Boxed in: Dennis Morris's Club Row photo then and now

Space is the place, they say, and yesterday I found myself in one interesting little space: the bit of Club Row in Shoreditch/Bethnal Green from where the photographer Dennis Morris took his celebrated snap of Ken Edwards and his boxmen (roadies/performers) for the Admiral Ken soundsystem one day in 1973 or '74 (I've seen it variously dated). This photo: 

Club Row then (Pic: Dennis Morris)

 

Evidently a "random shot" which Morris ended up with by chance as he wondered around the area one Sunday morning, it's obviously also to some degree "staged", with - at the very least - Morris getting them to pose for the shot. Anyway, I've been seeing this image for years and have often half-heartedly wondered about the exact location. So yesterday, in classic A London Inheritance style (though nowhere near as well researched), I detoured to the same road and took a new photo from more or less the precise spot as Morris's:

Club Row now 

Hmm, pretty different, right? Well, more colourful anyway. That said, it's half a century later but the fundamentals are still the same. The same buildings, the same trees (just bigger). OK, there's no flashy black Mercedes in the Dennis Morris shot though there's still a nice-looking (but partially obscured) little motor of an earlier vintage. It's an interesting location in all sorts of ways. First, it seems a slightly surprising area for one of the Caribbean "booze parties" that Admiral Ken might have played at. It's a good couple of miles south of Dalston or the heartlands of Hackney/Homerton/Clapton and not, as far as I'm aware, an area that's ever had a particular concentration of black residents (or maybe it once did?). Why Morris would have been wandering around these almost certainly deserted streets on a Sunday morning in the early 1970s is also kind of curious. What was he expecting to see there? These days the wider area (Boxpark, Brick Lane, Redchurch Street, Shoreditch High Street) is several phases of gentrification into some kind of overripe hellscape, and a typical Sunday morning in these parts is now full of people carting off their new £150 trainers after an obligatory dose of Shoreditch consumerist thrill-seeking. Anyway, back to the photo. I'm assuming the building ("[Something] Hall Ltd") glimpsed between the Admiral Ken equipment van and Clifton House was originally a factory, and may still have been one in the early seventies. Peter Willmott's excellent 1967 study of Bethnal Green noted that as of 1959-64 there were a lot of small factories and workshops in this part of London. Later on it became Sonos Studio, a "creative hub" (groan) and it now appears to house a high-end fashion company (need a £1,200 party dress? They've got you covered). Yeah, you could bang on for ever about the rather sickening commercialisation of this part of London (any part of London?), but don't worry I won't bother. Suffice it to say that the Morris photo is also - of course - on the fringe of the famous Boundary Estate, which, according to John Boughton, was the UK's first proper council estate, dating from 1900. Built to replace the notorious - and lethally-insanitary - Old Nichol slum, it seems vaguely fitting that the Admiral Ken photo should capture a bit of a structure purpose-built to assist some of London's most desperately poor. Vaguely fitting? Well, I'd say so. Immigrants from the Caribbean such as Admiral Ken and his audiences weren't exactly living in grand style in the 1970s.

So yeah, man, that's my little (super-amateur) take on the famous Morris pic. It's a very memorable photo which also happens to be in a fascinating location, one that I know reasonably well. I hadn't especially meant to revisit the Club Row spot at all, but yesterday, after seeing the photo again in the Guardian profile on Morris's new Photographers' Gallery show, and then, after an abortive church concert experience in nearby Bishopsgate (oh no, there are going to be bible readings and they want the audience to ... sing, ffs, I'm off ...), I thought I'd check it out. Of course the really interesting Dennis Morris photo-classic is the one of the Sex Pistols (well, John Lydon and Sid Vicious) looking vaguely disorientated as they stumble around the uber-bleak carpark area outside Coventry train station ahead of their December 1977 gig in the city. Fuck me, thinks, Mr Rotten, this place is a bleedin' ghost town, aint it? No, I don't think the Sex Pistols' singer-bassist combo would necessarily have been all that impressed by the Grade II-listed train station building behind them. And by the looks of Lydon's pith helmet hat, he's even fearing trouble from the natives as he contemplates entering the urban jungle of downtown Coventry ...

Destination nowhere (pic: Dennis Morris) 

PS: in England's Dreaming, Dennis Morris is quoted as saying that - as the Sex Pistols ran out of steam during the fraught days of the SPOTs tour - Lydon was increasingly hanging out with Jah Wobble and making "plans" for a post-SPs future. "He was really into the space of reggae, not thrash", says Morris. Yeah, man, don't box me in. Space is the place.