Stoke Newington E-Book

Rab MacWilliam

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 357

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

Stoke Newington has long been one of London's most intriguing and radical areas. Famous residents included Daniel Defoe, Mary Wollstonecraft and Edgar Allan Poe, and it was home to a variety of religious dissenting groups, such as Puritans, Congregationalists, Baptists, Presbyterians and Quakers. In more recent years, it was associated with the Kray Twins, the Angry Brigade and the Provisional IRA, as well as with a range of creative individuals including Harold Pinter, Paul Foot and Marc Bolan. Today, the neighbourhood is inhabited by a richly eclectic blend of nationalities and cultures. It is a home for inner-city dwellers of all types, from writers and artists to musicians, journalists and actors. Its appeal has led to its contemporary gentrification, making it a rather different place to the somewhat down-at-heel neighbourhood of the 1960s and 1970s. This book reveals, through anecdote, historical fact and cultural insight, how this often perverse, argumentative yet tolerant 'village' has become today's fashionable and desirable Stoke Newington.

Leseprobe

First published 2021

The History Press

97 St George’s Place, Cheltenham,

Gloucestershire, GL50 3QB

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

© Rab MacWilliam, 2021

The right of Rab MacWilliam to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the Publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 0 7509 9644 0

Typesetting and origination by The History Press

Printed in Great Britain

eBook converted by Geethik Technologies

CONTENTS

Slouching Towards Stokey

Where is Stoke Newington?

Introduction

Chapter One:

Stoke Newington: The Early Years

Chapter Two:

Civil War: The Emergence and Spread of Dissent

Chapter Three:

Before the Railway: The Nineteenth Century

Chapter Four:

A Village No More: 1870 to the First World War

Chapter Five:

The Inter-War Years: 1918 to 1939

Chapter Six:

Second World War to 1965

Chapter Seven:

The Return of Dissent: 1965 to the Present Day

Postscript

Index

FOREWORD

SLOUCHING TOWARDS STOKEY

During much of the 1970s, I lived in north London’s Crouch End, then a pleasant suburb sheltering under the forbidding shadows of Highgate and Muswell Hill.

Not far from my flat, Hornsey Arts College was in the process of closing and being replaced by Middlesex Poly, and these once infamous institutions helped to generate an artistically radical, unconventional atmosphere in our little cultural backwater. Also, Crouch End’s affordability, the diversity of its bars and its prevailing air of genial camaraderie created a stimulating and friendly environment. I enjoyed my few years there.

However, various events, mainly of a domestic nature, coincided in the early 1980s to suggest that I moved away from the comforting embrace of the Ally Pally. Throughout the following decade I drifted around Stroud Green, Dalston, Hackney, Shacklewell and Holloway, reacquainting myself with a dissolute, occasionally debauched but always satisfyingly self-indulgent lifestyle. I had also been working in Fitzroy Square, Highbury Fields, Chelsea, Soho, Hounslow, Hemel Hempstead and, for a mercifully brief period, Aldershot, so I figured it was again time to settle down. In early 1991 my wife and I moved into a flat in Stoke Newington – they were affordable then – and we have lived in this splendidly eccentric little parish ever since.

As the 1980s progressed, I had become increasingly fond of Stoke Newington, in particular my strolls around the area’s back streets and my regular visits to the Rose and Crown, Rochester Castle, Three Crowns and a few other pubs and restaurants, including Fox’s Wine Bar. Fox’s was owned by Robbie and Carole Richards, who were widely credited with kick-starting the ‘revival’ of Stoke Newington Church Street. Although it had the honour of being the longest street name in London (I defy you to come up with a longer one), Stoke Newington Church Street, which was plain old Church Street until the 1930s, was then a fairly dilapidated, meandering old thoroughfare that dated back to early medieval times but which was, like a good many of its local residents, floundering in Thatcher’s Britain.

In those days, it hosted several boarded up, vacant shops interrupted occasionally by a number of hopeful but wary businesses, usually small, friendly restaurants and drinking dens that never seemed to hang around for very long. Other arrivals, however, such as Bridgewood and Neitzert’s violin and cello outlet and Atique Choudhury’s Yum Yum Thai restaurant, continue to exist today. Some of the longer-term retailers were Whincop Timber Merchants (a fixture on the street since the mid-nineteenth century), John’s Garden Centre, Rosa’s Lingerie and Fox’s Wine Bar, all now gone.

However, KAC electrics shop, Anglo-Asian restaurant, Gino’s barber shop and the Rose and Crown, Auld Shillelagh and Red Lion bars remain, as do several other equally venerable pubs and retail establishments, but the street’s overall impression was then one of relative decay tinged with genteel shabbiness. With the exceptions of the enduring Michael Naik, Philips Estates and newcomer Next Move, estate agents were then markedly less numerous, although Julian Reid, who was then employed by Church Street’s Holden Matthews, currently runs his eponymous estate agency on Church Street. Indeed, it was Julian who, despite our new neighbour’s pit bulls roaming across our back yard, sold us our flat.

