Stoke Newington

A village that filled up with people who would not conform, and kept the street they argued on.

Church Street is the spine of it, and there are two churches called St Mary's facing each other across the road. The old one went up in 1563, small and brick and much mended since, badly bombed in the war and put back in the fifties. The new one is George Gilbert Scott's, begun in 1858, with a steeple of 250 feet that was not finished until 1890 and can be seen from half of Hackney. What made the place was dissent. Far enough out of London to be left alone, Stoke Newington filled with people who would not sign up to the established church, and with the meeting houses, academies and arguments that came with them. Daniel Defoe was living on the north side of Church Street by 1709. Mary Wollstonecraft, Richard Price and Anna Sewell were all here, and Edgar Allan Poe was sent to school here as a boy. Abney Park was laid out in 1840 as a burial ground for people of no established church, and William Booth of the Salvation Army lies in it. The New River was cut through these fields in the 1610s and a reach of it still lies in front of Clissold House, where the park keeps deer. What is here now is a long street of independent shops and pubs, with Turkish food running the length of the High Street and Stoke Newington Road at the other end.

Photo by Chris Whippet, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons