On May 29 last year, a nine-year old girl sitting in a restaurant on Dalston’s Kingsland Road was seriously injured when a motorcyclist gunman opened fire. Three men sitting outside were also wounded.
The shooting of a child in one of Dalston’s busiest thoroughfares appalled the local community, an eclectic mix of ageing Turkish shopkeepers, art students crammed into mouldy flatshares and affluent City types who have driven house prices to eye-watering peaks in nearby De Beauvoir and Shacklewell. Dalston’s gentrification, however, hasn’t eradicated its underworld.
