Audio Gutter Press
Call for Contributions
Hackney Gutter Press Issue 1 was published in April 1972 at Centreprise bookshop in Dalston. It describes an image of a borough both dilapidated and alive: empty and run down homes are turned into squats and community spaces. The rowdy and righteous citizens of Hackney - from the women’s liberation movement, to the claimants union, local kids and parents, squatters, the local tenants association, and anyone else who is ANGRY- are coming together to remake society.
Substitute 'Hackney' for wherever you live and imagine if you and the people in your area you lived in published a zine like this...
...1972: "Most people in Hackney don’t like the way their lives are controlled by work, rents, councillors, police, schools etc. A lot of us are organising to fight their control – but we feel we don’t know enough about each other. For example with the coming tenants’ campaign against the Fair Rents Act we’re going to need a united fight if we are going to win – women at home, people going to work, claimants and kids together: we’re all tenants.
We want this newspaper to be used as part of getting to know each other. Organising to fight together. We want it to be used as a WEAPON TO FIGHT FOR OUR OWN CONTROL OF HACKNEY."
...2020: In this moment of unionisation in response to unemployment, millions have found themselves dependent on the state, where they might never have expected to. People stand to lose their businesses, families have spent a disgusting amount of time together, domestic violence has unsurprisingly soared, and protests around systemic racism, racial inequality and BAME deaths are a critical reality.
Help us put together an 'audio zine', not unlike the Hackney Gutter Press did with words and paper in the 70s.
As always, we want contributions from the literal to the oblique; interviews with neighbours, soundscapes, field recordings, snippets from the streets, recordings from the tv, radio, internet, fury, resistance from the gutter looking up!
Questions to start you off:
Can you describe the kind of mutual aid that's been happening around you?
Have you witnessed or experienced police harassment?
Are you negotiating with your landlord?
Are you going on rent strike?
Do you have space?
What kind of care work are you doing?
Do we need a claimants union now?
How do we navigate Universal Credit together?
See examples here; The Lucas Plan, Schooling & Culture
And see the entire MayDay Rooms Archive digitised here.
Deadline 23rd July
Send your submissions to audio@maydayrooms.org via WeTransfer or link to a google doc.
We will be listening to all of this audio at an online event on the 23rd July.
Take a look at the Hackney Gutter Press archive
(digitised) from MayDay Rooms. You can also read about it at the radical history of hackney blog.
