HACKNEY BY NIGHT
2024
This series of images is from the book Hackney by Night (Hoxton Mini Press 2015) that examined “broken pastoral” landscapes in night time urban Hackney. The pastoral being a reconstructive nostalgic vision of a return to a bucolic, perfect landscape, an idea generated by the upper classes from the dark viewpoint of the industrial revolution and the scarred landscape it generated. The “broken” pastoral, with the idea of reflective nostalgia, understands the impossibility of pastoral ever being revisited due to the enormous, irreversible changes in the way the land has used and the subsequent vistas that have been created and celebrates the scarification of the land and the growth of the urban vista that has created these new “broken’ pastoral landscapes.