Around the corner from Church Street, Stoke Newington High Street, which almost 2,000 years previously as Ermine Street had resounded to the menacing tramp of Roman legions marching north to quell rebellious Britons and Celtic troublemakers, and which, at the beginning of the twentieth century, had been one of north London’s busiest retail centres, was also embracing a seemingly terminal decline.

At the turn of the twentieth century, an Edwardian observer had noted with reference to the High Street and the surrounding area: ‘Stoke Newington is one of the brightest and pleasantest of London boroughs … its attractiveness is enhanced by its excellent shops. These, for variety and the useful services they offer, are second to none in any London suburb.’ Sadly, times had moved on.

By the mid- to late-1980s, the High Street retailers included Woolworth’s (near a fading Marks and Spencer wall sign, recently airbrushed out as if to erase any trace of its former presence), the well-stocked General Woodwork Supplies, Hamdy’s newsagent emporium, the Gallo Nero restaurant/deli, two or three cheerfully scruffy bars, a few welcoming Turkish/Kurdish restaurants, and several smaller independently owned specialist shops – such as Parker’s Pet Shop and Hammerton Hardware, both long-standing retailers but now gone – but trade appeared to have tailed off markedly over the years, although the grim police station, dating from Victorian times, usually appeared busy enough.

Other streets across Stoke Newington – such as Albion Road, Cazenove Road, Allen Road, Shacklewell Lane and Green Lanes – were also, to varying degrees, revealing signs of a trading downturn and general disrepair. This decline in Stoke Newington’s fortunes even appeared to have affected many of the area’s road and pavement surfaces, which were shabby and were frequently pot-holed, although this was due more to neglect by Hackney Council than to any wider sense of sociocultural regression.

This disheartening general malaise across the parish was not helped by the widespread negative perception of Stoke Newington, with even some of my more degenerate friends describing it as London’s South Bronx in terms of its reputation for dangerous street encounters, random violence and other such vile imaginings. I remember at the time reading a report in the London Evening Standard that described Stoke Newington as being ‘beyond the bounds of law and order’, which may have sold a few more papers but I thought it was a bit harsh on the old place.

The relative absence of convenient public transport, accessibility and, when required, swift departure, only added to this prevailing air of negativism. There was no tube station in the immediate vicinity, the nearest being a good hike away at Manor House, and the local overground train station only travelled directly north or south, as did many of the buses. However, the ever-reliable 73 bus regularly ploughed its way from Victoria up through Oxford Street, King’s Cross and Islington to reach this abode of the damned.

Even black cabs, particularly in the West End, normally refused the fare for what was a relatively short journey: ‘Sorry, mate. I’m heading home now.’ We had to jump into the back, shut the door and then state our destination. Legally, cabbies then had no option but to comply, but their grumbling was accompanied by their deliberate acceleration over large speed bumps, simply to make the journey as uncomfortable as possible for the passengers. I guess the reason for their reluctance was not timidity (a cab driver?) but because they knew they wouldn’t pick up a return fare in Stoke Newington.

I recall saying to my wife that a sure sign that our little area was on an upward trajectory would be the sight of a black cab driving up Church Street with its yellow ‘For Hire’ light on display. In 1994 I saw my first such cab, ironically as I was making my way back from the Homeless Festival in the local park. Something had to give, and within only a few weeks the ‘crusties’ and a good many squatters seemed to have all but disappeared. Even local self-styled ‘anarchists’ Class War appeared to have faded away. The old order was rapidly changing.

It was becoming evident that the outside world’s perception of a decrepit and dangerous Stoke Newington was gradually being superseded by the prospects of a revival in the area, prompted and promoted by a number of factors: by the efforts of local pressure groups, such as the Hackney Society and the Stoke Newington Business Association, and their acquisition of funding and grants for the area, as well as securing selective Conservation Area status; by the growing awareness and celebration of such splendid old buildings as St Mary’s Old Church, Sisters’ Place and the Georgian houses on Church Street and elsewhere, the Unitarian Chapel and London’s oldest terrace (mid-seventeenth century) on Newington Green, as well as the area’s many other buildings that invoked a wealthier and more optimistic past, such as Sanford Terrace and Clissold House; and by a recognition of the variety and accessibility of the area’s open public spaces, in particular Clissold Park, Stoke Newington Common, Abney Park Cemetery, Newington Green and, slightly further east, Springfield Park with its unparalleled view across Walthamstow Marshes, one of the last remaining semi-natural wetlands in Greater London.

