London: The City the Media Doesn't Show You
A walk through Victoria Park reveals a London often missing from media narratives: one shaped by public generosity, private exclusion, memories, and the unresolved question of who is still able to belong.
The gates of the park stand open to all, but this is the quiet contradiction at the heart of this city: public space, public life, but not equally shared.
London is often shown from a distance: ceremony, wealth, disorder and spectacle. However, cities are not understood from a distance, they are understood on foot, through the places where ordinary lives have left their mark. The media rarely show the London lived between the headlines: the homes, the buses, the school gates, the park benches, the community halls, the neighbours who notice. A walk along these paths reveals not only what has changed, but what the city often hides.
The path runs west from Hackney Wick along Victoria Park Road, across from the Regent’s Canal. Beside the park, the canal carries another history. Its waters once moved the bricks that built this neighbourhood, shaped from clay dug out of nearby fields and pits. For those who worked there, the canal was not picturesque. It was their daily route, workplace, community and livelihood.
Where visitors now see sun scorched grass and lakes, earlier generations saw mud, toil and the raw materials of a growing city. That world has been buried beneath the park and its surrounding streets, but its influence lives on in the houses, roads and routes that still shape the neighbourhood and beyond.
Along the road, houses watch over the park. Where housing schemes once kept a place to live affordable, many of those same houses now cost nearly two million pounds. The buildings remain, but neighbours, habits, stories and communities have been displaced.
Nearby, the People’s Park Tavern, the latest of many names, opens its main entrance to the street. But once into the park fields, access can be restricted, on occasion only open to those who have paid to attend a festival. It serves as a reminder that access is often conditional, and financial boundaries continue to run through public life.
It can be all too easy to forget, or to have missed, the contributions of earlier decades to the struggle for greater equality. The final decades of the last century were not quiet years. They were defined by loud, visible, determined grassroots action.
Activists blocked roads and occupied buildings, demanding disability access long before legislation caught up. Organisation in workplaces, unions and community groups, challenged long standing discrimination and restrictive structures. Collective action gave strength and hope, and in 1978, Rock Against Racism brought tens of thousands here, marching from Trafalgar Square, advocating for a different vision of Britain. It was not only a concert or a march. It was an insistence that the future could be claimed for solidarity and hope rather than fear and hatred.
Around the park and its neighbouring streets as the decades moved on, different worlds found each other: students, long standing residents, arts cooperatives, campaign groups, all kinds of families who had known the area for generations and newcomers building their lives.
Of course there were disagreements about what equality and justice should look like, but the space existed to ask those questions and have that dialogue. Conversations about disability access, gender justice and racial equity reshaped public life. The threat and reality of war across the globe and the tragedy of the AIDS crisis brought fear and profound loss, while also exposing how urgently communities needed to stand together.
Increased rights may have now been written into law, and that progress matters. Accessible facilities and formal equality are not minor adjustments; they are the hard-won outcome of sustained campaigning. Yet a place may be open on paper and still inaccessible in practice through cost, attitude, design, or an unspoken signal that some are not welcome.
Paths may be shared, but the question of who these spaces serve remains. Just like earlier generations, it is essential to keep asking who is missing, who is excluded, and who benefits from resisting change.
If progress is measured by full participation in a shared quality of life, the question is not just whether those earlier struggles are over now. It is how much further might we go by remembering what has already been fought for, and certainly not by starting each debate as if no one has spoken before?
This beautiful park remains open, but the housing surrounding it does not. Families and young people without financial support are being priced out entirely. Those who sustain the city, teachers, care workers, cleaners, transport and retail staff, can no longer afford to live in the areas they serve.
For every child with expanded opportunities, another grows up in a household struggling to meet basic cost, and those most marginalised are also those whose voices are subdued when resources are limited. Belonging here remains fragile, and despite visible changes, people still feel excluded and the welcome remains conditional.
Yet humanity persists and kindness survives. People still make room for one another. There is shared laughter, brief courtesy, space made on a path, children playing together, a stranger noticed and included, and through it all the sound of many languages belonging to the same afternoon.
Tea, cake and sandwiches may be replaced by poke bowls and a myriad of healthy juices, but the cafes still provide those vibrant centres for families and friends, or a sheltered spot for solitary reflection.
Small acts of kindness form this city’s real infrastructure. They existed when the Victorians took the air in the newly landscaped gardens of the park, through the century of shared opportunities, stories and campaigns, and when safety on the canals depended on cooperation and mutual support. They are always there when people from different backgrounds socialise and find common ground. They do not make news, but they do sustain communities.
Likewise those who maintain public spaces, run community groups, teach, and provide care are often unseen, underpaid, or taken for granted. Yet they are the foundation of any functioning society.
Memory is passed down, not just through official records but through shared knowledge: those who lived in the houses, who worked on the canals, who organised the meetings, who looked after their neighbour. Culture is not static, one dimensional or confined to museums; it is a living conversation, evolving and holding that capacity to continue to welcome.
Part of our history is recognising who created and fought for these spaces: who dug the clay, who built the city, who marched for rights, who imagined a different kind of society. The question is not only who is remembered, but who is enabled to inherit the city they helped to make.
London’s most important landmarks are not its buildings or monuments, but the relationships formed across difference, the shared struggles and the kindness and welcome shown within and between communities.
Victoria Park has survived wars, austerity, pandemics, and successive waves of change. It is a space that we continue to protect, in the belief that everyone deserves somewhere to breathe.
If London is serious about the promise of shared and common ground, that promise must travel beyond the park. It must reach the classroom, the clinic, the home, the bus, the care home, the market and the council chamber. It must mean that those who teach, clean, drive, serve, care and organise are not forced to the margins of the city they hold together. It must mean that children and young people are welcomed into schools that enrich their lives, not merely measure their compliance. It must mean that long rooted communities are treated not as obstacles to improvement, but as part of the city’s memory and intelligence.
There are signs, still modest but real, that real voices will be heard again, asking not simply to be included, but helping to decide what that inclusion means.
The paths remain the same, but the people and possibilities shift. The trees have grown and the skyline changed in the forty years I have known Victoria Park and the voices around me reflect a global heritage. Names and people change, but the need for safety, dignity, and connection does not.
Looking once again toward the canal, it is possible to imagine earlier generations seeing the park today. They helped build this city but did not benefit from the spaces they created. Perhaps that is each generation’s task: not to admire their inheritance from a safe distance, but to widen it, repair it, and leave behind a city in which those who come next are not merely permitted to pass through, but able to remain, connect and build their community.
By Valerie Dennis
Biography:
Valerie brings nearly forty years’ experience in education; teacher, headteacher, and inclusive practice consultant. Her work is grounded in the disability rights and feminist movements of the 1980s, and the conviction that inclusion lies at the heart of equity.
She is a trustee of The Thyroid Trust, advocating for health awareness and disability-confident workplaces. For forty years, Victoria Park has been a constant: where she lived as a student, brought her children to play and now walks as a grandmother, with time to experiment with a variety of forms of writing.
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