Christmas 32 years ago…

“On the opening night itself the audience were welcomed and led into a magical forest glade environment. Having been shown to their tree trunk seats, they were entertained by the outlaw community. With the appearance of Robin and Marion the story began. After much plot and counter plot, farce and ducking down rabbit holes, our hero and heroine managed to defeat the evil Sir Guy of Gisbourne.”

Chats Palace Annual Report on Robbin’ the Rich (Dec 14, 1980 – January 10,1981) 

Click here to see the individual posters

1977 – The Wonderful Palace of Nod

1978 – The Thief of Ragbag

1979 – The Ice Queen – “Freeze up Mother Brown’

1980 – Robbin’ the Rich

1981 – Bluebeard – The Barbary Ghost

1982 – Burgerbar Galactica – ‘May the Sauce be with you’

1983 – Things that grow Bumps in the Night

1984 – Sawdust – Who stole the fun of the fair?

1985 – Junglenuts – On the tail of the loathsome shrine

1986 – Apocalympics! – Who cheats wins

The annual christmas pantomime was the major winter event at Chats Palace for many years. Starting with ‘A Hackney’d Show’ in 1976, there followed more than a decade of large scale community productions. The shows created their own traditions including the legendary last night, where the volunteers kept the cast on tenterhooks by adding to the action such things as live ferrets or worse!

‘A Wish for Billie Windows’ – Chats Palace Christmas Show 1988
Production team photo: back row – Rebecca Chester (designer), David Wooley (stage manager), Annie Smol (producer); middle row – Gary Horsman (light+sound+design), Tom Jones (publicity), Susan Chester (costumes); front row – Brian Walker (set builder), Malcolm Fredrick (director), John McGovern (link worker), Jack Bradley (writer)

Photographing Hackney

Between 2007 and 2011 Chats Palace hosted a series of photography exhibitions which, in their different ways reflect the changing nature of the Hackney landscape and its communities.

Colin O’Brien’s photograph of the ‘woman in summer dress’ walking along Chatsworth Road (1985) was spotted at his Oxo Tower Gallery 2006 show. This fortuitous connection led first to a survey of O’Brien’s classic monochrome images “Five Decades of East London Photography”. Three years later followed his collaboration with journalist Jane Egginton – “The Last of the Real High Streets” –  where they made environmental portraits and collected anecdotal stories from both longstanding and recently established shopkeepers.

© Colin O’Brien

Meanwhile the emerging popularity of Flickr brought the work of Alan Denney to a wider audience. Denney has been quietly observing the daily struggles of Hackney’s population for more than 30 years. Following his exhibition at Chats Palace in 2009 he has gone on to pursue projects around the Hasidic community in Stamford Hill, surveyed what he sees as the alarming and metaphorical cracks in many Hackney buildings and is currently collecting images under the title ‘You don’t see feet like that in Mayfair’.

“I didn’t find taking photographs of strangers easy; it never happened, but my fear was that one day someone would take offence and have a go at me. I tried to take photographs of people who were fully absorbed in what they were doing, not responding to me as a stranger pointing a camera at them.”

Berris Conolly left Hackney in the late 80’s vowing never to return, but not until he had surveyed virtually every street in the borough with his bulky Pentax 6×7 camera. The resulting work, self published a few years ago caught the eye of a younger urban photographer Alex Pink, who revisited many of the austere and empty vistas to digitally record how they had developed, or not, in the intervening decades.

‘Hackney revisited’ was shown at Chats Palace in the autumn of 2011.


© Berris Conolly and Alex Pink

Collectively the concerns of these photographers, both in terms of timescale and subject may be of interest to readers of this blog. You can see more of their work here: Colin O’Brien, Alan Denney,  Berris Conolly, Alex Pink.