, a lovely woman and fresh with a little baby approached the centre to seek support. It’s a long story but for the first time ever a police officer was charged with murder in the execution of his duty. Patrick Hodgson was strange man; he’d been a firearms officer for many years and yet had failed to move up the ranks. […]

Mark has previously written on police spy Mark Cassidy’s infiltration of the Colin Roach Centre.

Mark is now living in West Yorkshire and writes for a number of publications including The Big Issue. His website is http://markwrite.co.uk/

There is other material on this site by Hackney Community Defence Association.

Hackney History Housing Project

Interested to come by news of this new initiative – perhaps we can work together on some things…

The Hackney Housing History project has come out of some current housing campaigns, and the need to communicate, to learn from other people’s housing situations and struggles.

We are carrying out research, including interviewing people about the past, the present, and the future we would like to work towards together.

Do you want to be interviewed about your experiences, in Hackney or elsewhere? Interviews will be kept at Hackney Museum for future use.

Do you want to get involved in the project?

Please contact voices.of.hackney@googlemail.com or leave a message on
020 7265 9430

The first fruits of this project are now being posted on a new blog site.