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Audio Gutter Press with Mayday Radio
July 23, 2020 @ 8:00 pm - 10:00 pm BST
Hackney Gutter Press Issue 1 was published in April 1972 at Centerprise bookshop in Dalston.
1972: “Most people in Hackney don’t like the way their lives are controlled by work, rents, councillors, police, schools etc. A lot of us are organising to fight their control – but we feel we don’t know enough about each other. For example with the coming tenants’ campaign against the Fair Rents Act we’re going to need a united fight if we are going to win – women at home, people going to work, claimants and kids together: we’re all tenants.We want this newspaper to be used as part of getting to know each other. Organising to fight together. We want it to be used as a WEAPON TO FIGHT FOR OUR OWN CONTROL OF HACKNEY.”
2020: In this moment of unionisation in response to unemployment, millions have found themselves dependent on the state, where they might never have expected to. People stand to lose their businesses, families have spent a disgusting amount of time together, domestic violence has unsurprisingly soared, and protests around systemic racism, racial inequality and BAME deaths are a critical reality.
Substitute Hackney for wherever you live and imagine if you and the people in your area published a zine like this. Help us put together an audio collage, not unlike the Hackney Gutter Press did with words and paper in the 70s. As always we want contributions from the literal to the oblique; interviews with neighbours, soundscapes, field recordings, snippets from the streets, recordings from the tv, radio, internet, fury and resistance from the gutter looking up!
Questions to start you off:
- Can you describe the kind of mutual aid that’s been happening around you?
- Have you witnessed or experienced police harassment?
- Are you negotiating with your landlord?
- Are you going on rent strike?
- Do you have space?
- What kind of care work are you doing?
- Do we need a claimants union now? How do we navigate Universal Credit together?
Send your submissions to audio@maydayrooms.org via WeTransfer or link to a google doc by 23rd July. We will be listening to all our submitted audio together at the online event.
Take a look at the Hackney Gutter Press archive from MayDay Rooms. You can also read about it at the radical history of Hackney blog.