Place Waste Dissent maps the run-off, rackets and resistance along the route of the proposed M11 Link Road, and then spawned the DIISONANCE collaborations, exhibitions, performances & anthology with artist Steve Ryan.
“This is not so much a book as an archive, a dataset or a dossier of evidence. At times reminiscent of Tom Phillips' A Humument with its jump cut juxtapositions, liminal layers and luminous word wiring, Place Waste Dissent is nonetheless an utterly distinctive poetic document, weaving text and image to create a wakeful dream state of white noise, static and flux.”
- Tom Jenks




Place Waste Dissent & Diisonance
Paul Hawkins & Steve Ryan
second expanded edition
150 mm x 230 mm 190 b&w pages
ISBN: 978-1916159426
high-resolution PDF £5 buy
paperback £10.00 buy
first edition paperback
ISBN: 978-1910312063
12 November 2015
£9.99
OUT OF PRINT
Having spent three years in the early 1990s occupying properties and protesting in Claremont Road, east London, poet Paul Hawkins maps the run-off, rackets and resistance along the route of the proposed M11 Link Road.
Using the voices of Dolly Watson, Old Mick and many others in avant-garde experimental text and lo-fi collage, he explores place, waste and dissent; the stake the Thatcher/Major Tory government was driving into the heart of the UK.
From Claremont Road to Cameron via surveillance culture and Occupy: transient-beta memory traces re-surfacing along the A12. This collection is an important reflection on a historic site of resistance, offering us illumination, ideas and inspiration for the future.
‘Saints don’t change the world, people do.’
- Alice Nutter, in her foreword to Place Waste Dissent
Read more about how the book came about, artist Steve Ryan, Claremont Road, Dolly Watson, the DIISONANCE exhibitions, performances and book it spawned, works-in-progress, other articles on the No M11 Campaign and anti-roadbuilding protests in the UK at the archive website for Place Waste Dissent & DIISONANCE


Praise for Place Waste Dissent'Fire sermons and authentic retrievals for a battleground on the edge of the liminal, delivered with spirit and spite and sting. True witness.'
– Iain Sinclair
“a celebration of friendship and community as it is an homage to those neglected by Thatcher’s government and the political ideology that outlived it. Containing not only the same iconic images, introspective diary entries, and powerful poems of the original collection, but a stunning selection of artworks created in response to it”
- Madelaine Culver reviews Place Waste Dissent & Diisonance for The Babel Tower Noticeboard.
‘an incredibly important book. It is a window on the past but also a mirror on the gentrified times of today. I really, really urge you to read this book. Also, Place Waste Dissent is the fruition and continuation of a powerful project of examination of resistance and correspondence through experimental poetics which Paul Hawkins began in his other books, ‘Claremont Road‘, and ‘Contumacy‘. Paul is an incredible poet, the poet of England’s right here and right now.‘
- Miggy Angel
'This is not so much a book as an archive, a dataset or a dossier of evidence. At times reminiscent of Tom Phillips' A Humument with its jump cut juxtapositions, liminal layers and luminous word wiring, Place Waste Dissent is nonetheless an utterly distinctive poetic document, weaving text and image to create a wakeful dream state of white noise, static and flux. If you want to know what this book is like, try staying up for 48 hours straight then taking a dawn ride in an unlicensed minicab with a can of Red Bull and The Faust Tapes on repeat. Better still, just read it.'
– Tom Jenks
'The lost world of London squatting and radical struggles is conjured up through experiments with words and storybook political consciousness. Paul Hawkins illuminates the past he experienced and allows us to smell touch and love the cultures in collision which he participated in as a foot soldier banging on a revolutionary drum. '
– Joe Ambrose
'The collage format of text and imagery works perfectly in conveying the complex dynamic of community struggle, external politics and inner personal insecurity. Its sense of "being in the thick of it", of being adrift and yet trying to get a handle on things, of being players in a drama that was both orchestrated and out of control is exactly what it felt like. Parts of Place Waste Dissent brought me close to tears.'
– Ian Bourn (artist, film maker & ex-resident of Claremont Road)
'Picture Sesame Street as reimagined by Guy Debord and the set designers for Apocalypse Now.'
︎Minor Literature[s]
Paul Hawkins reads 'Index' at the Sanctum, Bristol, November 2015. Filmed and edited by Andrew Neil Hayes.