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
