Hackney – A Tale of Two Cities / Zed Nelson

A 16 year-old schoolgirl was recently killed by a gunshot fired through the window of a fast food restaurant in Hackney. The, gunman, riding a bicycle, was trying to scare a rival youth gang. On the same day an 18-year-old was shot in the leg in a street gun battle.

Hackney, though crime-ridden, poor and dilapidated, is also now London’s trendiest neighbourhood, and was home to the 2012 Olympics. Down the road from the shootings, contemporary design studios and modernist apartment blocks pepper the landscape, like out-of-place totems of middle-class gentrification.

The social landscape for an under-privileged teenager growing up in Hackney, one of London’s poorest boroughs, is a million light-years away from the new urban hipsters who frequent the cool bars and expensive cappuccino cafés springing up in the same streets. These worlds co-exist side-by-side but entirely separate, creating bizarre juxtapositions of wealth and poverty, aspiration and hopelessness.