‘Everything I do has climate at its centre’: Hackney’s first Green mayor gets to work

For the first time in decades the person sitting behind the desk in the wood-panelled office of Hackney’s imposing art deco town hall is not a Labour politician. Zoë Garbett was elected as the east London borough’s first Green party mayor in this month’s local elections, surfing a wave of support which resulted in the party winning more than 500 seats, taking control of five councils and winning two mayoralties. But even amid a celebratory national picture, the results in Hackney, one of the Labour party’s longtime strongholds in the capital, stood out. Not only did Garbett secure the mayoralty, the party jumped from four councillors to 40. At the same time, the Labour block slid from 50 seats in 2022 to nine. “Before the election, I was saying it’s going to be really different this time, there is going to be a different landscape in London ,” says Garbett, an increasingly familiar figure in the borough with her pink fringe and ready smile. “But I genuinely did not think it would be to this scale.” Now, the hard work of local government looms. Hackney is one of the most diverse areas in the country, with around half its residents from black and global majority groups, according to the council. Life expectancy is below the national average and although there are pockets of wealth as some neighbourhoods gentrify, the English indices of deprivation report found it was the second-worst area in the country for child deprivation. …