Stoke Newington

The Story of a Dissenting Village

Rab MacWilliam

• Publisher: The History Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780750990912
• eBook ISBN: 9780750996440
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

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.

CHAPTER ONE

STOKE NEWINGTON: THE EARLY YEARS

In the Ice Ages, the glacier sheets passed south, crushing everything in their paths. They stopped just north of Stamford Hill and large parts of the Palaeolithic floor are undamaged … Man appears to have retreated in front of the advancing cold. There is no evidence that Palaeolithic people ever returned.

The Growth of Stoke Newington, Jack Whitehead

During the 1860s and 1870s, much of Stoke Newington’s fertile soil – a combination of gravel and brickearth sitting on London clay that had long supported its buildings, farmlands and pathways – was being dug up to an unprecedented extent and depth.

These frenetic excavations were caused by the high number of burials at the new Abney Park Cemetery, the arrival of the Stoke Newington overground railway station, which required the construction of railway cuttings and level surfaces for its trains and coaches, and the surge in local house-building, which insisted on solid foundations and basements. Much of this activity was being carried out on and around Stoke Newington Common (then a part of West Hackney parish), which was in 1872 bifurcated by the new Great Eastern Railway Line from Enfield to Shoreditch. Shovels were also busy at work elsewhere across this fast-expanding parish, including the land around today’s Alkham, Osbaldeston and Fountayne Roads as well as elsewhere in the area.

During the course of this backbreaking effort, it became apparent that a number of the artefacts discovered by the labourers were unusual objects and that they required the experienced attention of archaeologists, who had been arriving here. At a depth of almost 2m below the surface, and mainly in locations on and around the Common, the archaeologists unearthed sharp flint instruments, adzes, axe-heads, broken animal bones and antlers, all of which indicated that human hunter-gatherers had once lived in this area. But when were these implements in use and who were these early residents of Stoke Newington?

When the experts examined these discoveries, their analyses dated these tools and animal remains to the Palaeolithic (Stone Age) Period of 200,000 years ago, although some sources suggest an even earlier date. It seems that a group of primitive early humans – the forerunners of homo sapiens – had a settlement on what is today the area around the Common, which was then part of a flat plain, surrounded by swampy land, and which was significantly larger than today. These early proto-humans existed partly on the flesh of the animals that they drove into the nearby marshy lands or a river – which was possibly the ancestor of the Hackney Brook – to trap and kill these no doubt ferocious wild beasts.

THE HACKNEY BROOK

The Hackney Brook was an ancient stream with its source near Holloway. It had developed into a substantial river by the time it arrived at Stoke Newington where, as late as the 1830s, it was up to 10m wide when in flood, and even in dry weather it flowed at a rate of 400 cu ft of water every minute.

It ran eastward around the north of what are now Clissold Park and Abney Park Cemetery, crossed Stamford Hill beside the cemetery’s main gates – with stepping stones and then a bridge provided for those wishing to cross the road at that point – and circled round the north of Stoke Newington Common. It then struck south across today’s Brooke and Evering Roads, the west side of Hackney Downs, Hackney’s Mare Street (where another ford crossed the street, under today’s railway bridge) and Hackney Wick, before entering the River Lea at Old Ford where, when again in flood, it could reach 30m in width.

By the 1850s, the Brook was travelling through newly built-up areas and had become an unpleasant, disease-carrying open sewer. In 1860 it was culverted under the direction of Sir Joseph Bazalgette and was linked into London’s subterranean sewer system, where today this old river remains. Several street names, such as Glazebrook Road in Stoke Newington and Well Street in Hackney, are evocative reminders of the open passage of the Hackney Brook.

In one of its occasional fits of lunacy, Hackney Council in 2016 briefly considered reopening the river between Mare Street and Hackney Wick for purposes of swimming, canoeing and kayaking, but common sense prevailed in this case and the old waterway continued its underground course untroubled by human interference.

On a visit some years ago to the Museum of London, the first exhibit I encountered was a life-sized diorama of these Palaeolithic people on Stoke Newington Common. This was located close to the main entrance and was presumably one of the museum’s leading exhibits. I subsequently learnt that the archaeological evidence, and the great age of the various implements, have led to the Common’s historical status as one of the most important Palaeolithic sites in Europe. As a result, I began to treat what was the then-scruffy, overgrown Stoke Newington Common, which sits only a block away from where I live, with the respect that one reserves for a treasured family heirloom.

