Neighbourhoods

London is often described as a collection of distinct urban villages rather than a single sprawling metropolis, due to the way it developed over time. Discover each neighbourhood's unique character and charm.

Dalston

A Roman road, a market of the 1880s, and the best night out in this part of London.

Kingsland High Street: a wide straight road lined with low shopfronts and flats above, buses and traffic running through, the street reaching away to the horizon. — Kingsland High Street, straight because the Romans laid it out.

Kingsland Road runs straight because the Romans laid it: it is Ermine Street, the road north out of London, and Dalston grew along it as a hamlet of Hackney that stayed small until the railways arrived. The straightness is still the first thing you notice. Two institutions tell you who came. The German Hospital opened in 1845 to treat London's German-speaking population free of charge - there were some thirty thousand Germans in the city then, the largest immigrant group in it - and went on working until 1987. Ridley Road market started in the 1880s and has taken in each arrival since: Jewish, then Caribbean, then Turkish and Kurdish, then West African, all of it still on the same stalls. The music came later and made the name. The Four Aces Club ran on Dalston Lane from 1966 and put on ska, reggae and then jungle for thirty years; what followed it is the reason people come here after dark now. In daylight it is the market, the Turkish grills along Kingsland Road and a theatre in a former railway building.