HHH Video were an activist collective working out of a studio in Martello Street, near London Fields. This second edition of their “magazine” is a great round up of the London counter culture and protest scenes of the mid 1990s.
Previous posts have covered:
- HHH Video Mag issue 1 from 1994 including Hackney Homeless Festival.
- HHH film of Hackney Anarchy Week in 1996.
Now, thanks to the Steampunk Saloon YouTube channel, we can see HHH Video Mag issue 2.
Thanks to History is Made at Night, we know that there was a showing of this video at the 121 Centre in Brixton on September 11 1995:
This flyer is also a handy guide to the contents, as we are without the cover…
The most relevant part of this edition is the coverage of the eviction of the Spikey Thing With Curves squat in Hackney Central, which I have written a separate post about.
And now here is the rest for you:
The Criminal Justice Bill was a huge piece of repressive legislation conjured up in 1994 – the dying days of the Conservative government. The bill targeted a diverse section of youth culture and the protest movement, although its powers would of course be used by the poilice in a wide range of contexts against ordinary people.
Whole sections of the CJB were aimed squarely at travellers, squatters, hunt saboteurs, road protestors and infamously ravers, with the much mocked definition of:
“any gathering of 20 or more people [where there is music…] ‘music’ includes sounds wholly or predominantly characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats.”
Other clauses gave the police even more powers of stop and search, of taking bodily samples – and reduced the status of the right to silence when under arrest.
On October 9th 1994, around 100,000 people marched against the Criminal Justice Bill in London. (A previous march in July, in which people climbed the gates of Downing Street is covered in HHH Video Magazine issue 1).
This clip begins with a bunch of Hackney squatters getting ready to attend the demo and speaking about various issues of the day.
It ends with the police violently attacking the protest after it reached its final destination of Hyde Park – and the protestors dong what they could to resist this. It was a messy evening. My friends and I were charged at by mounted police and then forcibly pushed down Oxford Street by riot cops…
The definitive story of the radical history of Hyde Park is 1850-1994: The Battle for Hyde Park: ruffians, radicals and ravers by our comrades Practical History.
The Criminal Justice Bill passed into law on 3 November 1994.
The McLibel trial was a huge issue in the late eighties and 1990s.
London Greenpeace activists being sued by an evil multinational corporation generated a lot of media attention and many solidarity actions, including the widespread dissemination of the “What is wrong with McDonalds” leaflet that had triggered the court case.
In this clip, activists disrupt the filiming of a McDonalds TV commercial in Ruskin Park south London, ensuring a frustrating day for the camera crew. You would need a heart of stone not to laugh.
The McLibel trial lasted nearly ten years, making it the longest-running libel case in English history. McDonald’s announced it did not plan to collect the £40,000 it was awarded by the courts and the European Court of Human Rights eventually ruled that the two defendants had been denied a fair trial.
“Anarchy In The UK: Ten Days That Shook The World” was an ambitious festival called by Class War founder Ian Bone. It took place from 21st-30th October 1994 at various locations across London:
“Anarchy In The UK” was the inspiration for Hackney Anarchy Week in 1996, which HHH Video also produced a documentary about.
The levitation footage is followed by a promo clip for an unknown (to me) band in a warehouse somewhere… this is probably the “Russian Techno Art Performance” on the 121 poster above.
In the summer of 1994 an entire row of houses in Claremont Road, East London was squatted in protest against the construction of the M11 motorway – a huge project which required the demolition of 350 homes and several wildlife habitats, so that commuters could drive to and from London more quickly.
The Claremont Road eviction lasted from 28th November to 5th December 1994. According to Squall magazine it was “the longest eviction in post-war European history”, featuring 400 protestors.
This footage is especially interesting as you get a sense of the community that had been created by the squatters and their alterations to houses and the street.
The M11 extension was eventually built, but it is widely acknowledged that the 1990s road protest movement made the construction of roads so complicated and expensive that several other projects were abandoned.
This clip is followed by a few minutes of firebreathing and fire juggling outside Hackney Town Hall. This was apparently a protest against the eviction of the Spikey Thing With Curves squat. A photograph from this ended up on the cover of Tony White’s debut novel Road Rage, which is a recommended pulp fiction take on 1990 UK road protests, with a nod to Hackney:
Road Rage! takes some liberties with the ‘sprawling consensual hallucination that is Hackney’, chiefly by relocating a lightly-drawn (no research, remember) analogue of the then M11 Link Road protests (which centred around the proposed ‘East Cross Route’ in Leytonstone) a few miles west to Well Street, E9. Events take place in a number of expedient and/or contingent locations around Well Street and London Fields: in the Pub on the Park, on Hackney Central railway station and the trains of the North London Line, in the Hackney DSS office and a still markedly pre-gentrification Broadway Market that would be unrecognisable now. This was where I lived at the time.
Tony white – Road Rage archive #1
There is more information about the book in the links below from Tony’s site.
HHH Video was ahead of its time – at what we used to call the “bleeding edge” of technology. It was very unusual to have access to a video camera thirty years ago, let alone the technology to do decent editing. There were only a handful of activist produced VHS tapes on sale in radical bookshops and through distributors – and public showings at squatted social centres like the 121 Centre were few and far between.
So it is pleasing that this footage has survived. For some of us it may trigger a nice trip down memory lane, whilst generating confusion and questions for younger viewers.
In 2024 many of us carry a video camera at all times. Widespread CCTV combined with repressive legislation such as the Criminal Justice Act and its successors have made direct action a riskier business. Nevertheless, I hope this footage is inspiring in some way…
I’ve added all the HHH video output I have found to archive.org where it can be downloaded. HHH were always clear that their work was anti-copyright, so use as you will! It’s also all on the Radical History of Hackney YouTube channel along with other videos of interest…
The Radical History of Hackney 
