A newspaper article about Hackney boys tripping up women and swearing in their faces? No, it’s not a scene on a Lower Clapton bus, or even an article about Diane Abbott’s recent walkabout: it’s an account of bad behaviour in Mare Street, as reported in the News of the World on Sunday 2nd May, 1886.

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. Now give me Jacqui Smith and a time machine.

Diane Abbott and three Labour colleagues - Keith Vaz, Gwyn Prosser and Karen Buck - take to the well-lit streets of Stoke Newington to prove that it’s safe to walk the streets of Hackney. Vaz sniffs an onion and inspects a butternut squash for the cameras, but fails to buy anything.

Meanwhile, in an East London hospital, a teenager lies in a critical condition, stabbed the night before on Rectory Road, near Hackney Downs.

Safe, Diane, safe.

At risk of this becoming the Hackney bog blog, it seems there has been a major movement at the abandoned Stamford Hill public conveniences. You may remember my earlier post, in which I pointed out that these loos had been left to rot since the late 1990s, just before I moved into the area. If you take a trip over to that article, you’ll see photos of the lavs filled with litter and something like a six-feet deep pool of stagnant water.

That’s why I was pleased when the things were drained in December; although I soon came to regard that as a freak of nature: within days the water was rising steadily once more.

Anyway, as you can see from the photo above, the council (I assume it is the council) has finally done something. The bogs have been properly drained, the litter has been cleared, and a cage has been erected over each entrance to prevent the worst of the rubbish from being blown in.

Sure, it’s outrageous that another civic amenity has been left to rot; but it’s great news that nine years of neglect has at least been halted. Thousands of gallons of filth swilling around the centre of one of Hackney’s main shopping areas was nothing less than an expression of municipal contempt.

So, well done to the Council: actions like this do a lot for community pride. Now let’s come up with a long-term plan for the facility. Sadly it seems beyond saving, but I’m sure there are plenty of local people who have imaginative ideas about what we can do next. Why not talk to them?

Hackney Council has decided that - on reflection - it might be a good idea to let families swim together on Sunday mornings.

Clissold Leisure Centre have just called me up to tell me that, following my complaint, they have re-thought their policy of holding gender segregated swimming in the training pool on Sunday mornings.

The original policy had the effect of preventing families with young children from going swimming together on Sunday mornings, and even barred young male children from swimming with their mothers in the gender segregated training pool. The policy impacted particularly harshly upon working families.

Gender segregated swimming will now take place on Tuesday evenings.

The decision was taken on the grounds of ‘numbers’: there are more families who want to swim on Sunday mornings, than men and women who are prevented for religious or other reasons from swimming in non-segregated pools.

Well done: it’s nice to see good sense and fairness win through for a change.

In this series of posts, I’m following the route taken on 26th July 1898 by a social investigator, George H. Duckworth, who was helping to compile Charles Booth’s Poverty Map for London (1898-1899). He was accompanied by a policeman, Inspector Fitzgerald, who accompanied him round a district that was

The investigator made detailed notes, supplemented by Fitzgerald’s observations, and I have been comparing these to my observations of the streets and buildings as they are today. I quote often from the original notebooks, so it’s worthwhile reading my introductory post and also familiarising yourself with the poverty map’s colour coding, listed to your left and explained in more detail here.

———

Duckworth began his day at Homerton Station, so I head down there to look around. Then, as now, the platforms were situated just off Church Road, known since 1936 as Barnabas Road. When the investigator arrived in 1898 he saw a street that was moderately comfortable but bruised here and there with want; and whilst, today, he would no longer be able to look out for bootless children or straw-hatted rent collectors, he would immediately realise that this pocket of Homerton has been left to rot.

The Alma public house would still be one of the first landmarks he saw, but instead of a busy boozer under the stewardship of delightfully-named Fanny Finch, he’d be confronted with a neglected building, left dilapidated after an attempt to convert it into flats, its tiled entrance smashed out and then engorged with breezeblocks.

I find myself wondering how Duckworth would interpret the busyness of the glass telephone boxes, one either side of the station approach. As I walk past, both are in use; and as one person vacates his booth, another man crosses the road and enters it. Duckworth was a man who could whip out a moral judgement at moment’s notice (“Some slatternly girls. ‘No brothels now but there used to be.’ But it looked as though there might be still…”). Would he see people who lacked mobiles, or men who were chasing drugs, or whores, or both?

