A series of podcasts about city life and urban culture from the Centre for Urban and Community Research, Goldsmiths, University of London.

Streetsigns Podcasts from the Centre of Urban and Community Research

In this edition of Street Signs we meet East Man – aka Anthoney Hart - and talk about his second Prole Art Threat.  Ant is a London-based electronic musician who was born in Hastings, England in 1979, but grew up on the boundary of East London and Essex, playing Drum & Bass on pirate radio.  His first album Red White and Blue include liner notes from postcolonial theorist Paul Gilroy.   

The new album and what it tells us about the life of London’s multiculture.  The album brings together a stable of London grime MCs under the banner of the East Man Sound.  Like the reggae sound systems and DJs that preceded grime, these are voices that come from somewhere.  It is the sound of life from London’s East and South where heritage from Ghana, Jamaica and Nigeria is tangled and woven into the new sonic tapestry.           

It might surprise some that the album’s title is taken from a track by The Fall. Led my Mark E Smith, the post punk band formed in 1976 were proudly working class but never stereotypically so. Similarly, East Man describes his music as: “a reflection of working-class creativity and how the establishment, including the likes of the Arts Council etc marginalise us, and (perhaps on a subconscious level) see us as a threat.” 

Listening to Prole Art Threat is like being at a dance.  As the mic is passed between each of the MCs, a different tale is ‘elevated… off the map’ as Ny Ny puts it.  We hear instalments from Forest Gate, Peckham, Lewisham and Manor Park as these ‘lyrical gaffers’ and ’top boys and girls’ tell tough stories of life under the scrutiny of the ‘Feds’ in a brutal and divided city.  The bars and rhymes document what it means to live here; from the double standards applied to the sexuality of young girls and boys to the corrosive violence of everyday life. All this is dissected without compromise.  

This is not just a London story though, the inclusion of Fernando Kep from the burgeoning Grime scene in Brazil is evidence of the outernational reach of the music. The tracks on East Man’s album explode the wilful ignorance of those who see ‘the working class’ in contemporary London as code for whiteness. This is the sound of a proletarian urban multiculture, made from Caribbean and African influences, sound system culture, pirate radio and the inexorable rhythms of Drum & Bass, Techno and Dancehall.  It is the stirring of the "white" & "black" working classes who are living together and coming together on their own terms in sound.  

Les Back is Professor of Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London and Director of the Centre for Urban and Community Research. @academicdiary @theCUCR

Prole Art Threat

Who am I?

Grime as Working-Class Creativity: Les Back talks to Eastman about his new album Prole Art Threat

Newington Green Sirens

In this edition of Street Signs, Les Back talks to musician Hak Baker about the power of songs as a way of understanding city life.

There are so many songs about London.  They are often the voice of hope and the demand for something else.  And just like Hak Baker’s tales from the Isle of Dogs, these songs frequently characterise a particular part of the city.

Hak talks to Les about his early years as a young rapper, his time as a chorister in Southwark Cathedral, learning the guitar and developing his unique musical style - which he calls G(uvnor) Folk.

The best folk songs make the listeners inhabit the world of the characters within them.  Hak Baker’s music is like this, and he makes us confront the joy, pain and particularly the complexity of the lives of young men.  Hak makes us walk in their shoes as they try to make their way in an unforgiving city that judges them so harshly.

Contains strong language

Wobbles on the Cobbles: Hak Baker talks to Les Back about G Folk and East London Life

In this edition of Street Signs, Les Back meets visual sociologists Anita Strasser
and talks to her about her book Deptford is Changing. This unique document
of south London urban community is produced through a combination of
photographic portraits and vivid life stories. Anita tells Les about her desire to
create a collaborative sociology that really captures the spirit and defiant hope
of this place, while at the same time showing the threats posed by property
development, austerity and gentrification. Unlike other academic research on
urban community that extracts information, this book creates a sense of
community at the heart of the research process itself through collaboration
that residents participate in and authorise. Deptford is Changing is a
compelling example of how to write a hopeful sociology and in this edition of
Street Signs we learned how it was achieved.
Deptford is Changing is available over the counter at The Word bookshop in
New Cross, London SE14. You can also read it online for free at
deptfordischanging.wordpress.com/

