“In the 1980s, Hackney was a very poor place,” Martinson recalls. “There was really high levels of unemployment, the high street was rundown, the estates were falling apart. But there were no food banks.” The photographer is keen, he explains, not to romanticise the 1980s – a time which undoubtedly had many problems of its own – but to highlight these changes in Hackney’s makeup.
His latest images from the borough – in which Hackney Foodbank now operates across five different locations each week– often confront these changes head on. One image shows shop worker Matt Payne. Heavily tattooed, with a moustache and wearing a tight white vest, he stands in vintage clothing shop, Beyond Retro. Forty one years ago, Martinson took an image of another worker on almost exactly the same spot. Only then, he was in the Simpsons clothing factory.