Further signs of the area’s re-emerging vitality and adventurous spirit were demonstrated by the popularity of the annual Church Street Festival, which began in the mid-1990s, as well as the Hackney Show on Hackney Downs. Although less dramatic, but equally important in re-fostering a sense of ‘belonging’, was the emergence in Church Street and other places in the area of newly created memorial plaques, bicycle rails, small volunteer-led public gardens, Christmas street lights and other ideas and activities that individually were minor contributions to the area but which collectively implied a progressive feeling of community awareness and a growing pride in the old parish.

Other significant uplifting factors were the explosive growth of a varied and vibrant local music scene – particularly rock, folk, reggae, soul and blues, with occasional bursts of classical Baroque (Battuta) and opera (Opera Cabaret). Jazz was provided at the renowned Vortex Jazz Bar, opened on Church Street in 1984. Other early bars and venues included The Pegasus on Green Lanes (rhythm and blues from Juice on the Loose was a regular Friday date), the Rochester Castle’s punk and blues live acts in the late 1970s and The Four Aces in Dalston Lane, which arrived in 1967 and which quickly became London’s leading reggae, ska and soul club. As time progressed, several others clubs and venues incorporated live music, almost all from the growing number of new bands and performers in Stoke Newington.

This was complemented by a reawakening interest in, and celebration of, the written word. Daniel Defoe, Edgar Allan Poe, Joseph Conrad and Alexander Barron had all lived here, and authors are highly regarded in this parish. Special mentions must go to the deserved success of the Stoke Newington Book Shop, which opened in 1988, the unveiling by Mehmet Ergun of the makeshift Arcola Theatre in a side street off Stoke Newington Road, and the Stoke Newington Literary Festival, which would have had its eleventh anniversary in 2020 but for Covid-19 (see Postscript).

Also gratifying was the eager willingness and co-operation of local bars and venues, including both the Old and New St Mary’s churches and the civic Assembly Rooms on Church Street, to stage gigs featuring local performers as well as diverse literary and musical events, and the gradual appearance of intriguing, useful little shops and quirky small businesses, alongside the refurbishment of some of the older, somewhat seedier bars (although these last ‘improvements’ were far from universally welcomed).

There were also positive indications, particularly at the northern end of the High Street, of the growing integration of faith and ethnic groups in the area, exemplified by the co-operative co-existence of the Muslim and Ultra-Orthodox Jewish populations and community centres in and around Cazenove Road. I recall during the 2011 ‘Hackney Riots’ that a large crowd from Mare Street headed up to Stoke Newington in an attempt to spread the disruption. The potential invaders were swiftly repelled by a line of Turkish and Kurdish restaurant employees forming a defensive line across the High Street while clutching their meat cleavers. A second line of resistance, although not required (the Kurds had seen to that), was formed by a hastily assembled group of Muslim and Hassidic youths who had gathered together further up the road and who appeared determined, physically if necessary, to defend their mutual territory.

Yet another major reason for the area’s upturn in recent years was that many of the local inhabitants and recent arrivals also seemed different to the norm. As well as the ever-expanding ethnic and cultural incomers and the ease of their acceptance into the existing neighbourhood, there were eccentrics, anarchists, hustlers, buskers, amiable and voluble drunks, and contrarians of all persuasions, often to be found in public houses. Stoke Newington’s close proximity to central London, and the area’s disputatious nature and history, attracted writers, journalists, musicians, visual artists, radical politicians and vociferous opinion-formers, many of whom mixed and intermingled with similarly minded, companionable local people whose fondness for Stoke Newington life often also revealed a cheerfully cynical attitude to the local Council at that time.

There were, of course, beggars and the homeless sitting on the streets, but these unfortunate people were, as a rule, not treated with dismissal or disdain but with the friendly humanity they deserved, and they normally responded in a like manner. A number of groups and organisations were formed to help those who had fallen on hard times. As an example, North London Action for the Homeless began in the early 1990s in a synagogue (built on the site of a former Baptist chapel) in Amhurst Park and then moved to St Paul’s Church on Stoke Newington Road. Reliant on external funding, grants and volunteers, NLAH provided, and continues to offer, regular meals, clothing, medical assistance, housing advice and much else. There are today several similar organisations in the area.

Less definably, but as important as all the heartening signs of Stoke Newington’s return to grace, was the growing awareness among local people of the area’s historical legacy, which had always exerted a powerful presence, albeit in temporary abeyance. All of these initiatives, encounters, discussions, creative activities, eccentric behaviours and voluntary community groupings resulted in a conducive atmosphere for, once again, dissent to flourish in this parish. Aside from a few notable exceptions, this was a forward-looking, optimistic dissent and one that has contributed to today’s revitalised, if rather different, Stoke Newington.