I can’t decide; but at least the kiosks aren’t smashed and I’ve not seen anyone piss in them.

From the station Duckworth and his escort, Inspector Fitzgerald, walked up Church Street and turned into Homerton High Street, examining in turn the fibrillae of roads and closes that splay off on its journey east. First on their route were Nisbet Place and Nisbet Street (which Duckworth spelled as ‘Nesbit’ throughout).

East down Homerton High Street to Nesbit Place, which has a block of model dwellings and some small factories of tables and pianofortes. Children were making a grotto in the St[reet]. Further east into Nesbit St, which the map marks as dark blue lined with black. From Fitzgerald’s account it would perhaps be dark blue but not black. It is evidently poor. Many children and costers barrows about (2.40). Two families in each house. Houses two-storied. “Prostitutes used to live here but do not now & it was never a notorious place” said Fitzgerald. One or two houses were noticeable for torn blinds and broken windows. The houses have 7 rooms and are let for 13/- to 14/- per week. They have yards rather than gardens at the back of them.

Neither Nisbet Street or Nisbet Place now exist: both were demolished as part of the slum clearances between 1935 and 1936. By then, it was becoming unacceptable to let people live in houses like these on Nisbet Street, pictured here in 1930.

Instead, those who knew best decided that the working classes needed didn’t just need homes, but an “experiment in the construction of a village in modern dress.” * Of course, that was just a good way of talking up a vast, crowded, six-storey citadel of 311 council flats. The year after they were built, they looked like this:

Imposing. Vast. A ghetto dressed up as Progress. Even King George VI and Queen Elizabeth dropped by to declare the place officially open:

Note how the families hang out of their windows to greet their royal guests: although there are over 300 flats, there are only 15 communal entrance points. That’s one door to the outside world for roughly every 20 families.

Little residue of that pride is evident today. The exterior walls show where channels of water have run unchecked down the bricks. There’s litter on the communal grass patches that face the street - visible from the flats, but accessible from none. A diamond shaped placard in one window declares

TOO
MANY
FREAKS

All the communal doors face inwards, into what was probably conceived as a spacious courtyard. It has a playpark in its centre, ensuring that a group of bored and slouching teenagers is the main focal point in this ill-conceived, patronising design. For the first time I realise that council blocks and state secondary schools have shared the same kinds of shape and function as the decades have evolved. Back in the 30s, inward-facing segregation was sold as utopia; these days both kids and residents get shoved in flimsy glass and steel structures behind a perimeter of metal fences, spied on all the while by CCTV cameras for their own ’safety’ and ‘protection’.

Surroundings like these poison human warmth. If planners and architects don’t trust whole groups of people to live like others, and they use bricks and mortar to force them apart, pride decays into neglect. Especially when their municipal landlord couldn’t care a prickly turd about the few symbols of shared purpose that are left to its tenants:

Four bolt holes of contempt.

Duckworth and Fitzgerald moved on from Nisbet Street to Tranby Place (now gone) and then into Crozier Terrace. It too was poor - “dark blue” - and

Its inhabitants are common labourers. The men work in the dust shoot in the marshes and the women go our charing at 2/6 per day or go out/take in to do washing. Houses two storied.

Today, one side of the street is blocked in by the doorless, eastern side of Nisbet House, its six stories dotted liberally, but not uniformly, with satellite dishes. No terraces remain, although there is a pub on the junction with the High Street, The Jackdaw and Stump, which looks as though it must have been built shortly after Duckworth’s tour. It is brightly painted, with slightly sagging net curtains forming a backdrop to a series of no-nonsense notices and placards. The imposing carved eagle above the main door suggests the place has changed its name at least once, but the back of the building is dilapidated with crooked pipes, rotting window frames and an off-kilter burglar alarm.

At the foot of the road, there’s a children’s nursery. But before you reach it, there’s a secure gate leading off to an unmarked complex of buildings. I see only two people exit from the gate, whilst a Dial-a-Ride bus is given access. Only later do I discover that the street is also home to a medium secure unit, a hospital for mentally disordered criminals.

