Hackney
Dalston Junction hasn’t always been a destination in itself. For years, this part of East London – set between Stoke Newington to the north, Shoreditch to the south, Islington to the west and Hackney and Clapton further east – performed the function its name suggests, more a portal connecting different parts of the capital to each other than a place you’d visit to spend any great length of time in. Over the past 15 years, though, that’s changed, and now the stretch of Kingsland Road running north for a mile from the relatively new overground station is arguably London’s nightlife centre, a kind of factory that takes the raw materials of money, brain cells and serotonin and turns them into friendship, love, nausea and office warnings. Home to dozens of pubs, bars, venues, cafes and restaurants, a community of creatives has settled on the area, integrating with native Turkish, Caribbean and West African populations who have been in Dalston for generations. It’s a vivid, microcosmic example of what London does best: myriad cultures building lives side by side, 24 hours a day, in a way that lends an area kaleidoscopic new layers of identity.
Akinola Davies Jr has been living in this part of Hackney for seven years. In that time, it seems he’s pulled levers and explored opportunities in every department of Dalston’s nocturnal shop floor: working in pubs, helping to stage club nights and exhibitions at various local venues, DJing for the globally renowned internet radio station NTS in Gillett Square and assisting local directors such as Tim & Barry, who’ve managed to turn a local basement into a live music room that streams cutting edge electronic music to the world with Just Jam London, setting the stage for Skepta’s comeback with his “That’s Not Me” video and putting on events with the Barbican and V&A. It’s not just local clubland that Akinola has left his mark on – he again assisted Tim & Barry in Chicago to document the footwork scene and his own directing work has taken him most recently to the Nigerian village of Nsukka, where he directed a summer beauty pageant for the fashion brand KENZO.
Because of its cultural output, it can feel like Dalston is no longer a local portal but a global one – and Akinola is a man at the hub.
“When I first moved here, I worked at the pub for a few years and that actually helped a lot in terms of getting to know all the locals and mapping out what everyone does,” he says. “Living here felt more young and exciting than in other places in London. Everyone I went to uni with in Brighton had moved to Hackney and we were all in this place trying to figure it out together. And to me it still feels like that, very exciting. It has its naysayers but you make the most of where you live.”
Walking with Akinola around the neighbourhood, we’re stopped five or six times in the space of 15 minutes by people who want to know about plans – weekend plans, creative plans – or just say hi and catch up. Those “naysayers” that he referenced tend to talk Dalston down as a hotspot of hedonistic, self-worshiping Nathan Barley-esque interlopers whose pretentious intentions hold little consideration for the native communities that were here before. But Dalston isn’t really like that any more – it feels like the dust has settled somewhat, in a way that doesn’t deny any one group (with the notable exception, perhaps, of squatters) the chance to assert themselves.
“If you saw a bunch of people saying ‘hi’ to me, it’s because I interact with the same people I did when I first moved,” he says. “NTS is part of the community; my pub is a part of the community; Cafe Oto, same again. I still eat in the same restaurants I always have. There are many ecosystems in and around Hackney that you can either choose to be a part of or not.”
One of the key themes that seems to return often in Akinola’s work is diaspora. Born in Hammersmith in the mid-80s, he moved back to his family’s native Nigeria for a while before returning to settle more permanently in London. In the video he shot for the experimental electronic artist Klein – who like Akinola spent her childhood in multiple places – there’s a keen sense of the dissonance that comes from feeling like you’re from two places at once and thus never really entirely “home”. Akinola talks passionately and articulately about the need for dialogue in all areas of life, and in a way the Klein and Nsukka videos could be seen as attempts to stage a dialogue between generations separated by geography, between one past that has been lived from birth and stored in the mind’s eye and another, more elusive history that might reside in bloodlines and epigenetic memory. It’s a subject that he’s broached in other ways – in 2015, he staged a “Nigerian Lives Matter” protest outside the country’s embassy in London against the atrocities committed by Islamic terrorist group Boko Haram.
“For ages, it felt like our generation really wanted to have these conversations but everyone treated us like we were too young to know what was going on,” he explains. “A generation only really comes of age because you’ve been low-key condescended to a lot, when you’re sat with your older relatives at the table or whatever.”
His experiences in clubland stood him in good stead when it came to rallying numbers and support for the cause: “I literally organised that protest the same way I’ve organised club nights – inviting people on Facebook based on what they’re into. You have friends who possess a degree of consciousness that makes something like this resonate – whether you met through football, emotionally, or from having a crazy night out. Once you’ve lived in an environment for long enough, you start to see how all those groups are connected like a spider’s web. And you think, ‘Cool, this idea could actually fly with all of them,’ ‘cos at the root core of it is just trying to help other people.”
Akinola is a member of club night, PDA alongside a group of friends – routinely cited as one of London’s best nights out, the soundtrack is a mixture of razor’s-edge grime, garage, hip-hop, trap and club ephemera, alongside the odd dash of something more party-canonical when the mood fits. It starts late, finishes later, and has found a home at a basement venue in the heart of Hackney with an intimate dancefloor. It’s a place with history that is currently pointing the way to London’s club future, and the atmosphere – which Akinola evocatively describes as “like going to a cousin’s birthday” – betrays the sense of comradeship with which it’s run, Akinola part of a team that includes Shygirl, Ati, Larry B and original founder, Mischa Mafia. It’s something that pulls together the many diverse strands of Akinola’s life – a curated, communal experience that uses the witching hours as an arena and fun as a proxy to forge new connections, establish fresh dialogue.
“I think nightlife is crucial to London – for capital purposes, for venues, and for the social fabric,” he says. “Some European cities are further ahead of the curve when it comes to nightlife, but they don’t have the diversity London does. It’s a great place to have those formative years where you develop as a human, establish your relationship with pleasure, excess – meeting people from different walks of life, letting loose in what is quite an architecturally straight-line city.”