Throbbing Gristle's Hackney

In 2009 I was contacted by the Lentos Art Museum in Linz, Austria who were curating an exhibit on the relationship between space and sound as part of Linz's being the year's European City Of Culture titled See This Sound. They requested to exhibit a series of photographs I had taken as part of my MA thesis documenting Hackney, London where Industrial music had emerged in the mid-1970s.

The exhibition was highly successful and an accompanying book was published which features a page dedicated to myself and my work. The next page in the book is for Peter Saville, so if I achieved nothing else in my life I can still die happy. It's wonderful to be considered an "artist" - even if it's only in Austria.

Here is the official text from the exhibition:

At the end of the 1970s, the London Borough of Hackney, which is located northeast of the city's center, accommodated the so-called Death Factory. It was the rehearsal space and recording studio for the band Throbbing Gristle, and was also a kind of headquarters for the early Industrial movement. In 2006, the geographer Andrew Gowans began searching for clues in this area, now mythologized as the birthplace of Industrial. The former Death Factory at 10 Martello Street is now an artist's studio; the surrounding area is still largely going to rack and ruin, despite some tentative attempts at gentrification. Monotony and gloom still characterize Throbbing Gristle's former place of residence on Beck Road. "And then, over the ruined factory, there's a funny noise", was the way Genesis P-Orridge had described the musical genius of this area in 1976.
-Work description by Christian Holler

Below is the series of pictures and a description I wrote at the time about them; hold the cursor over the images for a brief description.

These are pictures of the Beck Road and Martello Street in the London borough of Hackney, where Throbbing Gristle lived and recorded music from the mid-1970s until the early 1980s. I took them as part of my research for my Geography MA, which is looking at the relationship between music and place - focussing on Throbbing Gristle and Hackney.

I was amazed how bleak Hackney is, considering it's so central in London I assumed it would have been heavily gentrified by now, but there was an abundance of decaying, derelict buildings. Redevelopment has started, but it looks like the area's bad reputation is a hindrance. I was surprised the Death Factory at 10 Martello Street was still standing, although it is seemingly used as an artist's studio it looks abandoned, and right next to it is a new building of luxury flats - which you need a swipe card to gain entry to, appearing like a gated community - something I didn't think we had in the UK. This can be seen to the right of the Death Factory in the sixth picture. Beck Road was also rather grim, being old terraced houses with the street running underneath the Northern rail line. A train passed overhead approximately ever minute while I was there. The bottom six pictures were taken along Hackney Road on the way to Beck Road and Martello Street, they give an idea of the condition of the area.

All these pictures were taken by Andrew Gowans on the 17th January 2006.