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hackney citizen

Libraries & Censors

I have just written a full page feature – ‘Put Your Hand In Mine’ – which has now been published in one of my local newspapers, the Hackney Citizen. I’d promised to write something about the ten years I’ve spent in Hackney, but I ended up trying something rather trickier.

The problem was that the more I mentally catalogued the places and things I love about the borough – Abney Park Cemetery, Springfield Marina and the canal, hidden backstreets and the rest – I couldn’t stop thinking about the different ways people can become isolated in the midst of hundreds of thousands of others. So I started reading over lots of my old notes and incorporated some of the memories they raked up, slotting them into the main narrative as flashbacks.

Anyway, it’s not all gloom, and it even ends on a note of hope. I’ll post it here in full when it’s slightly older news, but for the moment there’s something else I want to draw your attention to.

If you look at the paper (badly photographed, I’m afriad), you’ll see that it leads on a story about criticism and dissent. If you could see below the dome of the head on the left, you’d realise that the piece is about the writer Iain Sinclair.

Sinclair has caused a storm by revealing in The Guardian that Hackney Council ordered that his book launch at Stoke Newington Library be banned. The reason? His latest, Hackney, That Rose Red Empire was deemed to be critical of the 2012 Olympics, which are a main plank of the Council’s ambitions and are meant have a major legacy for the borough.

It was a strange argument to make, particularly as the book hadn’t been published and no-one – bar Sinclair and, I assume his editor – knew for sure what was or wasn’t in it.

So, after being made to look completely foolish in the national press and criticised by the Mayor of London, the Council backtracked.

And now, not only has Sinclair generated massive publicity for his book (did I mention that you can pre-order it on Amazon?), all of Hackney’s libraries are now stocking a free newspaper that leads on a story that upbraids the Council for its intolerance of criticism.

All of which not only goes to prove that there’s nothing like a bit of controversy to shift a few extra books, but that censors will always end up drawing attention to the very things they want to conceal, in the places they wanted to hush them up.

Long may that continue.

Posted by: Ben Locker
Published: 1st December, 2008 at 7:49 pm in Blog.
Tags: censorship, hackney, hackney citizen, iain sinclair, libraries
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