Recorded at London Fields between 04:00 and 04:30 on Thursday 21st May.

London Fields East Side from 00:00 to 03:32, Lansdown Drive (crows) from 03:32 to 04:10.

Edits in the recording are indicated by tape generated sounds at 02:27 and 03:32.

Edition 11: Birdsong

Photographer Stephen Gill talks to Francesca Panetta about his particular fascination with Hackney Wick, an area he has documented over the last eight years in noisy images ranging from the backs of advertising boards to the banks of the River Lea.  A Series of Disappointments brings together discarded betting slips picked up from the floors of Hackney's bookies over a period of six weeks, and which for Stephen portray fragments of human emotion.  Inside these shops we hear from the punters themselves, before questioning the Mayor of Hackney, Jules Pipe, about his campaign to reduce the concentration of betting shops in the borough.

Edition 15: Bookies, Brunch and Bats

In this programme we trace the shifting guises of the Hackney Empire - from music hall to bingo hall, from television studio to wrestling venue, to its current incarnation as a home for populist theatre and comedy. Elisha Sessions and Francesca Panetta follow a group of local Hackney Empire aficionados who call themselves The Elders as they prepare to say goodbye to another era in the theatre's history. The gang of mates who ran the Empire since its resurrection in the mid-1980s have been shown the door, and as a new chief exec reconsiders the theatre's "business model" the Elders want to know what happens next.

Edition 16: The Empire

Hackney depends on buses. With no tubes, they're how we get around. But what do you do while you're on the bus? Read, eye up the guy opposite? Is it a space for reflection? Or just irritation? Hackney's bus riders tell us. We hear from Alfie Dennen about his Bus-Tops project, from Anthony Morris the bus mechanic who keeps the wheels turning behind the scenes and from driver Pauline Jacobs and passenger Carole Allen who helped deliver a baby on the 394 last year. Plus bus-themed performances from poet Michael Rosen and musician Earl Zinger.

Edition 17: Buses

"Night in London is a brief period of infinite possibility" wrote the journalist and travel writer HV Morton in the 1920s, and nowhere is this truer than in Hackney, which from doors open till dawn chorus becomes an asphalt jungle for revellers, criminals, artists, lovers, all night eateries and taxi drivers.

In the latest and most extensive in a series of themed editions, the Hackney Podcast brings you a night in the life of this 24-hour borough through the words of its inhabitants, as we meet Mare Street's moonlight bookseller, skirt the edges of a Dalston stabbing, rescue a lost and disillusioned party-goer, feast on a Turkish spread at Somine, trail a Homerton rubbish truck, and greet dawn with the street traders of Broadway Market. Along the way we hear readings from HV Morton and commentary from Night Haunts author Sukhdev Sandhu, helping to reveal some of the strange allurement of the dark unknown.

Edition 18: Night

The Third Wave of Coffee is pouring its way in to Hackney. Cafes such as the Penny University, Mouse & De Lotz and the Counter Cafe pride themselves in their artisan beverages, meticulously measuring the temperature of the milk and the pressure of their carefully ground beans. But while this demand for the artisan cup might be a 21st-century phenomenon, coffee has a role in Hackney life that goes back to the age of the Enlightenment. Dr Matt Green takes us into the world of the 18th-century Hackney coffee house, a bustling social space but also a hub of news information. The substance they drank may have been served from cauldrons and tasted like soot, but this was the place for journalists to find stories on finance or religious dissent.

Edition 19: Coffeecast

We take four authors for a walk through Hackney. Sean Borodale's poem Notes for an Atlas guides us through, we rise early to join Iain Sinclair for his morning perambulation to the A12, Lemn Sissay takes us from his local shop Palm 2 (where all walks begin) to hear of his tale of going barefoot for a year, and Stewart Home walks us from Kingsland Basin to where he used to live in the 80s near Victoria Park, finding it now just a pile of rubble.

Edition 20: Writers on Walking

Francesca Panetta visits Cafe OTO, the new music venue in Dalston run by Hamish Dunbar and Keiko Yamamoto, and meets one of their regular performers, Atsuko Kamura.

After a lesson in brake tuning at bicycle cafe Lock 7 and a bell-themed sonic adventure along the Regent’s Canal, we conclude with an architectural tour of one of London’s key post-war social housing developments, Woodberry Down, with the Twentieth Century Society’s Suzanne Waters. To join other walks like this visit the Hackney Society.

Edition 3: Sound Designs

Francesca Panetta attends the premiere of Legacy in the Dust, a film charting the history of the Four Aces in Dalston. She talks to the club’s founder Newton Dunbar, singer Winston Reedy and the film’s director Winstan Whitter. As construction is underway to redevelop the site into a major transport interchange, we hear the views of OPEN chairman Bill Parry-Davies and Hackney mayor Jules Pipe. Our resident philosopher James Wilson offers his thoughts on healthcare and quality of life in Hackney, and we end up on board a British Waterways maintenance boat in the company of Alan Farmer and Colin Wright.

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