The American writer Edgar Allan Poe, famous for his horror stories like ‘The Fall of the House Of Usher’ and ‘The Tell-tale Heart’ (Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque) went to a school ran by a Dr. Bransby on the site of the present Town Hall between 1817 and 1820. Bransby said of his pupil ‘I liked the boy. His parents spoilt him by allowing him too much pocket money. He was intelligent, wayward and wilful.’ Edgar later wrote of the village of his youth:-

‘a misty looking village of England with gigantic and gnarled trees, deeply shadowed avenues and a thousand shrubberies’
(‘William Wilson’ 1839)

However by 1864, naturalist Shirley Hibberd, while still praising the wild birds of the area, including nightingales, notes ‘all around the builders are drawing a close cordon of bricks.’

On the corner of Seven Sisters Road and Green Lanes stands a prominent redbrick pub with unusual Tudor style crowstepped gables. A.W. Blomfield built it in 1931 for Watney’s brewery.

Proceed south along Green Lanes. On the left is-

Built between 1948 and 1952 by the LCC (Durnford and Miller) it was the first post-war health centre in England. Aneurin Bevan, the Minister of Health, cut the first turf. It is a typical building of the fifties with concrete box-framed windows with Crittall metal frames and an emphasis on the horizontal.

The south east regional headquarters of the TGWU was extended in 1987 by architects White and Travis and opened by the then General Secretary, Ron Todd.

On of the most impressive buildings in Hackney borough it has all the qualities of a Scottish baronial castle. Robert Billings designed it in 1854-56 as a pumping station for the New River Company, lifting water from the aqueduct to the filter beds on the other side of Green Lanes. This site has now been cleared to make way for an extensive housing development named after the founder of the New River Company, Sir Hugh Myddleton. Bridget Cherry writes of the pumping station, ‘The variety of motifs and outline is beyond belief. The chimney is a tall polygonal castle tower. In addition, a big round tower for the standpipe, with a square top stage set diagonally, and at the opposite angle a stair turret with a conical top. The keep itself is buttressed and has Gothic windows and a large monogram with Mylne’s initials’. (W.C.Mylne was the chief engineer to the New River Company at the time.)

Becoming redundant when water provision from this site ceased in the 1980s, the reservoir now provides facilities for water born leisure activities managed by Hackney Council. To the north of the Castle can be seen the final stretch of the New River running alongside the reservoir. This was first opened as an aqueduct in 1612 to bring clean water from Hertfordshire to the City. The scheme, first conceived by Edmund Coltshurst, was supported by wealthy merchant Hugh Myddleton and by James 1st. It ran originally from Amwell and Chadwell Springs near Ware to Islington, a distance of over forty miles. It still provides water for London via a pipe to the water purification works at Coppermill Lane in Walthamstow.

Clissold Park has a fascinating and rather romantic history. It was opened as a public park by the Metropolitan Board of Works in 1889, however it was earlier a private estate, known as Newington Park. In 1793 a house was built within it, on the banks of the New River, for Quaker businessman Jonathon Hoare. In 1811 it became the property of the Crawshay family who had made a fortune from iron manufacture in Merthyr Tydfil, South Wales. Eliza, the daughter of William Crawshay, fell in love with the local vicar the Rev. Augustus Clissold, a liaison strongly opposed by her father. He threatened to shoot the go-between who carried their love letters and it is also said that he heightened the garden wall so that they could not glimpse each other.

Once the old man died however, the lovers married and Augustus moved into the house renaming it Clissold House and subsequently the park was named after him.

Two ponds near this entrance to the park are named after Joseph Beck and John Runtz leaders of the campaign to buy Clissold Park for public use.

These ponds are vestiges of the Hackney Brook, a stream rising in Hornsey and flowing through Stoke Newington and Hackney to join the River Lea at Hackney Wick. That brook has since been culverted as a sewer.

Originally known as Paradise House, it was built in the 1790s for the Irish Quaker Jonathon Hoare, a banker whose business later became part of Lloyds Bank now HSBC. His brother Samuel was an active campaigner against slavery. The front of the neo-classical house is dominated by a one-storey colonnade of fluted Greek Doric columns which is approached by a ramped courtyard which gives the house an elevated setting. There are plans to restore the house but at present the entrance hall is used as a café and is very popular in the Summer.

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Stoke Newington is fortunate in retaining its two original parish churches, a ‘homely’ Tudor structure alongside a grand Victorian Gothic creation. Bridget Cherry writes, 'The contrast between the Old Church on the edge of Clissold Park and the New Church across the road is impressive, one still the church of an English village, the other with ambitions of a rising London suburb.’

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The churchyard retains, like the church, an air of the countryside. Amongst the memorials here are tombs for Anna Laetitia Barbauld and the sister of William Wilberforce, both like Samuel Hoare were active in the anti-slavery movement of the early 19th century. Mrs. Barbauld was also one of the earliest writers to espouse the rights of women. Twenty years before Mary Wollstonecraft’s, ‘A Vindication of the Rights of Woman’, Mrs. Barbauld wrote in 1773 a poem entitled :-

The Rights of Woman

Yes, injured Woman! rise, assert thy right!
Woman! too long degraded, scorned, opprest;
O born to rule in partial Law's despite,
Resume thy native empire o'er the breast!

The growing population of the parish in the 19th century led to the building of a new, much larger, church in the 1850s on the site of the former rectory.

