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By Victor Arden

We’ve been on the receiving end of ‘postcode snobbery’ here in N16.

According to the Evening Standard ‘some in Stoke Newington now claim to live in Hackney because it sounds edgier and cooler’. To be fair, who can blame them when as local resident George Alagiah pointed out in the New Statesman ‘an area which has been a refuge for London dissenters since the 18th century, is now home to thirty-something couples who drink wheatgrass shots and obsess about school catchment areas’.

Perhaps a copy of Jake Arnottt’s latest opus Johnny Come Home (see review page xx), set back in 1972 following the trials and tribulations of The Angry Brigade as ‘represented by two Stoke Newington squatters: the bisexually-challenged Nina and Pearson, a gay anarchist’ (The Times) who ‘keep getting stoned amid the cheap rococo glamour of their tarted-up squat’ (the Evening Standard) should be given out gratis at The Framers’ Market to all N16ers as a reminder of a lost era.

‘Danny Williams a solicitor at a City firm specialising in corporate takeovers… with a flat in Stoke Newington’ (The Times) would be a fine recipient, only Danny isn’t real, he’s the main character in another novel, the recently to paperback Utterly Monkey by Nick Laird. As if fictitious corporate lawyers within our midst wasn’t bad enough the Daily Star has even managed to unearth ‘an office worker from Stoke Newington’ – he was commenting on bird flu of all things in a piece tastefully headlined ‘Cluck that’.

These days, there’s obviously plenty of money floating around the area for a fortune few, including Dr Sanjiv Gupta the ‘£270,000 a year GP’ with the ‘Mercedes with personalised number plate’ (Daily Express) and ‘shabby London surgery’ (Evening Standard). Wherever you stand on the recent GP pay debate you have to feel a bit sorry for the Stoke Newington doctor who became the human face of this national story. No matter how many times he tried to explain that ‘it is nobody’s business but mine what I earn… my pay is only £130,000 with the remaining £140,000 spent on staff costs’(Daily Express) no one seemed hear him. The Independent put his alleged salary as on a par with The Duke of York, Jade Goody and Cherie Booth: put that way I’m sure most in N16 would agree that, being responsible for the health of 9,000 of our ranks, Dr Gupta probably deserves his £130k.

Locals with disposable incomes large or small should think about dispensing with as much of it as they can locally. ‘The village that thrived until the traffic wardens appeared’ headlined the Evening Standard in a piece that focused on Stoke Newington as part of the paper’s ‘campaign to save London’s small shops’. Mark Prisk, shadow minister for small business, came visiting, they reported, and ‘was immensely impressed by the range and quality of shops’. Several local shopkeepers were quoted including Georgie Cook from Hub, saying ‘rent hikes, parking restrictions and ruthless traffic wardens have put off customers. I’ve seen many of the nicer shops in Church Street forced out of business. If, as we fear, Tesco and Starbucks move in, it will be the beginning of a downhill slope – even the end of the street’.

It’s a worrying thought; we can all do our bit to help, otherwise the day when the sound of City lawyers discussing leveraged buyouts over a Starbucks caramel macchito may be upon us sooner than we fear!!

By Robert Lindsay

I appear to have struck a chord.

Since my article about a campaign to scrap Stoke Newington's one-way system appeared in the last issue of this magazine, I have been adding new members to my mailing list at a regular rate.

We have plans to hold a festival on Stoke Newington Common on Sunday September 17, provided a hero with the time to organise it steps forward. We hope to get Rectory Road, where it runs over the common, closed for the day and invite councillors and officers to take part in a cricket or five-a-side challenge and local schools to hold events.

Jennette Arnold, influential Labour member of the Greater London Assembly, and representative of North East London, met me in the High Street's Z-Bar on a scorching day in May and made my coffee taste even better by promising to press the case for the one-way system's removal with Ken Livingstone. At the moment, Ken has simply promised, in a written answer to a question by Green Party GLA member Jenny Jones, that a feasibility study into removing the one-way system ‘could’ begin this summer. Meanwhile, Hackney mayor Jules Pipe declared at a recent Stoke Newington Neighbourhood Forum that he was ‘100 per cent behind’ the campaign. But he then quickly added ‘provided it can be shown to be feasible’. He also seems reluctant to put pressure on Ken to deliver.

So far, so good. There are two main objections that have been raised with me by some. One is from a few of the traders – not the majority – on the High Street who believe that their customers need the car parking spaces on the road. The fact is that shops do need places for their delivery vehicles to unload – outside working and commuting hours – and there should be room for time-restricted delivery bays, properly enforced, for all the shops that need them. But no high street should have to support customer parking. I firmly believe that shops would get more customers not less, if the High Street is made two way. Several surveys of the area in the past have shown that, despite what some traders think, their core, loyal customers get to the shops on foot. If the High Street was two way again, the noise and pollution from accelerating cars would be slashed, and more people would turn up to explore and enjoy the rich and diverse range of stores we have.

Another block, in the mind of some politicians at least, is the idea of grassing over Rectory Road, on the common. ‘Why are you insisting on closing Rectory Road?’ a former Hackney councillor asked me the other day after collaring me at a meeting. ‘I don't like to use the word but I can't think of a better: it's wacky’, he said. ‘In any case, the common is already divided in two by the railway line.’ A few weeks later Jennette Arnold, in that Z Bar meeting, told me: ‘Grassing over Rectory Road is impractical. It's just too expensive – or that's what I'm told.’

For people who live near Clissold Park, the need to revive Stoke Newington's forgotten green space seems a low priority. But for the thousands of people who live near the common, the lost opportunity stares them in the face every day. They see not only the potential in reuniting the two halves cut by Rectory Road but also in building a green bridge over the rail cutting. So I say, let's be ambitious. Anything's possible. Money and political will can be found if enough pressure is applied.

I'm looking for a festival manager for the common festival to arrange fundraising and book the necessary stage and so on. It requires someone who has some time during office hours to liaise with council officers, and who doesn't mind giving the time unpaid. Contact me at robert@rlindsay8.wanadoo.co.uk. Subscribe to the email debate group snowsn16@yahoogroups.com. Visit the website
http://mysite.wanadoo-members.co.uk/scrapstokiegyratory

Robert Lindsay is a resident of Bayston Road and a founder of the Scrap Stoke Newington One Way System campaign (SNOWS)