Deptford is Changing with Anita Strasser

We start this edition of Streetsigns with the sound of the great American sociologist Howard S. Becker playing the blues in Deptford Town Hall during his visit to Goldsmiths in 2007. 
This is Les Back’s final episode as presenter of the series and in it he reflects on his favourite memories in his long association with Centre for Urban and Community Research and being based in Laurie Grove Baths as a researcher, teacher and as Director over the past five years. Les talks to Emma Jackson, who will be taking over as the new director of CUCR in
October, 2022, about her plans for what’s next for urban research at Goldsmiths.

Packing Up and Moving In – Les Back’s Farewell and Emma Jackson’s arrival at CUCR

Inspired by Henri Lefevbre’s ‘rhythmanalysis’ (Lefebvre, 2013), I have been experimenting with audio recorders to explore how rhythms of automated women’s voices punctuate and guide experiences of public and private space in London. 

 

I was interested in automated voices as one of many infrastructural rhythms in London’s ‘sonic ecology’ (Battesti and Puig, 2020). I was curious about its effect on the listener, beyond the notion that women’s voices are perceived as gentle and non-threatening. I experimented with engaging passively and directly with the voices. What was the difference between being subconsciously guided by vocal rhythms on the overground, to needing them to provide a service on a self-checkout? I also experimented with leaving the machine to speak to itself in a call centre call. 

 

Amongst the sounds of automated voices, patterns of bleeps, ticks, clicks, chugs, clangs and sirens can all be heard. These are layered with continuous ascending and descending tones of passing trains, cars, aeroplanes and helicopters. Organic sounds of birdsong, breezes in bushes, chatter, shuffling, zipping, coughing, rustling diffuse the rhythms throughout. Changes in acoustic fields can be heard in the opening and closing of train doors, and between the different recordings.  

 

The affects of rhythms are well documented in urban, cultural and sound studies, from bells in 19th C rural France to bleeps underwater in a US submarine (Helmreich, 2007) and high frequency youth repellent devices in underpasses and shopping malls (Goodman, 2009). Across these examples sonic rhythms orient people in place; they shape their relationship to place through the semiotics of sound.  

 

In most of my recordings, the rhythms are so sparse they are almost indiscernible as rhythms. We receive each voice in isolation, a situated experience of functional instructions delivered in a specific time and place. Rhythmanalysis elucidates the temporal and spatial scale at which these rhythms operate. It makes visible otherwise ephemeral connections between embodied experiences and rhythmic pulses and patterns in the city. Bringing this into a sonic ecology, we can imagine ourselves and the disembodied voices not as distinct but as lines and speeds, moving away and towards each other stochastically in the urban environment.

Rhythmanalysis: An Audio Postcard

‘If you’re going to make a project that has some resonance, that is going to transcend into the pure visual, that is meaningful, I think you need to research the city; not only by walking, but by studying the city. My approach is about exploring the city and that’s an important part of my practice... Only by doing this can you understand the hidden layers of the city and maybe reveal this complexity which is overlooked’. 

Isidro Ramirez, photographer  

 

Isidro Ramirez is a Spanish photographer who, after 20 years spent living, working and studying in the UK, is now based in Singapore. Alongside developing his practice as a contemporary urban photographer, Ramirez now also lectures in the BA(Hons) Design Communication program at LASALLE College of the Arts in Singapore. His photographic works have been exhibited widely in major cities across Europe and the USA, including Barcelona, Bogota, Vienna, Berlin, New York and Los Angeles. 

In this wide-ranging interview, Isidro talks about his interest in photographic theory, exploring the limitations of the medium and how it intersects with phenomenology. He talks about the reasons for his switch from analogue 5x4 process to digital photography after moving to Singapore and current project, Spare Time, using long exposure images. Isidro discusses in detail other South East Asia photo projects that concentrate on cities, including Jakarta - Modest Interventions and Minor Improvisations and The Unfeasible Order of Things and how his research process combines walking. experiencing and theorising the city. 

