The forensics of the pavement

This text represents a small experiment in writing. It is centred on an urban Hackney patch outside the flat where I stay in Stoke Newington, north London. It attempts to take in some dynamics of past and present, the composition of the pavement and some history above and below it. Hackney itself was once an orchard retreat for plague victims, but this patch is now territory of tarmac, pollution, foxes, shoppers, gulls, cyclists, a shooting, a mugging and a boy hidden in a bin. But it is a community, a functioning one, full of life. Influences on this episodic approach come from George Perec, with his invitations to transcribe the city; Henri Lefebvre’s Rhythmanalysis, with his theory of the city based on rhythm, and Tim Ingold’s ‘anthropology’ of line, capturing the traces and threads that compose and surround our lives.