This is undoubtedly a commendable first collection for a new indie press, and it is good news that Influx plans to publish further site-specific anthologies. I think I'll bring this book with me as a pseudo-travel guide next time I visit Hackney, follow the looping route Budden and Caless have outlined in their introduction, starting from the Lea Valley then south to the Marshes, on to Hackney Wick and Regent's Canal and then back up to Dalston and further north to Stoke Newington. As an outsider to Hackney life, it will surely be illuminating for me to put real images to unfamiliar names and words.

Whether it’s losing your dignity on the streets of Dalston, staying at The Dolphin until they turn the lights on (Tip: Always leave before they turn the lights on), or going to town on a Turkish kebab while waiting for the nightbus, it’s the grit and the stick of East London that gives it it’s life. Acquired for Development By… sounds out the many voices of the borough, celebrating its urbanity, cultural tensions and traditions and the future that now lies wide open.

Acquired for… is a chorus of rich and diverse east London voices. The collection neatly pinpoints some of the most critical tensions in modern urban life – tradition versus innovation, the real versus the perceived, the modern versus the post-modern – and sees how these play out in a borough perceived as both lawless and cool.

Add in plenty of poetry, haikus, a ghost story and the tale of a man who falls in love with an electricity pylon, and you have a superb collection of original writing about London’s most fascinating borough. This is Hackney without the hackneyed, and a must-read for anyone who cares about the area.

From its first electric crackle, Acquired For Development By… galvanises the landmarks of Hackney on the page. Short stories, journalism and poems cross paths as the flow of images takes you from a homely borough to the fringes of what you know via a future Dalston you’ll never visit.