However, it occurs to me that you may think I’m painting an excessively rosy picture of how this parish handled the changes of recent years and, to a degree, you may be right. In an inner-city area where employment is for many people a welcome but unreliable and sporadic activity, where social deprivation, injustice and governmental indifference often exist next door to affluence and self-indulgent luxury, and where shabby, often poverty-stricken council estates are to be found round the corner from streets containing million-pound houses, there will inevitably be occasions when social hostility and related confrontation can occur. It is in no one’s interests to pretend otherwise, and it can happen anywhere.

As an example, I recall a good few years back when I was invited (for some reason) one Saturday afternoon to an event described as a ‘village fete’ being held in the grounds between Old St Mary’s Church and Clissold House. With the yummy mummies and helicopter dads indulging themselves in fullsize chess games, enjoying the home-baked cakes, the kids dressing up as fairy tale figures, story-telling, small stalls selling home-knitted clothing, quizzes, backgammon competitions and all the rest of it, I felt I could have been in deepest rural Berkshire. I soon left, and was walking home along Church Street when I was stopped by police and directed home down a side road. There had been a violent clash between groups of youths that had involved the use of knives, resulting in several stabbings and serious injuries, and the corner of the High Street had been closed to the public.

On the way home, I asked myself which of these two events represented the ‘real’ Stoke Newington. The truth is that, during those years, they both did. The ‘fete’ seemed to be an attempt, instituted by a number of probably well-intentioned people, to reintroduce bourgeois ‘normality’ into the area, while the stabbings episode, although obviously prompted by other factors, felt like an unconscious but understandable reaction to the arrival in the parish of a new, more privileged population. When people from very different cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds live in a small built-up area, the potential for trouble is often present. However, vicious street violence involving weapons is now a rarity in this area, although not unknown, and Stoke Newington feels a safer place. These scenes represented a polarity in Stoke Newington that today appears to have resolved itself into a tolerance, if on occasion a grudging one, of the behaviour and opinions of other, more advantaged residents.

Despite that afternoon, despite the external and prevailing negative perception of the area – or perhaps because of them – and despite the crime, the punch-ups, the muggings, the screaming street arguments, the menacing stares from small gangs of youths, the early threat of the pit bull population and all the rest of it, the longer I lived in this area, the more I enjoyed being here. Eventually, after a few years as a resident, and with my background as a writer, editor and publisher, it occurred to me that this area of around 50,000 people was a small town, and that most small towns had their own newspapers. Unless one included the Hackney Gazette and the occasional advertising-led promotional sheets, Stoke Newington did not then possess such an organ of opinion, commentary and reflection.

This being the case, I helped to establish in the late 1990s N16 Magazine: The Voice of Stoke Newington: a free, quarterly, editorially led magazine. For the following twelve years of its existence I was its publisher, and I also initiated and was director of the N16 Fringe – an annual weekend of mainly free music in venues and bars across Stoke Newington – during most of the magazine’s life. As you may imagine, I learned a good deal about this locality from both these ventures and, in the pages of this book – Stoke Newington: The Story of a Dissenting Village – I draw heavily from the experiences, interactions and friendships I formed while running the mag, as well as from a significant number of other sources, historical and contem-porary.

In the thirty years since my permanent arrival in Stoke Newington, most of this area has re-evolved into an undeniably more middle-class and less fractious part of London, yet its radical atmosphere of dissent and its argumentative but companionable spirit lives on. Stoke Newington has been and remains a most unusual and fascinating place.

For all these reasons, and a good many others, I took great satisfaction from writing this book. I hope you take as much pleasure from reading it.

(I delivered the final draft of this book to the publisher just before the full impact of the Covid-19 pandemic became apparent. I subsequently corrected on the page proofs any factual errors caused by the pandemic. On page 201 I include a brief explanatory Postscript on how the book’s publication was affected by Covid-19.)

WHERE IS STOKE NEWINGTON?

If I were to describe present-day Stoke Newington as being less of a London area than ‘a state of mind’, I’m pretty sure that you would regard such a proposition as, at best, self-deluding and as, at worst, pretentious nonsense. To an extent, I’d agree with these criticisms, but there is more than an element of truth in this assertion, so I’ll restrict myself to saying that Stoke Newington does seem to be a good deal more than the sum of its parts.

By this I mean, first, that Stoke Newington is perceived by many of its longer-term residents as, for all its faults, possessing its own special identity and that it generates a strong attachment to the area as well as a sentiment of loyalty in many residents, and does so with an iconoclastic style that few other places in London can sustain. Second, and as I discovered at N16 Magazine when we received emails and letters from Stokey born-and-bred readers across the world, ‘out of place’ does not mean ‘out of mind’, judging by the nostalgia, homesickness and residual fondness for the place that was clearly manifested in their memories and stories.

