When I asked Meg Hillier (MP for Hoxton East & Shoreditch) late last year if the pandemic could be an opportunity for Hackney, she was quite doubtful.
Fair enough. It must be hard to be optimistic when every day you hear from constituents whose livelihoods had been ruined by the events of the past year.
Still, it is not Panglossian to see our current situation as a once-in-a-lifetime chance to refigure this wonderful borough and address some of its most pressing inequalities.
Philip Glanville, Mayor of Hackney, seems to agree. Announcing this year’s council budget, he wrote: “We see the pandemic as a means to addressing the stark inequalities this crisis has revealed and rebuild a better Hackney.”
This is the right attitude and Glanville is correct to focus on the inequalities Covid has revealed. But he should also pay attention to the fascinating behavioural shifts caused by the pandemic which could aid him in his task.
Hackney’s Speaker Kam Adams is well aware of the issues facing the area. “If you look at Hoxton East & Shoreditch, it’s like two halves,” he said in November. “From Old Street down to Liverpool Street it’s full of offices, fintech, ICT and so forth.
“When you come to the other side of the ward it’s full of council estates. So most of the people that live on the estates don’t actually get to profit from the growth in the south of the ward.”
Adams had been working on setting up “parents’ evening” sessions, where local parents and children could meet people working in the borough’s tech companies, but these were scuppered by the lockdown.
Why on earth, then, is Covid an opportunity to bring the two halves of Hackney together? Surely our enforced isolation is doing the complete opposite?
For the answer, look at how the pandemic is changing the way we work. Earlier this year, I interviewed the founders of a new co-working space called ARC Club. Hackney has long pioneered trendy collaborative spaces like Fora and WeWork, but these have tended to be concentrated down in Shoreditch and the surrounding area.
ARC Club is different, however. It is based on the ground floor of a social housing block in suburban Homerton.
“Our model was the neighbourhood workplace, the idea that you could walk or cycle to work,” its co-founder, Hannah Philp, said. “We were only looking outside Zone 1.”
When researching what people valued about a workplace, Philp discovered that very few workers missed a long commute. She is betting big on the idea that, post-lockdown, people will opt for a suburban workspace for some or all of their working week.
And she’s not alone. The founder of the Salty Commune workspace, based in a deconsecrated church in Hoxton, also say that “co-working spaces, especially the ones that are in residential areas, will find themselves doing pretty well.”
Why is this wave of hyper-local spaces good for Hackney? They have the potential to break down some of the barriers that divide the borough.
As well as being less intimidatingly formal than traditional offices, they are physically closer to Hackney’s suburbs. Your next boss could be working right underneath your flat. With the right thinking, proximity begets possibility.
ARC Club has cottoned on to this: they’ve made an effort to get to know their neighbours and are offering discounts and free out-of-hours space to residents, local charities and community groups.
Once lockdown restrictions are lifted, Adams’s parents’ evening sessions would be easier to set up than ever before. Local families will have a far shorter distance to travel and may even have met some of the borough’s tech workers queuing for a coffee at their nearby workspace.
Hackney’s community groups, such as the Rise 365 youth organisation behind the wonderful new food shop run by teenagers on the Kingsmead estate, are among the best in the country.
And once Hackney’s tech companies are embedded in residential areas, with a locally-focused mindset, who knows what additional collaborations — between companies, workspaces, residents, community groups, and politicians like Adams — might be possible?
Of course there are numerous other ways Hackney’s inequality should be addressed — not least by tackling the terrible problem of overcrowding (Adams told me there were currently over 30,000 people on the waiting list for social housing in the borough).
But if we are alert to the changes precipitated by the pandemic, there is a truly unique chance to capitalise on them. We must be bold enough to seize it.
