Acquired for Development By...: A Hackney Anthology

by Gary Budden (Editor)

Twenty-five writers. Twenty-five differing perspectives on a rapidly changing London borough. From gentrification to supermarket sandwiches, Turkish Alevism to inner-city river living, middle-class civil war to pylon romance, “Acquired for Development by…” captures an alternative, insightful and sometimes bizarre take on modern London life. Featuring work by Lee Rourke, Molly Naylor, Siddartha Bose, Laura Oldfield Ford, Gavin James Bower and many more.

Kindle Edition

First published April 26, 2012

About the author

Gary Budden writes fiction and creative non-fiction about the intersections of British sub-culture, landscape, psychogeography, hidden history, nature, horror, weird fiction and more.

His collection of uncanny psychogeographies and landscape punk, HOLLOW SHORES, was published by Dead Ink Books in October 2017. His dark fiction novella JUDDERMAN (as D.A. Northwood) is published in 2018 by the Eden Book Society.

He was shortlisted for the 2015 London Short Story Award, and his story ‘Greenteeth’ was nominated for a 2017 British Fantasy Award and adapted into a short film by the filmmaker Adam Scovell.

His work has been published widely, including Black Static, Structo, Elsewhere, Unthology, The Lonely Crowd, Gorse, and Year’s Best Weird Fiction.

Praise for HOLLOW SHORES:

Here are punks, ghosts, vampire-hunters, ancient gods that hate to be neglected. Here is a country and a world teetering on the lip of apocalyptic void. And here are, too, insanities, desperate longings, great loves and rages and beauties. Completely absorbing.
— Niall Griffiths, author of Runt

I don't think I've ever read a collection of stories that fitted together so well before, with each one deepening the same themes to make a powerful reading experience about loss, and belonging, and growing.
– Aliya Whiteley, author of The Beauty

Quiet, unsettling, and at times, quite beautiful... The overall sense of dissatisfaction (though never angsty) and longing for an ineffable, unattainable ideal in our environmentally ravaged world was authentically and meticulously rendered.
– Paul Tremblay, author of A Head Full of Ghosts

Budden’s writing is sparse, terse even, but perfectly suited to the landscapes of dislocation and alienation that are his natural milieu.
– Nina Allan, author of The Rift

Like some mythic counterculture coast; The Snow Goose on speed.
– Tony White, author of The Fountain in the Forest

Reviews

[Rachel Stevenson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Many books have been written about London, some even about Hackney – The Lowlife by Alexander Baron, a quote from which gives this anthology its title, features its anti-hero escaping from gangsters by running through the Bishopsgate Goods Yard all the way up to his home in Shacklewell (the hinterland between Dalston and Stoke Newington). But this book is set almost literally on my doorstep: the first story in this collection of fiction, poetry and prose is about a man falling in love with a pylon on Walthamstow marsh. I knew exactly which one he meant – I too was entranced by it when I first waked under it, hoping to soak up some pyramid type energy. I also recognised the magic fish that “live” in the filter bed, the machinery left over from the filtration system, the concrete stone circle. And this was just the first section: there are also chapters on Clapton, Stoke Newington/Stamford Hill, Dalston, Hackney Central and Hackney Wick.

In The Battle Of Kingsland Road, Paul Case invents the Stoke Newington Rising Dawn vs the Hoxton Liberation Army, fighting about who controls Dalston – the rising tide of gentrification or the cool kids, dinner partiers vs clubbers. The HLA's mantra is “The Only Good Stokey Is A Dead Stokey.” The armies hole up in the Gillett Square bunker and imprison their captives in the Manor Road concentration camp.

Elsewhere, Tim Burrows writes an essay about The Four Aces club, once a Victorian theatre, now demolished to make way for the new Dalston library and commercial opportunities square. Newton Dunbar ran the reggae and ska club for 30 years and, leaving Hackney, Burrows investigates Dunbar, the Scottish border town. Again, I recognise the spots, having stopped there on the way to Edinburgh:- the award winning public loo, the ruined hotel. Burrows posits that the men who were deported to the Caribbean by Cromwell's army from the royalist town of Dunbar were connected, loosely, to Newton.

David Dawkins' A London Triptych references other local places: Pages of Hackney bookshop, the Round Chapel, Palm 2 convenience store – a corner shop that competes with the next door Tesco with varied stock, a coffee concession, and a build your own takeaway pizza. These are the places of our London lives; they mean more to us than Trafalgar Square or Buckingham Palace. These are our sacred sites.

The only piece I didn't like was Tautologies, by one of the co-editors – the tale of a disgruntled old punk deciding whether or not to help his friend put on a gig. Disappointed, as all cultural warriors are, that his time has passed, he moans about the way things are going. “Farmers' markets and focaccia aren’t culture,” he complains. Maybe not, but a squat gig isn't revolution. Anarchist punks stick it to the man by living at their girlfriend’s place, afternoon drinking, and being in hock to Big Tobacco via taxed addiction. Really rebellious.

Published in 2012, the year of our Olympics, the book is trying to track changes, to leave a written record of what has been left behind. It is best read in conjunction with St Etienne's film about the Lower Lea Valley, What Have You Done Today, Mervyn Day?

[John Bell · Rating 4 out of 5]

Written in 2011, this is a time capsule from Hackney on the verge of Apocalypse. The Olympics looms large in the background of many pieces - destroying the beloved pylon in ‘a dream of Hackney marshes’ and epitomising a collapsing global capitalism in ‘2061’. Chain shops are portrayed like an invading army, representing Hackney being drained of its character by soulless corporations (the finest store).

‘Acquired for Development by’ is thus the last gasp of the first wave of Hackney Gentrifiers who moved into the abandoned warehouses and run down terraces after industry in london collapsed in the 60s and 70s. This is an epilogue of a lifestyle of squats, raves and communes before it is displaced by the ‘architectural nightmare of the newbuild’ and smothered by the new wave of gentrification. There is a feeling of impending loss and finality about many of the pieces which matches this mood: ‘Foucault over the garden fence’, ‘tautologies’ and ‘the paper child’ in particular.


As a product of a very specific time and place and from a very specific point of view, it is fascinating and many of the contributions are enjoyable and interesting. Favourites were ‘tautologies’, ‘the finest store’ and ‘Foucault over the garden fence’. The latter and ‘paper child’ are especially haunting

[Eleanor · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really enjoyed reading this, but it was quite a mixed bag. I loved knowing exactly where the works were talking about (especially the particular pylon and the back of the Round Chapel). I felt, however, that a lot of the works were lacking in a lot of context or explanation. Like what the heck was going on in a lot of them? I felt thrown in the deep end quite often and I really struggled to understand the storyline or even the point of them. It was often hard to tell whether stories were factual or fiction (maybe it doesn't matter but I kind of wanted to know). Furthermore, I felt a definite masculine stamp on a number of the stories, which always sits a bit weirdly with me.

There were a couple I simply loved and these are as follows:

Rivers of Change - Nell Frizzell
Dalston Lane - Daniel Kramb
Alevism and Hackney - Natalie Hardwick
Electric Blue - Anita Ostrowska
The Finest Store - Kit Caless
Suki’s Cherry - Georgia Myers

I feel like I would definitely recommend this book, but only to other Hackneyites, and with the proviso that not all of the works are all that enjoyable. I loved the whole idea of it, however. I also liked that it was arranged by place, which meant I could really understand where I was.

[Litro Magazine]

Litro Magazine review by Emily Ding: http://www.litro.co.uk/?p=25595