‘My stories show Hackney before it changed’ – EastlondonlinesFacebookInstagramTikTokTwitterYouTube

‘My stories show Hackney before it changed’ – EastlondonlinesFacebookInstagramTikTokTwitterYouTube

Pic: Joe Thomas Pic courtesy of Joe Thomas For many authors, finding the right setting for their stories is the most difficult bit of the job. But for Hackney author Joe Thomas it was easy. Born and bred in the east London borough, Thomas found himself naturally veering to Hackney as the setting for his new trilogy, which deal with Thatcherism, racism and the use of rock music to fight it. True Blue, published last year, is the concluding novel in the trilogy set in the Hackney of the late 1970s, through to the 1990s. Thomas says it came about because of the way his family’s life happened to intersect with local politics. “What sparked off the whole trilogy was learning that my dad, who was a solicitor in Hackney, was involved in helping to displace the National Front, the extreme right-wing political organisation, from their headquarters in Hackney and Shoreditch through a planning dispute,” he told EastLondonLines (ELL). Of course the way the National Front was displaced from their headquarters was far from glamorous. It came down to solicitors fighting the far right party with a planning application. It was precisely the ordinariness of events that caught the writer’s attention. He found it interesting “the idea that something so dry could be applied to a situation that has genuine benefit to the area, to the place”. To Thomas, it spoke volumes about how communities fight back against divisive forces, even if sometimes sotto voce. He also found it fascinating that Hackney struck a blow for communal harmony with music. Rock against Racism held a major musical event in Victoria Park to bring different people together, around a shared love for music and after that, says Thomas, he became interested in “how that movement grew and how it became this focal point in East London”. He says: “How do you take a real-life political force for good and use its narrative to drive a fictional story?” Born in Lower Clapton Road in the north-eastern part of Hackney, and having lived there well into his 30s, Thomas says he felt he grew up in an “incredibly progressive and diverse” area. Even so, he acknowledges there was a “very real and very prevalent growing problem of racism and violence”. It was his attempt to understand these tensions in the place he knew best that pushed him to set the new trilogy in Hackney. Thomas laughs when asked how Hackney has changed over the years. “When I was growing up, I couldn’t wait to leave Hackney, and now I can’t afford to live there”. The joke has a serious subtext: The gentrification of Hackney, which is both commercially successful and politically controversial. Thomas says his novels are set in “pre-gentrification Hackney” and he hopes some of that comes through, the place as it was before it changed. Collage: Yassmine Tabka