Stokey Press Watch
By Victor Ardern
The silly season brought very little in the way of SN-related column inches. While were all carbon neutral camping it up in Cornwall, the holidaying press abroad were patently more interested in Factor 16 than N16.
However, the usual local clichés were to be found if you looked hard enough. The Guardian Diary claimed to have overheard the following – ‘Young mother in Clissold Park to toddler in push chair… ‘No darling, you can’t have cous cous with pasta – they just don’t go’, and Time Out’s Overheard Underground eavesdropped that ‘It’s pretty much impossible to get to Stoke Newington’. The ‘emotive subject’ of baby feeding in the Sunday Times reported that ‘admittedly, an organic café in Stoke Newington is not the wisest place to be seen with Cow & Gate, but did the mother who opened a jar of baby food in Fresh & Wild really deserve the sharp intake of breath and disapproving stares?’ An Evening Standard journalist and local resident even touched on what is surely N16’s biggest cliché when he claimed that he had ‘started to treat my local neighbourhood as a village’ before going on to ponder on the joys of Clissold Park and Abney Cemetery.
If it’s the summer and you’re an editor with a paper or the Evening Standard to fill, you can always fall back on that staple we British just love – property prices. According to the capital’s finest, ‘Londoners have 3 times less living space and the £200,000 national average [for a house] buys you a meagre 549 sq ft in a poky one-bedroom flat in Stoke Newington’. A few days before, the paper had headlined with ‘Cycle all the way to the bank and save £125,000’, stating the not unobvious, namely that living near a tube costs you more. According to their extensive research ‘the greatest savings were to be found between the districts of Highbury and Stoke Newington. Stokey is without a tube station and about a mile further from the West End but otherwise it would be quite difficult for a Martian to tell the two Victorian neighbourhoods apart’. A little tip for any visitors from outer space if you fancy a quick swim sometime or a decent butcher’s: don’t land here, fella.
Believe it or not, there was some serious news from the area to keep dinner party conversation flowing when house prices and baby feeding have been exhausted. The 21/7 terror trial in which ‘ringleader Muktar Ibrahim, 29, of Stoke Newington’ was one of four men to get 40 years for their failed suicide bid was discussed at great length – although the Daily Mirror’s headline describing him as ‘Chemical Wally’ for his ‘bungled bomb mix’ probably won’t go down as one of the more sensitive stories of the year.
The ongoing saga of ‘Bin Boy’ also came to a conclusion. The Daily Telegraph screamed out ‘£4,000 for teenager dumped in a litter bin by police officer’ after he allegedly ‘pelted people with conkers on Stoke Newington High Street’. His out-off-court settlement was meat and drink to those in the press with less liberal leanings. The Sunday Times felt ‘maybe we need yet another set of bins for our front gardens – a red one for lippy troublesome teenagers and guaranteed weekly collection by the council for melting down and recycling’. For us in N16, however, I’m sure we’d settle for just having our left-over organic arugula or adzuki bean salad collected more than once a month – aaah, another cliché.
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