This interview was originally produced for Crossing Lines, which began as a collaborative venture with the Centre for Urban and Community Research and is a satellite group of London Independent Photography. The meetings are hosted by the interviewer and photographer Anthony Palmer and take place on the first Wednesday of each month from 6-8pm and are online. The format is usually two presentations and topics that have recently been explored include photography of architectural re-use, industrial preservation, a visual sociology of the doorbell, colonial spaces, the social memory of place, cities and regulation; and also the ideas that emerge from exploring the limitations of photography, as can be heard in this interview with Isidro Ramirez.  

If you’re interested in joining Crossing Lines please contact Anthony Palmer , or visit the Crossing Lines page on London Independent Photography  

Isidro Ramirez is a graduate of the Photography and Urban Cultures MA at Goldsmiths, University of London. His current work can be found here

Hidden Layers of the City with Isidro Ramirez and Anthony Palmer

‘In a world seemingly overloaded with imagery and often only briefly looked at on screens before
being clicked past, I wanted to create a visual essay to address what mattered deeply to me as
the child of immigrants. The political narrative on migration is toxic. It pollutes our discourse with
notions intended to create an unjustified hostility to migrants, who are, after all, just people like us
looking for a better life for themselves and their families. In creating a deliberately slowed down
video installation, I wanted the viewer to stop, look and see what was around them. How did they
feel about what they see around them. How does that accord with the political narrative?
The richness of our lives today is inextricably linked to the sharing of our cultural experiences and
heritage. And throughout history this has always been so. There is nothing to fear from migration.
When we look around ourselves, and see people who look like us and people who do not, we
should feel a sense of normality, not hostility, gratitude, not fear.’ Michael Scott spent many years working as a lawyer specialising in industrial, employment and
discrimination law. He now spends his time taking photographs, developing his own political
aesthetic to reflect his view of the world and the connections between what we see around us,
and the economic and political structures which determine and rule our lives. Aside from this
video, he has been working for some years on a series of portraits of people who attend protests.
He focuses in on the people with their home made placards on pieces of cardboard trying to have
their voices heard in a democratic society.
About Crossing Lines
The 360 Migration project was originally discussed at Crossing Lines, a collaborative venture with
the Centre for Urban and Community Research and a satellite group of London Independent
Photography. The meetings are hosted by the interviewer and photographer Anthony Palmer and
take place online every first Wednesday of the month from 6-8pm. Other topics that have recently
been explored include photography of architectural re-use, industrial preservation, a visual
sociology of the doorbell, colonial spaces, the social memory of place and how regeneration of
the city can be photographed.

360 Migration Project

In this interview, Sara Faridamin talks about her photography and the way she uses social theories of the everyday and observes the rhythms of the city. In discussing the intensely personal viewpoint of A Lived Temporality, Sara explains how each series changed with her moves from London to Montreal and Vancouver, reflecting the different urban designs but also changed times too.  Her recent project, The Erosion of a Spectacle, looks at how the intervention of a barge changed public space around it into a temporary tourist destination.  Similar to a readymade art object, the barge was the backdrop to a public performance of everyday life and the series of photographs has recently been published by Soft Grain Books.

City Rhythms by Anthony Palmer with Sara Faridamin

The Fellowship Inn Evaluation

‘For me, this image captures the old and the new of Toulouse. The old city built in the pink brick that gives it the name ‘La Ville Rose’, and the condensation trails of aircraft a symbol of Toulouse’s position at the centre of Europe’s aerospace industry. And it is the latter that is responsible for Toulouse’s contemporary urban development and the highest population growth in France, with people attracted to highly skilled jobs.’

Dr Michaela Benson is Reader in Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London. 
Brexit Brits Abroad is a research project examining experiences of Britons in other EU member states living through Brexit.

Michaela Benson Postcard From The Field.WAV

Emma Jackson – Bowling Together

Bowling Together: Lessons from the Lanes

This two part podcast by Emma Jackson introduces some of the key themes from an ethnographic study of a London bowling alley. 