It’s all a bit strange, but this parish can and does generate a sense of belonging that is not normally evident elsewhere. This being so, its informal boundaries are fluid, and there are many people – including residents of Upper Clapton, Stamford Hill, Dalston and other neighbouring areas – who do not live within the formal boundaries of Stoke Newington but who describe this parish as being their home.

As Stoke Newington began to outgrow its medieval parish status, so also did its boundaries expand and become more clearly defined, as I will explain as this book progresses. However, the area most commonly agreed as representing the formal limits of today’s parish was delineated in 1900 by Stoke Newington’s creation as a Metropolitan Borough, and it was refined after its induction in 1965 into the London Borough of Hackney.

Prior to 1900, the parish of Stoke Newington had long virtually encircled, roughly to its south-west, the self-administering area of South Hornsey. The now-redundant signpost indicating ‘Town Hall Approach’, on Milton Grove as one travels along Albion Road, refers to South Hornsey’s administrative centre. The physical inclusion of another parish within Stoke Newington had long been an anomaly but, immediately prior to the Metropolitan Borough legislation, this intrusion proved advantageous.

Some doubts had previously been expressed concerning Stoke Newington’s suitability as a candidate for a Metropolitan Borough as it contained, by some degree, the smallest population among the contenders. However, if it added South Hornsey to its constituency, Stoke Newington could then more easily pull its weight alongside the big boys. That’s what happened, and South Hornsey found itself dissolved and under the admin-istrative control of Stoke Newington.

The main boundary change thereafter was its formal extension beyond the eastern boundary of Ermine Street (the ancient, straight Roman road known variously as Kingsland Road, Stoke Newington Road and Stoke Newington High Street) to include Stoke Newington Common (an area of open land previously known as Newington Common and Cockhangar Common) and a small section of what had beforehand been West Hackney. Along with the Common came sections of Cazenove and Northwold Roads and several other north–south roads leading to Evering Road, before again turning west and re-joining the previous boundary on Rectory Road.

This may seem to you as an irrelevant geographical diversion to Stoke Newington’s history, but it is important for the purposes of this book to have as accurate a knowledge as possible of what constitutes the Stoke Newington borders, given the number of historically important areas elsewhere in Hackney. As it is, on occasion I veer away from the area – for instance, to Hackney Downs, Clapton Common, Lower Clapton Road and Dalston Lane – to refer to other parts of Hackney Borough that are not strictly within Stoke Newington but which, particularly in terms of dissent and related activities, have impacted significantly on the behaviour and opinions of residents within its boundaries.

Therefore, although I concentrate below on Stoke Newington’s postcode of N16, I also make brief visits to N1, N4, N15, E5 and even tiptoe into E8. However, as I proceed I will provide you with prior warning that I am about to venture abroad.

STOKE NEWINGTON BOUNDARIES IN 2020

The following pleasant little excursion will lead you around the area included, more or less, in the N16 postcode. This code is usually regarded as containing the present-day Stoke Newington, and the parish is normally on the righthand side of my directions as you travel round. I will mention any changes to this as we proceed. It’s nothing like as complicated as it may appear.

Beginning at Stoke Newington railway station on Stamford Hill Road, travel south to Cazenove Road. Turn left here and make your way past Alkham, Kyverdale and Osbaldeston Roads. Then turn right and proceed south along Fountayne Road until you reach the road’s end at the eastern edge of the Common. Wiggle across to Norcott Road and head south for a block until you encounter Brooke Road, where you turn left and then take the right-hand turn at the junction on Evering Road. Travel west along to Rectory Road railway station at the end of Evering Road, and then make a left at the traffic lights onto Rectory Road. Follow Rectory Road to your left, ignoring the one-way right turn back to the High Street.

Ignore the left-hand turn to Hackney Downs. At the junction with Amhurst Road, continue straight across the traffic lights to Shacklewell Road, passing Shacklewell Green and keeping to the right at the roundabout. (If you look to the left here, you will see St Mark’s Church, which is impossible to miss as it is the largest parish church in London, is bigger than Southwark Cathedral and is known as ‘The Cathedral of the East End’.) Keep going past the mosque to your right, and you then arrive at Kingsland Road (or Ermine Street, south of Stoke Newington Road). Go straight across at the traffic lights onto Crossway, turn right at the next lights at Boleyn Road and continue until you reach the bend of Matthias Road, which you follow past the Factory and school to your left, until you find yourself at Newington Green. (Curiously, if you turn left on Kingsland Road, stay on the right-hand pavement, go past the Rio Cinema, turn into Gillett Square, emerge from the other end of the Square, turn right and go over the traffic lights, you are back on Boleyn Road. On this short stretch of Kingsland Road, which is really Dalston, N16 is to your right and includes the Rio and Gillett Square, while E8 faces you on your left, across the street.)

