Text: Robert Kazandjian – Photography: Liz Seabrook
Author, artist, screenwriter, DJ, producer: Tottenham native Tice Cin is multi-disciplinary in every sense of the word. Following the success of her acclaimed debut novel, she’s restating her commitment to the place that made her, with a plan to create pathways so that others can replicate her journey.
SITTING ON THE RIVER LEA, next to the historic Essex-Middlesex border in Northeast London, is Walthamstow Wetlands – a 211-hectare reservoir site and one of Europe’s largest urban wetlands. It’s a haven for wildlife, from grey herons, kingfishers and peregrine falcons to speckled wood butterflies and thick-kneed beetles.
It opened to the public in 2017, and it’s no coincidence that residents of the sleek new high-rise towers in nearby Tottenham Hale and Blackhorse Road – developments with snappy names like Blackhorse Mills and Hale Works – can enjoy views of it from their balconies and rooftop gardens. The main entrance on Forest Road is just a three-minute drive from where an unarmed Mark Duggan was shot and killed by police on 4 August, 2011, and exactly a mile away from the steps of the police station where his family arrived demanding answers two days later.
On an angler’s pontoon overlooking one of the 10 reservoirs, bathed in comforting spring sunlight, is where I meet multidisciplinary artist Tice Cin. We’re here to discuss her critically acclaimed debut novel Keeping the House and a pair of Egyptian geese have joined to keep us company. Tice and I have met once before, during the first national lockdown in 2020, at an online book club. The text we were discussing was Elif Shafak’s The Bastard of Istanbul, a novel centred on two families’ connection through the events of the Armenian Genocide. The responsibility fell to Tice (a Turkish Cypriot) and me (an Armenian) – connected to the communities on which the book is focused – to add context to the discussion. It was an intense, healing experience for both of us, and we’ve stayed in touch since.
Ostensibly a crime novel about “the North London Heroin Trade” – as described by Tice herself in the book’s blurb – Keeping The House has featured in both the New York Times and Washington Post, and was named as one of The Guardian’s best books of 2021. It has since been longlisted for both the Desmond Elliott Prize and the Jhalak Prize. The scope of the novel is far greater than its description as a crime novel implies. Tice says this framing was a deliberate misdirection. “If you’ve read the book, you’ll know there’s a lot more going on. So it was this political cheekiness,