However, and putting to one side its ancient Stone Age origins, the area that is today agreed as the original site of a continuously occupied Stoke Newington was first formally assessed and recorded in the late eleventh cen-tury.

In 1086, twenty years after he and his Norman troops (the name ‘Norman’ betraying their Norse Viking origins) had invaded England, King William I, or William the Conqueror, received from his aides the ‘Great Survey’ that he had commissioned. This work is the oldest public record in England, and it contained detailed information on more than 13,000 places in his new domain. It concerned itself with most of England and Wales: its land distribution and ownership, townships, manorial estates and copyholdings (short-term feudal leaseholdings granted by the lord of the manor), the nature and beneficiaries of local and individual taxation systems, and other information of a similar nature.

This monumental work of research, designed to discover the fiscal and landholding basis and relationships underpinning these Saxon territories that William had so recently appropriated, came to be labelled the ‘Domesday Book’. Unsurprisingly, the name stems from the Middle English ‘doomsday’ as, similar to the doctrinal finality of The Last Judgement, its findings and conclusions were considered immutable, at least by the country’s Norman overlords.

The Domesday Book revealed inter alia the presence of the tiny hamlet of ‘Neutone’ (‘new town in the wood’) almost hidden from sight in a clearing in the Forest of Middlesex, close to the Roman-built, first-century Ermine Street and located around 3 miles north of the Bishopsgate entrance to the City of London. After the Conquest, the ancient forest was proclaimed a Royal Forest that also included common land. It stretched for 20 miles across the north of the city and was described as ‘dense with foliage concealing wild animals – stags, does, boars and wild bulls’. The Domesday Book noted that Neutone consisted of four ‘villeins’ (bonded feudal serfs), thirty-seven ‘cottars’ (peasants who lived in a cottage owned by a farm) and was occupied by around 100 people, with much of the settlement being surrounded by extensive, thick woodland.

Although informed historical conjecture suggests that Neutone had been continuously occupied since the early Saxon period established a couple of hundred years previously (‘Middlesex’ meaning ‘mid-Saxon’), William’s survey was the first written description of the hamlet and inhabitants of what was to become, almost a millennium later, today’s thriving inner-London ‘village’ of Stoke Newington.

After William’s brief, abrupt intrusion into its anonymity, Neutone reverted to type, and for another couple of hundred years or so it again virtually disappeared from public gaze, seemingly content to remain in its relative obscurity among the open fields and the gradually disappearing woodland. The hamlet was to resurface in the later medieval period under a new name – Stoke Newington (‘stoke’ meaning ‘timber’ or ‘tree stump’) – with only a small increase in its extent and its population but, alongside the village’s peasantry, serfs and general labourers, there was a growing number of wealthier, more culturally diverse and more politically influential residents than had existed under Norman rule.

During its seemingly sleepy social interregnum, however, the village had not been entirely inactive. In the year 939, before William arrived on the scene, the Saxon King Athelstan, grandson of Alfred the Great, had granted in perpetuity to the Prebendary (‘Dean’ and ‘Chapter’, or ecclesiastical overlords) of St Paul’s Cathedral an area of twenty-four ‘hides’ (the Old English word ‘hide’ amounting to approximately 100 acres), which was ‘next the Wall of London’.

This expansive gesture to his spiritual peers comprised much of the Manor of Stepney, then one of the largest and most powerful manors in England, and which included the parishes of St Augustine’s in Hackney and St Leonard’s in Shoreditch. A small part of this regal gift also granted to St Paul’s the village of Neutone, situated a mile or so to the north of these parishes.

By the early twelfth century, Neutone had acquired a rudimentary manorial structure and a small chapel or church that, over time, came to be known as St Mary’s Church. The precise date of the church’s establishment must remain speculative, as its early records were destroyed along with the original St Paul’s Cathedral in the 1666 Great Fire of London. The parish, with an overall area of 325 acres, was formally instituted in 1314 when its first rector, one Thomas de London, was appointed. St Mary’s Church was by then the local manorial place of worship, although its oldest recorded burial monument, which is now long gone, was erected in memory of one Matilda Elkington in 1473.

