The late afternoon sun fell on the anomalous pine trees of Gillett Square, London N16, and on the wooden decking below, giving it a fleeting look of lunch in the Alps. To the east, just visible at the far end of Gillett Street, the Kings-land Road ran its usual choppy course: hipsters and the homeless, Jamaicans and Turks, Vietnamese up from the Shoreditch end and the odd Haredi Jew heading north to Stamford Hill.
Gillett Square is Hackney’s great regeneration project. Once a disused car park full of drunks and dealers, after 25 years of funding drives and architects, bulldozing, building and PR, it’s now Dalston’s ‘town square’. In the beginning, it was the first of Ken Livingstone’s ‘100 new public spaces’ and a model for future development. Its proud parent, Hackney Co-operative Developments (HCD), calls it: ‘A place to walk through; a place to sit; a place to share; a place to meet; a place to see, hear, feel, smell, taste and discover wonderful and incredible things.’
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