Dalston Solidarities

Histories to remember

Last Saturday was a warm May day in London. My partner and I enjoyed a late afternoon swim outdoors followed by a pint on a patio. We cycled home via Ashwin Street, a short road near Dalston Junction in northeast London that forms an L shape and is lined a fringe theatre, an alternative music venue, a Black women’s domestic violence service and a few fast-food joints. In recent years, the side of the theatre has also been one of the places where the area’s food delivery drivers park their mopeds and bicycles between jobs.

As we rode past the drivers, we saw a couple of police officers chasing someone down an alley. When we turned the corner onto the high street we cycled into a large crowd on the pavement. A few were cheering on and using their phones to film a small group of people, some with balaclavas, marching down the middle of the street towards the junction, shouting “Fascist Cops off our Streets!” More than a said cops were striding around menacingly, and parked about 10 metres to my left was a black police van (which I later discovered belonged to the London Metropolitan Police’s Territorial Support Group, charged with policing “public order”). The atmosphere was tense, and on reflex I looked around to see where we might dump our bikes and make a run for it if the police charged.

It turned out we’d happened upon the end of a protest that had started a couple of hours before. According to Samir Jeraj, a journalist friend who was one of the first to get the scene and wrote a excellent report of what happened, several police had descended on Ashwin Street around 6 pm to demand insurance documents and licenses from the delivery drivers, claiming there had been complaints of “anti-social behaviour”. But what officially began as a routine check quickly turned into an immigration raid (most of the drivers are migrant workers). News spread quickly via messaging apps and soon several hundred people had arrived in Dalston to support the drivers. Police responded rapidly and violently. Videos officers beating protesters with batons and dragging them to the ground instantly made their ways around social media.

Though I’d missed the main events, that sense of urgency in a demo where the police start beating and arresting people was still very much in the air. I spotted a friend who lives on the housing estate around the corner and was busy talking to local residents who recognised her as one the newly elected local councillors for the area. Then an older mate I knew from the queer anarchist squats that lined the streets around the corner from where we were standing twenty years ago – long since demolished and replaced by restaurants with eye-wateringly expensive tasting menus – ran up to us, out of breath, and quickly recounted what had gone on. He’d been there for a couple of hours, “adrenalin still pumping” from brushes with the cops.

In case this post is starting to sound like a wistful trip down memory lane to the good ole days of Dalston, I should say that standing at the corner of Ashwin Street talking to friends from different stages of my life and people from various local communities, I had the opposite feeling: a strong sense that for all the vertiginous changes in the area since the turn of the millennium, the networks of solidarity remain remarkably strong. Without romanticising what happened, and without minimising the impact on the people at the centre of the police violence, the delivery drivers – who no doubt would have preferred that nothing had happened – that couple of hours of intense and highly visible action in Dalston last Saturday happened not only because of social media’s ability to spread word of police action faster than proverbial wildfire, but thanks to a much more extensive web of activism among and alongside migrant workers and against police violence. This web has been woven over years and decades, weaving its way down Ashwin Street, past the junction, through the other neighbourhoods of Hackney and Dalston, across national borders and generations.

Several people who witnessed the Dalston protests last Saturday compared them to the demonstration in Glasgow almost exactly a year ago when residents gathered en masse to prevent officers from the UK Home Office from “removing” two of their neighbours in Pollokshields on the city’s southside. Kenmure Street quickly became a celebrated example of popular protest against the UK government’s proud intention to create a hostile environment for undocumented migrants. As a Glaswegian friend reminded me, that successful intervention was the fruit of years of work among migrant and other communities in Scotland.

Similarly, the fact that so many rushed to Dalston in a matter of minutes last Saturday afternoon should not be interpreted as a spontaneous response to an emergency call. Today there are many grassroots groups working in Hackney to monitor and challenge police violence and stand with migrants. These movements are part of a much longer history of organising against racist, anti-migrant, fascist and police violence in the Borough. They are grounded in Hackney’s migrant working-class communities and the area’s tradition of radical activism, with links to wider movements around the UK and internationally. Solidarity networks in Dalston draw on the experiences and histories of people who arrive from different parts of the country and the world. At a recent meeting of one of the groups who responded to the call for support last Saturday I picked up a flyer about the Anarchist Federation of Gran Canaria, founded in 2011 in the midst of the indignados movement. My mind immediately travelled backwards, to Spain’s strong anarchist tradition from the late nineteenth century through the Civil War of the 1930s, and I was reminded of the richness of activist histories that can converge during one seemingly brief demonstration.  

The role of newer migrants in creating solidarity networks in Hackney complicates one of the stock explanations for what happened last Saturday: gentrification. Gentrification has become a byword for the changes in Dalston over the past few decades, for lots of good reasons. Gentrification captures the devastating loss and sense of existential threat posed by government-sponsored corporate regeneration projects. But as a grand narrative that emphasises decline and tends to paint its players in broad strokes (older communities are all working class, Black and Brown while newcomers are uniformly white and wealthy), gentrification inevitably brushes over other things – including collective actions that have successfully pushed back against capitalist development in recent years, bringing together members of established communities (for example the African, Caribbean and Turkish/Kurdish shops in and around the Ridley Road market) and people who have come to the area to live and/or work more recently (this includes the food delivery drivers themselves, who, far from being passive victims of the police violence were the first to resist it).

It's important to remember these histories, recent as well as older, because urban regeneration projects are about more than removing people – whether through immigration raids or building expensive new housing out of reach of most locals. It’s also about erasing histories of resistance. Saturday’s police raid took place a stone’s throw from the Dalston public library, named after the socialist historian, writer and activist CLR James, who was born in Trinidad and lived for years in London. When the library was relocated to Dalston Square some 10 years ago, the local Council proposed to change its name. They reversed this plan following objections from Hackney’s Black communities. CLR James Library now stands on the edge of Dalston Square, surrounded by new high-rise apartment blocks, a vital memory of the neighbourhood’s strong history of anti-racist and anti-imperialist activism.

So yes: when we tell the story of what happened in Dalston last Saturday let’s talk about the vicious violence of the police, the complicity of different levels of government, the class contempt and racism of residents who make complaints against the same workers who deliver their take-away meals. And let’s also remember the many, many activist histories that continue to make resistance possible.