Hackney
People will often point to London’s ailing tube system, or the weird architectural juxtapositions lining the capital’s tangled, un-Haussmanised streets, to highlight the haphazard way in which the world’s oldest great city has been built and grown, layer upon layer, century upon century. It’s as if each brick that forms London today has had to stoop and bend and keel to find its place here, mock-Tudor mansions, pre-fab terrapins, Brutalist estates and Victorian town houses engaged in a massive, slow-moving game of metropolitan Twister, a city tying itself in knots. Similarly, it’s rare that someone will live in London for any real length of time without having to adjust the architecture of their daily routine. With a volatile rental market making it normal for people to move house each year, a boom in internet-based freelance work burning office ties, and a generational deferral when it comes to getting married and having kids, it can be hard to feel like you’re putting down roots. So it is that 30-year-old Gynelle Leon finds herself with a shop in a strange, itinerant, digital city, selling people plants that regularly outlast their romantic relationships, jobs and homes.
If modern London had an emblem, it’d make sense for it to be the cactus. Less a plant and more a companion, they get to see London from man-with-van dashboards and the flatshare windowsills of fled ex-lovers, students who’ve left their mates behind in the suburbs, young artists flown in from warmer climes to seek life between the bar work. Durable, resilient, undemanding – they’re like pets for people who are too time, money and space-poor to have one, and Gynelle’s shop on Hackney’s Kingsland Road – “Prick”, it’s called – is dedicated to finding a home for them.
“My oldest one I bought seven years ago,” she says. “It’s moved home with me. When I first fell in love with cacti and succulents, it’s because they were outlasting my actual relationships. They were loyal – it was like, ‘When I come home, I can trust you to still be there.’”
Gynelle’s shop has been operating from its position just south of Dalston Junction since July 2016, but despite its spartan decor and the fact it only sells desert plants – prices range from £3 to £500 – it would be a disservice to describe it solely as a place for retail. Gynelle regularly hosts parties at Prick, especially in the summer months when the 50 or so regulars who tend to show up can spill out onto the pavement, and she feels like she’s become part of the local community: “I’m on first-name terms with the people that live next door, across the road, upstairs – I feel like I haven’t got a shop, I’ve got a front room on the high street. Especially ‘cos I’m in a room full of plants, in my chair, listening to the music I love. In summer, my friends come by. It’s a hang-out spot.”
Long known for its nightlife, Dalston seems a natural fit for the shop – people have been going to the area in hordes to drink and pub and club for well over a decade now, and Prick feels like a sign that those rave settlers could be growing up, prepared, perhaps, to have conversations in places that can’t serve them foaming booze that pours from pipes that go snaking down to the basement. Gynelle’s no stranger to that world – she reels off a list of club nights past and present, and vividly remembers a New Year’s Eve party from years ago at local mainstay Visions bar – but her relationship to Dalston and East London as a whole extends beyond that, back to a childhood that started in Bow, where her nan moved in 1960 from St Lucia as part of the Windrush Generation.
“I always remember my mum and nan taking me down to Ridley Road Market,” she laughs. “We’d drive and the moment I felt the potholes in the road, I knew we were near. My mum used to park in a really dodgy car park and it was touch and go whether you came back and something was missing. Windscreen wipers would go, aerials, stereos, and wheels, obviously. You’d still come, but something might be missing when you got back to your car!”
Now, other people travel to visit her in Dalston – some from as far as America, Turkey and Greece, as Prick becomes a destination on the checklists of London’s tourist herds. For years, there’s been a simmering fear that the gentrification wrought on Hackney by developers, estate agents and middle-class students and artists might homogenise Dalston to a point where it becomes indistinguishable from any other high street in the country: a grim, uniform procession of chain shops and bars. But for all that talk, most of the premises are still controlled by people who’ve been here for generations. Prick may be new, but it feels at home in Dalston – a local girl selling survivor plants to a creative generation who lack for little but community and consistency in their lives.