Go around Newington Green (three sides of which are in N1), turn left at Green Lanes, and you are back in N16. Stoke Newington occupies the north side of the Green including the Unitarian chapel. Keep travelling northward along Green Lanes, passing Clissold Park, Brownswood Road, The Castle Climbing Centre and the Reservoirs, until you arrive at Seven Sisters Road (which is in N4).

Turn right along the Seven Sisters carriageway, passing on your right Woodberry Down estate and the right-hand turn at the first set of lights for Lordship Road. Turn right into Amhurst Park as the main carriageway veers left, travel along Amhurst Park, with Stamford Hill railway station to your left, till you arrive at the busy Stamford Hill junction, where you make a sharp right turn at the lights. You are now back on Ermine Street (the straightness of the road is a clue), so keep moving south in a straight line until you are back at Stoke Newington railway station, where you began this enjoyably convoluted trip. You may now go to the nearest bar (the Wheat-sheaf on Windus Road is about as close as you can get, while the Bird Cage and Mascara Bar are just up the road) and have a few drinks, as you deserve these.

In this book, I occasionally include Upper Clapton and Stamford Hill as part of Stoke Newington, as it is an interesting area. To follow this route, continue straight ahead from the Stamford Hill traffic lights, pass by Clapton Common, and follow Upper Clapton Road southward until it reaches the Lea Bridge Road roundabout. Here, you turn right (or west) onto Kenninghall Road, and then either veer left for Hackney Downs or continue straight ahead, a short journey that takes you back to Evering Road and the delights of Stoke Newington.

Finally, and as a stylistic point, you may occasionally find confusing in this book my use of the word ‘parish’, which I employ in two similar but slightly different ways. In some cases, the word refers to the formal, older vestry boundaries of Stoke Newington. In others, it is a word I have always used – in a more general, affectionate sense – to encompass Stoke Newington and its immediate surrounds. The context should clarify the difference. (If this is the only thing that confuses you, I’d be delighted.)

INTRODUCTION

We always did feel the same,

We just saw it from a different point of view.

‘Tangled Up in Blue’, Bob Dylan

In 1953, the architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner neatly captured the essential spirit of Stoke Newington when he wrote, in The Buildings of London, ‘Stoke Newington is not entirely London yet’.

Notwithstanding its urban location and physical integration into the sprawling mass of the city, this perversely unique area has never allowed its independence to be absorbed fully into London’s collective unity. Although Pevsner employs the academically cautious word ‘yet’, such an absorption today and in the foreseeable future appears unlikely.

Unlike other suburban areas, Stoke Newington has today avoided the loss of its historical identity, and it has managed to retain its distinctive character, despite the many countervailing pressures and despite its geographical location close to the heart of one of the world’s largest cities.

In order to discover why this is the case, I examine in this book the historical and contemporary reasons underlying this spirit of independence, and I attempt to reveal why, throughout its history, Stoke Newington has been and remains such an unusual and special place.

Stoke Newington, once a tiny medieval hamlet just north of the city, is today a thriving, multicultural area located in inner-city London. In 1965 it was formally assimilated, along with the metropolitan boroughs of Hackney and Shoreditch, into the London Borough of Hackney. As such, it now forms the north-eastern part of Hackney, which borders the Boroughs Islington, Haringey, Waltham Forest, Newham and Tower Hamlets.

Within Hackney, the metropolitan borough of Stoke Newington is today sandwiched between Haringey to the north and Islington to the west. This locational description of contemporary Stoke Newington makes it appear simply as another small district of north-east London and as a fairly banal component of this great sprawling capital. The reality, however, is very different.

This parish is widely known and appreciated for its cultural and historical importance and its impact on British social and political life, and this has been, and remains, of much greater significance than its relative size may suggest. Stoke Newington’s proximity to London and to the old borough of Hackney, particularly in recent years, helps one to understand the reasons for this.

For much of the later part of the twentieth century, Hackney was considered to be one of the most socially and economically deprived regions in the UK but, over the last twenty years or so, the borough has gentrified at an almost alarming rate and, although there remain areas of relative poverty, it has overcome its previously dismissive ranking. Indeed, much of Hackney, for example Shoreditch and more recently Stoke Newington, is today regarded, particularly by younger people, as one of London’s most desirable, innovative and exciting areas.