In the second part of this podcast, Emma explores bowling as a practice of belonging, becoming and performance. We meet some of the groups who use the bowling alley, including the bowling league.

Bowling Together: Lessons from the Lanes

Bowling Together: Lessons from the Lanes, Part 2

Emma Jackson – Bowling Together

Bowling Together: Lessons from the Lanes

This two part podcast by Emma Jackson introduces some of the key themes from an ethnographic study of a London bowling alley. In episode one Emma talks about what is revealed about the social life of the city through turning the lens onto a busy London bowling alley.

Written and presented by Emma Jackson with extra voices by Anamik Saha

Thanks to Michaela Benson for production and technical help, Anamik Saha for reading and Emma Houlton at the Art of Podcast for editing.

Bowling Together: Lessons from the Lanes. Part 1

In this edition of Street Signs podcast Les Back meets Michaela Benson and talks about her work on Brexit and the experience of UK citizens living in the EU.  This offers a very different perspective on the current debate the UK’s decision to leave the EU. We see Brexit from the point of view of the plight of millions of citizens of Britain living overseas.  Michaela shows how Britain is a nation of emigration that was in many respects of its imperial past.   
The podcast focuses a new paper to published in the Sage journal Sociology entitled Brexit and the classed politics of bordering: the British in France and European belongings. It focuses on how British citizens living in France are trying to secure their right to stay in Europe.  She argues, that Brexit is unevenly experienced, exacerbating existing vulnerabilities and generating new fault lines of belonging among the British in France as they are repositioned in relation to hierarchies of European belonging.

Dr Michaela Benson is Reader in Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London. 
Brexit Brits Abroad is a research project examining experiences of Britons in other EU member states living through Brexit.

Emigration Nation with Michaela Benson

The way people celebrate Christmas conjures, what Jennifer Mason and Stuart Muir call, a ‘social atmosphere’. The city comes to life differently at this time of year.  Even the style of gift giving can be imbued with, and shaped by, subtle associations with social class, ethnicity and urban social divisions. The festive glow of the illuminated decorations on the homes of London’s citizens can reveal clues about the changing relationship between class, culture and the politics of housing.  Christmas seems more and more to be only for those who can afford it.  Many Londoners living on low incomes just try and ignore the expensive commercial pageant that Christmas has become.  In the ‘season of goodwill’ those hurtful divisions and exclusions can be most keenly felt.  

In this festive edition of Street Signs podcast Les Back asks colleagues at Centre for Urban and Community Research: ‘what gift would you give a city like London Christmas?’   In many ways the economic life of the city takes on garish and exaggerated qualities during this time of year.  It is a carnival of consumerism from ‘black Friday’ bargains to the Christmas markets.   So often these purchased gifts are unwanted and destined to be quickly cast off and end up in a remote landfill.  What does a city like London need today? What resources have been lost and what kinds of values need need to fostered?

What Would You Give London For Christmas?

Becoming different together 

Vox Liminis is a project in Glasgow that challenges criminal justice and fosters communities through song writing and music 

 

In this podcast Les Back visits an extraordinary project called Vox Liminis based in the Gallowgate, in Glasgow’s East End that uses creative practices to challenge and change criminal justice. Vox hosts ‘Distant Voices, Coming Home’; an innovative research partnership between the Universities of Glasgow, Edinburgh and the West of Scotland. The project uses music and songwriting to help people both inside prison, and former prisoners to reckon with their past, embrace their present and reimagine their future. 

 

Producer: Freya Hellier 

 

Music credits: 

 

The Man I Used to Be 

Written by Steven Robinson and Kris Drever 

 

Never Got to Say Goodbye 

Written by Shuggie and Donna Maciocia 

 

Rewind  

Written by Sean H and Donna Maciocia  

 

The Ship’s Renegade  

Written by Iain and Jo Mango 

 

Uncredited Poem 

Written by the Unbound Community

Streetsigns-CUCR

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