It’s an overcast Thursday morning, and photographer Simon Wheatley is doing a soft-shoe shuffle through Roman Road in Bow, east London, as a market stall blares out exquisite 70s funk. “That’s more like it,” he says, with a grin on his face. “A bit of energy.” This was once grime’s artery, its chaotic central hub, even its muse – a street Wiley once told me was “the nurturer” of local talents like him and Dizzee Rascal. And it was here, in the 2000s, that Wheatley would create a vivid and intimate document of grime in its frenzied flush of youth, and of working-class neighbourhoods like this before they became considerably more sedate. Fourteen years after the release of Don’t Call Me Urban, Wheatley’s long-sold-out photo-book from that era – once described by Vice as “grime’s Old Testament” – it is finally getting a rerelease, at almost double its original size.
I have arranged to meet Wheatley outside the bougie Roman Road coffee shop that was once legendary grime record shop Rhythm Division. This leads to some confusion – there are simply too many bougie coffee shops in succession. “Back in the day it was absolutely thronging with people,” Wheatley recalls. “You’d turn a corner and down a sidestreet there’d be six guys doing an impromptu cipher [a freestyle MC-ing performance] – everywhere there were youths hanging out, wheeling around on their bikes, spitting over some tinny beat playing off a Nokia. This was the heartbeat of grime.”