Since the start of the new millennium, Stoke Newington has shrugged off its late-twentieth-century reputation as a run-down and depressed inner-city London area and has become an aspirational, ‘hipster’ venue, with its bars, restaurants and chic designer shops attracting a new breed of visitors and inhabitants. Known by many as ‘Stokey’, this little ‘village’ (as some still see it) has maintained its identity through some hard times, and is currently something of a cultural magnet for these mainly bourgeois newcomers. In this respect, Stoke Newington is doing no more than replicating the respect and reputation that it once enjoyed and which marked it out as a remarkable place for over 500 years, from its emergence as a retreat for wealthy London merchants and dissenters in the sixteenth century until its twentieth-century inclusion in the ‘Great Wen’.

As with many inner-city areas, Stoke Newington is no stranger to social deprivation, crime and all the other downsides to contemporary urban existence, but its history as an area of resistance to external interference, its culture of dissent and its enduring tradition of offering a welcome to people from differing cultures, ethnic groups and social backgrounds has ensured that this particular ‘village’ can well handle and adapt to most of today’s urban blights.

By the sixteenth century, Stoke Newington was close enough to the expanding City of London for it to be able to offer a retreat to moneyed merchants whose daily activities committed them to the noisy, cramped and often disease-ridden vagaries of city life, as well as to its mainly upper-class and aristocratic inhabitants who also involved themselves in the capital’s social and commercial affairs.

For these people and others like them, during its early years Stoke Newington was developing into a rural dormitory suburb of the city. Meanwhile, in common with other villages of the time, the less privileged inhabitants – the burgeoning presence of tradesmen, agricultural workers, servants, ‘masterless men’ and the otherwise economically and socially disadvantaged – existed side-by-side with the wealthy new arrivals, with both groups generally co-existing to their mutual advantage.

In this book I trace the evolution of Stoke Newington and its southern neighbour, Newington Green, from these late-medieval origins as a popular retreat for wealthy merchants, rich urban dilettantes and aristocrats into an extended village which, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, was to transform itself into a byword for religious dissent. Thereafter, and to the present day, the Stoke Newington area has preserved this ‘dissenting’ tradition, but has enhanced and continually modified its contrarian nature away from purely religious matters to adopt political and cultural positions that have been and remain at variance with ‘the establishment’ and its widely accepted principles and attitudes.

While elsewhere ‘dissent’ was widely regarded as divisive and even dangerous, in Stoke Newington it was, and is, positively relished. Although in this book I consider and discuss several other intriguing aspects of the area – including matters literary and cultural, the ever-changing nature of land use and development, the local economy, architecture and unusual buildings, relationships with nearby Clapton and Stamford Hill, popular activities and entertainment, personality profiles and so on – ‘dissent’ is the principal perspective from which I will be narrating the story of this nonconforming and constantly changing urban village.

‘Dissent’ – from the Latin dissentire – is defined in the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary as ‘not to assent; to disagree with or object to an action … to think differently’.

It is one of those all-inclusive words, the dominant meaning of which, depending on the period under investigation, ranges, at one extreme, from a mild objection to what is considered a disagreeable suggestion to, at the other extreme, the adoption of physically violent activity in the defence of one’s principles against the attempted imposition of a contrary, often widely held, set of opposing beliefs. Today, the term ‘dissent’ tends to the former usage, but 400 years ago the word’s meaning was emphatically concentrated on the latter.

In seventeenth-century England, in the aftermath of the Reformation and during the continuing decline of feudalism, the term ‘nonconformist’ was applied to the growing number of ‘independent’ thinkers who questioned not only much of the Anglican Church’s teachings but, on occasion, its very existence. In those times, given the inflexible and mutually dependent relationship between religion and state, profound social upheaval was the inevitable result of this clash between dissent and orthodoxy.

These religious nonconformists were virtually all Protestants as, after King Henry’s break with the Roman Papacy in the 1530s, Catholics were considered as extreme ‘recusants’ (from the Latin recusare: to refuse), and were regarded as legitimate targets for the state’s and God’s wrath. Given their relative scarcity in England, however, ‘papists’ were in no position to dissent publicly from anything, as they were obliged to worship in the utmost secrecy. Indeed, Stoke Newington apparently contained no Roman Catholic inhabitants, or the Catholics kept quiet about it, throughout the entire seventeenth century. Similar strictures applied to the few Sephardic Jews (from Spain and Portugal) in the country.

So long as they kept themselves to themselves, these two groups were on safer ground than were the dissenters, as, although Catholics and Jews were treated by the state as dangerously suspect foreigners, their adherents in England were considered as ‘aliens’ to be kept at arm’s length rather than, as were the Protestant nonconformists, condemned as blasphemous traitors.

