Hackney at certain epochs has given itself suburban airs and graces, before being slapped down and consigned once more to the dump bin of aborted ambition.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Hackney gets a bit of a bad rap, but it's the only place I've ever lived that felt like a community. I know my neighbours.
I am crumbling in sync with old Hackney.
You know, I don't really understand a suburban environment. I want to be out in the woods, I want to be where it's wild, I want to wake up and hear birds, I want to walk outside and see a gaggle of turkeys bouncing across my lawn - I want to be someplace like that - or I want to be right in the middle of an urban environment.
Gone are the days when the upper classes were terrified of the angry mob wanting to smash their skulls and confiscate their properties. Now their biggest enemy is the army of lazy bums, whose lifestyle of indolence and hedonism, financed by crippling taxes on the rich, is sucking the lifeblood out of the economy.
I think the thing about it is when you grow up in Chicago there's such a thing as putting on airs, you know? And you just learn not to put on airs. Don't act like, 'Oh boy, I'm somebody.' They'll slap you down.
Overcrowded cities are spawning increasingly lawless suburbs. Waste is accumulating in and around them, straining the capacity to deal with it.
Some people like neat suburbs. I always am attracted to the rundown and the old and the offbeat.
In other words, New York has gone all suburban and bourgeois on us.
I am, and always will be, proud to be a Hackney girl.
I don't feel proprietary, but I do feel there is a human identity to the borough of Hackney that's quite peculiar. It was always bloody-minded and difficult; it always stood up to central government.