In medieval times the early parish boundaries were, to the west, the old pathway of Green Lanes and, to the east, London Way or Ermine Street, the latter leading to Cambridge, Lincoln and, eventually, York. These two ancient roads were linked together by the winding, gravel thoroughfare of Church Street. To the north and south the boundaries were largely open fields and woods, and these merged with the neighbouring parishes in a fluid and frequently undefined manner.

The land and fields to the north of Church Street were largely ‘demesne’, an old French word meaning ‘belonging to the lord of the manor’, and these fields were well maintained and carefully planned. To the south of Church Street the land distribution was less organised, as there were several estates, such as Pulteney and Stonefields – and, in the early eighteenth century, the Palatine – and these were smaller landholdings under the control of less experienced managers than was the demesne. Also, directly south of the church lay the ‘glebe’ land, which was tended by the church rector and was part of his ‘benefice’, or salary.

During the early years of the Tudor era – which lasted from Henry VII’s victory over Richard III at Bosworth Field 1485 until the death of Elizabeth I in 1603 – the village of Stoke Newington, and its southern neighbour Newington Green, whose existence was first publicly recorded in 1480, slowly emerged from relative slumber. The surrounding woodland was gradually diminishing in size due to deforestation, thereby permitting the expansion of cultivatable land for crops and grazing fields for animals, and also the profitable sale of the timber. With the village’s proximity and ease of travel to the City of London, its open landscapes and clean air, the availability of more than sufficient land for building decent homes, and its tranquil solitude, Stoke Newington – then containing fewer than 100 households, which were concentrated at the eastern end of the street and dotted along the London Road – began to prosper.

By the mid-sixteenth century, it had evolved into a favoured destination for a day out and as a refuge from the city for merchants, traders and aristocrats, some of whom began to construct in the parish large brick-built houses and mansions with spreading gardens and pastures, and to take up residence here. Generally, these wealthy arrivals were welcomed by the inhabitants of Stoke Newington, whose incomes were supplemented by catering to the newcomers’ needs and requirements.

Other than the arrival of these newcomers, there seems to have been very little to report about the parish of Stoke Newington during the first half of the sixteenth century. In this respect, it was probably a bit like today’s radio programme The Archers: it was located in the countryside, people gossiped to each other about parochial matters, everyone knew each other, they all gradually grew older and, generally, not a great deal happened. Or perhaps I’m being unkind to the then-inhabitants of Stoke Newington (or to The Archers).

Nevertheless, this small community continued with its policy of deforestation and the manufacture of bricks (which, given the abundant brickearth in much of the local soil, was a common, profitable business across the area). The inhabitants also plied their various trades, enjoyed their archery, rabbit coursing and hunting of various small animals, and drank their ales in the local alehouses, such as Le Bell on the Hoop (established in 1405), the Hinde, the Falcon and the Cock and Harp, which became, after 1603, The Three Crowns.

The reason for the Cock and Harp’s change of name was that, owing to the intricate complexity of monarchic succession, after the death of the childless Queen Elizabeth in 1603, James VI of Scotland was her closest living relative and thus also became James I of England, thereby replacing the Tudors with the Stuart dynasty. The new King, along with the Lord Mayor and Sheriffs of the city who had ventured out to Stamford Hill to welcome him, had popped into the Cock and Harp on the London Road for a few beers after James’s lengthy, triumphant journey down from Edinburgh to his London coronation, and the bar’s landlord was not slow to notice a marketing opportunity.

These pubs were on or around Church Street, and there were another five licensed premises in the parish, most probably on the London Road, to service the needs of the passengers on the horse-drawn coaches and the long-distance travellers. As the taverns began to proliferate under the new Stuart regime, so too did the objections to the parish vestry increase from the emerging Puritan dissenters in Stoke Newington, who were mainly teetotal abstainers and who disapproved of alcohol.

(From the feudal period until the late nineteenth century in England, the term ‘vestry’ referred to a regular meeting of selected parishioners who were charged with the discussion and dispatch of parochial business and related matters. The vestry can be seen as the equivalent of today’s local government authority, with their name deriving from where they normally assembled: the vestry, the part of a church in which were kept the parish records and ecclesiastic vestments. However, they frequently also held meetings in other venues, a favourite being public houses.)

As well as enjoying local taverns, many locals worked on the fields, market gardens and orchards, the last two being skills they had learnt from Protestant refugees who had arrived from Europe, as the City of London was fast expanding and running out of space to accommodate its people, never mind having room to...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• 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
• Further Reading
• Postscript