As attitudes and circumstances changed with the first glimmerings of liberalism and modernity, and as the relationship between the state and its people gradually developed into a degree of religious toleration, so also did the meaning of ‘dissent’ begin to assume a new emphasis and an application to a wider constituency. The word became applied to contrarians in the political and cultural life of the nation, and, particularly in relatively recent times, ‘dissent’ has again widened its focus. When considering, for example, the various waves of immigration, particularly during the twentieth century, I have stretched still further my definition of ‘dissent’ and have subsumed it under the catch-all term ‘different’.

Today, Stoke Newington’s ethnic, social and cultural diversity can be observed on a daily basis simply by strolling around its streets. There are a good many other similar areas in London and elsewhere in the UK. However, few other places in London and beyond can today claim a virtually continuous dissenting heritage dating back to before the mid-seventeenth-century English Civil War (or, if you prefer, War of the Three Kingdoms).

Stoke Newington provided a secure post-Civil War home from the mid-seventeenth to early-nineteenth centuries for such radicals, writers and nonconformist preachers as Isaac Watts, Daniel Defoe, Mary Wollstone-craft, Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Cromwellian senior army officers Charles Fleetwood and Alexander Popham, Unitarians Dr Richard Price and Charles Morton, Methodists John and Charles Wesley, Quaker anti-slavery abolitionists Samuel Hoare and James Stephen, prison reformer John Howard, Baptists, Congregationalists, Methodists, Puritans, Presbyterians, Republicans, anti-monarchist Parliamentarians, foreign exiles and a good many others whose religious and political views differed significantly from the norm.

Jewish people, who had been expelled from England by Edward I in 1290, had been invited back under Oliver Cromwell’s Protectorate in the 1650s, because he wished to make use of their expertise in matters financial and their profitable trading acuity. (It has also been suggested that, as Cromwell was a believer in the impending Apocalyptic Last Judgement, he wanted to be present when the Jewish people were forced to atone in front of God for their ‘sins’. Given the Protector’s relative level-headedness, however, this seems a rather fanciful notion.)

Jewish businessmen were certainly financially adept but, as dislike of Jewish people was rife in medieval times and finance was one of the very few professions at that time open to them in England, they had to excel in financial affairs or they would face the alternative of poverty. One of the reasons for Edward’s earlier expulsion of the Jews had been that his courtiers and fellow aristocrats owed large sums of money to Jewish lenders. Expelling these people was one way of cancelling these debts, although this could be seen as a panicked response to sound business practice, which included the probability of conversion into long-term repayment of debt. The principal cause was clearly virulent anti-Semitism, as these ‘Christians’ believed in the ‘Christ-killer’ status of Jews and all too easily afforded credibility to ‘blood-libel’ slurs.

However, a number of Sephardic Jews remained in England, often in small villages such as Stoke Newington. The 30,000 or so Ultra-Orthodox Jews who today live in Stamford Hill are Ashkenazi (mainly from Ukraine and Germany), and their recent history before reaching England was a harrowing and difficult story, as I will relate in Chapter Seven.

Newington Green’s Unitarian church was opened on the southern boundary of the parish in 1708. Initially, it was built as a Presbyterian place of worship but gradually it had become a home to Unitarians and, as such, today it remains committed to these anti-Trinitarian beliefs.

In the same area there also flourished the dissenting academies, which taught a variety of subjects and did not require, as did the two English universities of Oxford and Cambridge, a knowledge of Latin and Greek nor, more importantly, a commitment to the Anglican Church. These academies hosted, and in some cases educated, sympathetic intellectual luminaries of the calibre of John Locke, Daniel Defoe, John Stuart Mill, David Hume, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Tom Paine and others of a similar ilk.

Although from the early eighteenth century Anglican religious intolerance was becoming more relaxed, and religious dissent was correspondingly diminishing in its impact as a contentious issue between Anglicans and nonconformists, the position of the established Church remained a powerful one. Political, cultural and economic dissatisfactions, however, continued to be expressed and Stoke Newington willingly maintained its role as a protector of individual beliefs. The quasi-heretic meaning of ‘dissent’, although in some circles retaining a strong foothold, was evolving into its wider, more complex definition.

The dissenting tradition continued in 1840 with the opening of Stoke Newington’s Abney Park Cemetery, one of London’s ‘magnificent seven’ cemeteries that were established to cope with the rapid population growth of the time and the inability of London’s small churchyards to contain this expansion. Abney Park was the only non-denominational, unconsecrated cemetery of the new seven burial grounds and, with its 32 available acres, it was considered sufficiently large for its task.

After the closure of Clerkenwell’s nonconformist graveyard Bunhill Fields, known as ‘God’s Acre’ and which had long been the only burial space in London for all nonconformists, who were not permitted to be buried in the City of London, Abney Park became the final resting place of later dissenters, opponents of the prevailing status quo and objectors to the mores of the time.