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Liz Robinson describes this as ‘one of the most exciting buildings built in Hackney in recent years’. It was opened in February 2002. The architects are Hodder Associates who also designed the Learning and Technology Centre in central Hackney. The roof of this building is particularly impressive consisting of twenty ‘toroid’, or shell shaped segments, of steel and glass which flood the centre with light. Inside are two pools, a health suite and gym

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Built between 1935 and 1937 by J. Reginald Truelove as a Town Hall and Assembly Hall for the Metropolitan Borough of Stoke Newington, it went out of use in this role when the Borough of Stoke Newington combined with Hackney and Shoreditch in 1964 to become the London Borough of Hackney, an event still resented by many older residents of Stoke Newington!
The building is convex in form, as it faces the road, and is built from Portland stone and long, narrow yellow and red bricks. Curiously it still shows traces of the camouflage paint from the 2nd world war.

Built in 1892, it is an early example of a borough library by architects Bridgman and Goss. It has a War Memorial entrance hall with the names of all Stoke Newington residents who died in the 1st world war which was added in 1923. Until recently the bust of Daniel Defoe and his original gravestone were on display in the entrance hall but these are now to be seen in the Hackney Museum in Mare Street, central Hackney.

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A pair of early Georgian red-brick houses dating from 1715 named after four sisters who inherited them in 1813. In a medieval mansion, demolished to make way for this pair, between 1592 and 1596 lived Edward De Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford (see the plaque). He later lived in Brooke House, Hackney and on his death in 1604 was buried in Hackney Churchyard.
Some scholars believe that he wrote many, if not all, the works attributed to William Shakespeare!

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Mrs Barbauld lived here between 1802 and her death in 1825. She entertained many literary and intellectual friends here in her salon - rather like a ‘Bloomsbury set’ of its day. Her husband, the Rev. Rochemont Barbauld was morning preacher at the Unitarian Newington Chapel on Newington Green. He suffered periods of mental illness that resulted in his suicide in 1808. He drowned himself in the New River.

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Set back from Mrs Barbauld’s house, with a supermarket built out from the ground floor, is a substantial redbrick house dating to around 1700. Here lived the author and philosopher Thomas Day (1748-1789). Day was a follower of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s theories of education. In a somewhat eccentric experiment he took two young girls, one dark, one fair, from an orphanage and educated them with a view to marrying one, when they grew up, whichever was most acceptable to him. As might be expected, the project failed although one did marry his best friend John Bicknell. With John Bicknell, Day wrote his first poem, ‘The Dying Negro’ (1773), one of the first literary attacks on the slave trade. The poem is in the form of an extended suicide note from a black slave that killed himself rather than be sent to the plantation. The hard facts of the slaves’ lives is illustrated by one verse:-

Rouz’d by the lash, go forth their chearless way
And while their souls with shame and anguish burn,
Salute with groans unwelcome morn’s return

Whether or not ‘Shakespeare’ lived in Stoke Newington, another famous writer in the English Language certainly did. Daniel Defoe (1659-1731), who wrote Robinson Crusoe, a Journal of the Plague Year and Moll Flanders, built a house in 1716 in what is now called Defoe Road (off Church Street) where a blue plaque commemorates the fact. As a boy he attended a Dissenter’s Academy in Newington Green run by a Dr. Morton. One of his fellow pupils was one Timothy Crusoe! Later, after marrying Mary Tuffley, Defoe lived in Hackney parish where his two daughters were christened. As an outspoken supporter of the cause of non-conformism and against the accepted doctrine of the Church of England, he was subjected to imprisonment and torture. He died of ‘a lethargy’ in 1731 at the age of 71. His bust and original tombstone can be seen in the Hackney Museum.

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This fine group of four storey houses with a central carriage way and ‘exuberant eared door cases with carved friezes’ (Cherry) was built in 1734. This and many other surviving houses in Church Street reflect the select country village that Stoke Newington was in the Georgian period.

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Two substantial detached mansions were demolished to make way for this non-conformist cemetery in 1838, Fleetwood House and Abney House. The entrance to the cemetery in Church Street is through fine wrought iron gates of 1701 all that is left of Abney House. Poet and hymnologist Isaac Watts came to stay with Lady Abney there for a week in 1735 but stayed until his death in 1748. During his long sojourn there he entertained leading non-conformist preachers like John Wesley and George Whitfield. Amongst many famous hymns written by Watts are

‘O God our help in ages past’ and ‘When I behold the wondrous cross’.
Fleetwood house was, in the 17th century, the home of General Fleetwood, the son-in-law of Oliver Cromwell. Somewhat surprisingly, Fleetwood survived the restoration despite that fact that he was one of the signatories to the death warrant of Charles I.

George Collinson, who had earlier founded the Theological Seminary in Well Street Hackney, masterminded the creation of the cemetery. George Loddiges, nurseryman of Mare Street, Hackney supervised the planting of trees in the burial ground, conceived as an arboretum. The Abney Park Cemetery Trust bought the grounds from Hackney Council in 1992 for £1.00 and now manages the cemetery. They have created a visitor centre and organise guided tours and other activities in the grounds.

Enter the cemetery via the gates in Church Street.

Among the first memorials encountered is a large sandstone shield commemorating William and Catharine Booth, co-founders of the Salvation Army and dedicated to social, political and religious action.

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The High Street is a continuation of Kingsland Road and originated as the Roman road Ermine Street running due north out of the city of Londinium. 187-191 form an “uncommonly impressive trio” (Nikolaus Pevsner) built between 1715 and 1728. Each of five bays and three storeys, they were renovated in the 1980s “but only after they had stood empty and vandalised for twenty years and had lost most of their interior features” (Cherry) In fact, no.187 was totally reconstructed behind the façade.

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