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.

Hackney

A medieval tower, a Tudor house, Matcham's variety palace and a lido the neighbourhood got back.

The red brick and terracotta front of a large theatre with EMPIRE carved across it in stone letters, and a modern block-lettered sign standing out beside it. — The Hackney Empire on Mare Street, built for variety in 1901 and a theatre again since 1986.

St Augustine's Tower stands alone in the churchyard off Mare Street, and it is the oldest building in the borough: about 1275, and all that was kept of the medieval parish church when the rest came down in 1798. James Spiller's St John-at-Hackney had gone up beside it the year before, one of the largest parish churches in London, built for a village that was about to stop being one. Sutton House on Homerton High Street is older as a house. Red brick, 1535, put up for Ralph Sadleir, who was Thomas Cromwell's secretary and later Henry VIII's; it is the oldest house in east London and has since been a school, a chapel, a trade union office and a squat. Hackney filled up in the nineteenth century, and the Empire is what a full Hackney could pay for. Frank Matcham built it on Mare Street in 1901 for variety, and Marie Lloyd, Charlie Chaplin and Stan Laurel all played it. It spent thirty years as a television studio and then a bingo hall, and has been a theatre again since 1986. London Fields has been common ground since at least the thirteenth century. Its lido - fifty metres, heated, open all year - was closed in 1988 and got back in 2006 after a long campaign, and Broadway Market runs from the far corner down to the canal, a market on and off since the 1890s.