“A night out at the Lord Napier”
“We had heard about these sessions from Timothy Soar, the architectural photographer. Tim would be in the old pub, undoubtedly; he would want to pay his respects to a discontinued artist, Stevie Dola.
Dola and Soar: you could not imagine a more ill-matched pair in habits or art practice. They came together through a love of this doomed landscape, the magical island of Hackney Wick. Soar has a white cube, close to the railway, a controlled space cleaner than any hospital. He lodges comfortably, behind a secure gate, in the company of the dying industries with their dazzling sparks, their eternal grinding: white vans, hoists, fork-lifts.
Dola was an invisible: post-squat, pre-oblivion.
Soar ground his own coffee, worked with assistants, filed his prints in steel cabinets. Dola’s Scottish breakfast came in bottles from the Russian supermarket: whisky and milk chocolate, cold potatoes and peanut butter. The conjunction of such lives was possible only in the limbo before demolition, security fences, insurance fires. Newts and allotment holders to be offered alternative accommodation.
The small irony here was that Tim Soar got his living from making the new buildings of Stratford City, the only active element in the Olympic smokescreen, look good. A cool eye on hot money.
Within the Lionworks studio, frozen architectural prints were presented, lit from above, like a choir of icons. Tim told Jock about the sessions in the Lord Napier, a squatted pub spray-painted by Sweet Toof, Cyclops and their associates. Lock-ins for Wick irregulars: waifs and strays, Poles, Russians, anybody outside the system”
from Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire, by Iain Sinclair.
Running a photography studio in Hackney Wick, before the Olympics, meant more than just renting a raw industrial shell and chasing the light through warehouse windows. It meant being part of a living, pulsing experiment — a patchwork of cultures, dreams, and half-formed plans, stitched together with sound systems, spray paint, and shared rent.
Back then, the Wick was wild. Multicultural in the truest sense — not curated, not branded — just people from everywhere, making things out of nothing. A studio was never just a studio. It was a bunkhouse, a party, a refuge, a makeshift gallery, a kitchen for twenty, a space to crash or to cry. Art spilled out into the corridors, onto the canal towpaths, into the streets.
To run a studio here was to hold the door open — for welders, poets, photographers, artists, musicians, ravers, strangers, life. It was to believe that creativity needs community, not polish; mess, not perfection. That healing can happen over developing trays and late-night cooking. That falling in love — with people, with places, with purpose — is part of the process
In Hackney Wick, before the cranes came, the camera didn’t just capture culture. It lived inside it.
