Rana Rastegari interviews the artist Graeme Miller, who, along with hundreds of others, lost his home when the M11 Link Road (A12) was built in the 1990s

The M11 Link road, completed in 1998, is a four mile long dual carriageway running through Leyton, Leytonstone and Wanstead connecting Hackney with Redbridge, and the M11 motorway.

Originally intended to provide a quicker and more direct route to central London, the plan for the construction received huge backlash from the local communities as protests erupted, lasting from the early to mid 1990’s. 

The construction plan was set to avoid the high streets of the areas and therefore, 350 local homes were acquired by compulsory purchase and set to be demolished, as well as several acres of green space. 

In the early noughties, Graeme Miller, an artist who lived in one of the homes that was eventually torn down, created a radio installation piece called LINKED which is installed on lampposts along three miles of the link road. 

LINKED was commissioned by the Museum of London in 2003 as an artistic response to the creation of the M11. The innovative installation runs between Hackney Marshes and Redbridge Roundabout, adjacent to the link road, and consists of analogue transmitters that tell the stories of around 60 people who once lived and worked in the area. 

The piece includes the voices of families, protestors, railway workers, artists, teachers and more. For its 20th anniversary, LINKED is being technically restored and open to the public. Audiences can borrow radio receivers, headphones, a map from the pick up point and walk along the route listening to these stories. 

On the process of bringing LINKED to life, Graeme told the Echo: “I suppose in terms of hands-on making it, it took our team about a year. But it took about eight years of making money and planning to get to that point. It’s a hidden part of art making and especially with big public protests like that. Building it up took a really long time but the idea for it began in 1995.”

Having been commissioned in 2003, the piece was brought to life almost a decade after the protests. But even though so much time had passed, Graeme noted that “for everybody who experienced it, it’s very much in the present.”

He added: “It’s more than a problem, the time scale, it’s actually exactly what it’s about. It’s about always being present in the past. If you listen to the audio in it, a lot of the people interviewed are asked to speak about what happened to them in the present tense. It’s being told as if it’s happening and it’s very vivid, it creates very strong visual images in your mind but what you might be looking at is a bit of the motorway.”

Graeme lived in one of the homes that was eventually destroyed for 10 years before he was evicted although he noted that he only expected to be there for about a year, “that’s the thing about artists, they’re always wanting a space. A load of houses came up precisely because they were building the road, they were short-life housing. I wasn’t really expecting more than two years but that turned into three, four and finally ten years living in the house. It had five bedrooms and it used to be a doctor’s house and I moved in with a bunch of artists and musicians. 

My son was born there and it became a family home. I was no longer an artist who was just interested in the studio. I got to realise the value of all these amazing buildings.”

When the construction plan began, homes were evicted one by one and “the whole neighbourhood took on this very spooky feeling,” he says.

“It’s sort of a bit like teeth falling out, something that’s really wrong. When this road came through, everything became a bit of a wasteland.”

But, there was a wave of protest and community mobilisation against the road. This, he said, was incredible, and prompted him and others to become active participants in the community.

Though several of the houses set for demolition became central parts of the protests, as squatters took over and refused to leave, Miller’s own home was emptied entirely. He told the Echo: “I ended up being quite brutally evicted. We ended up homeless, I had my son who was profoundly disabled and it was really hard. 

“Police and bailiffs knocked down my front door and came pouring into the house and it took me about three months to get anywhere. To be honest a little bit of me thought, well, as an artist this project is going to be a delicious piece of revenge. This road drove a trench through the neighbourhood and revealed things about it that you wouldn’t know were there.”

The installation on the lampposts makes LINKED a hidden piece of art, a secret kept between all those who remember and those who seek it out. It had always been the plan that the piece would be almost invisible unless you knew it was there, he says. 

“It was always going to be something you had to look for. One of the magic things about listening is that sound can inform what you’re seeing. I really like the idea that you have to work at it a little.”

Graeme continues: “If it’s too easy you just take it as part of the audio and visual clutter but if you have to seek out a lamppost and listen to voices crackle into life, there’s something quite poetic about that and the visibility of it. The whole concept was tuning into something, something that’s like a ghostly layer, it’s not all being thrown at you, you’ve got to go out and seek it and make of it what you will”. 

Though it was originally built to reduce traffic, the M11 Link Road is now one of the most congested roads in the country. Despite many environmentalists protests in the 1990s, who predicted this would happen, the construction went ahead anyway. In terms of LINKED as a piece of creative or artistic resistance, Graeme noted: “It was never going to stop the road but I think just this idea of rebuilding the 500 houses that were demolished in sound is implicitly resistant.”

Audio excerpts from LINKED are available on Graeme Miller’s website and one particular excerpt features a former Leytonstone resident who states that her cat is now buried underneath the M11. 

This particular anecdote, Graeme says, plays into “the idea that those things are still there, this sterile place actually leads on to how we naturally memorialise things. What I did was just listen to everyone’s stories. She wants to memorialise and keep Nabu [her cat] alive. LINKED is part of a mechanism that helps revive that. LINKED is something that reveals the other side of the motorway.”

Information about LINKED and Graeme Miller’s other projects can be found at his website

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