The unit’s siting makes sense. When Duckworth left Crozier Terrace and turned right into Homerton High Street, he soon walked past the Hackney Union Workhouse which, in 1911, had a lunatic block built on its western side where today’s secure unit is sited. The Workhouse also had an infirmary and, when the site came under the control of London County Council in 1930 it became Hackney Hospital for the next 57 years.

I decide to take a closer look at the former workhouse later, and in the meantime I follow Duckworth’s steps round into Sidney Road (Kenworthy Road since 1939) where:

…came a block of newly made or half made streets round the Sydney [sic] Road Board School. They are on the top of the hill which goes down into the Hackney Marshes. Chevet Street. Swinnerton St: road hardly made or very badly kept. No pavement. 2 storied houses - purple in character. Women throwing slops in the street.

The Board School is now Cardinal Pole Roman Catholic School. As I approach, Wednesday afternoon lessons have just finished and pupils are making their way down the hill in groups, seemingly unaware or uninterested of the fact that they are forcing other pedestrians off the path. Despite the policemen stationed at the school gates on both Kenworthy Road and Swinnerton Street, I feel uncomfortable with the idea of taking my camera out of my pocket, so I decide to take photographs of this area at the weekend. Instead I look around and memorise what I see, from the mobile phone mast on the top of the school block, to the girl who, in full view of the police officer, whips out a marker pen and casually scribbles on a white patch of wall before vanishing into Kemey’s Street.

The collection of graffiti contains the usual declarations of love, musical affiliation and gang worship, but also - weirdly - has a streak devoted to Iraq and Afghanistan.

Emma love’s Darren Forever

E.9. Stikz

Swinnerton Street itself has improved little since the time Duckworth witnessed women throwing their slops into it. There are still a few two-storey cottages at either end, but the bulk of the road is lined by the back walls of houses belonging to the relatively modern Herbert Butler estate. This arrangement rips the character out of most of the road, reducing it to a sluice channel for windswept litter and schoolchildren.

One of the smaller roads, Mabley Street, which connects Swinnerton Street and Kenworthy Road, has fared better since Duckworth reported that it was “still in the course of building.” Yet the investigator would certainly have concluded that the houses on its north side showed signs of being more affluent than those on its south. The latter terrace has signs indicating two flats are being offered for rent, whilst black binbags are piled deep up the entrance steps to many of the houses. A window in one house has been boarded up, many of the buildings have flaking paintwork, and there are boxes of fried chicken, spilling bones out on to the pavement. I see one resident - a woman - poke her head out of a basement flat and quickly disappear again.

The north side of Mabley Road, on the other hand contains two properties for sale, has neatly-piled refuse (including a Marks and Spencer bag hangly elegantly off a railing) and one resident - wearing the heavy rectangular spectacles beloved of those who work in the media - smoking a cigarette outside his front door. Duckworth would have classed these houses pink to red, whilst those opposite would have been purple to pink.

I move on to the former Hackney Workhouse, which is less than a minute’s walk away. The block below, as seen from Chevet Street, is the infirmary complex that was built in 1882.

As I look upwards, an argument breaks out in the corner house that joins Kenworthy Road and Chevet Street, so I head off to a local pub to refresh myself and marvel at how Duckworth covered so many streets, in so much detail, in a single day.

Next: Up Glyn Road to Clapton Park where Duckworth finds many boys bathing nude in a ditch.

I’m not sure how I managed to miss this:

It commemorates also the melancholy and untimely fate of the Alderman’s daughter Elizabeth, who died Dec. 11, 1781, “in consequence of her cloaths taking fire the preceding evening.” The inscription adds, “Reader, if ever you should witness such an afflicting scene, recollect, that the only method to extinguish the flame is to stifle it by an immediate covering.”

To find out what and where, visit this page.

I seem to remember Dave Hill discussing this about a year ago. Anyway, it now seems to have become a more pressing issue, at least for this writer over at Harry’s Place:

This morning, my wife, five year old son and I thought it might be nice to go swimming in the newly re-opened local swimming pool, Clissold Leisure Centre. We got to the pool at 10.30, to be told that:

- the main pool was too deep to be safe for a five year old;
- the “training” pool was women only between 10.45 and 12.30 every Sunday;

I got angry. I nearly swore. I rarely get angry at people who are doing no more than implementing a policy, because it isn’t fair on them. I apologised.

Not to worry, we thought. I’ll go in the main pool. My wife and son will go to the training pool. However, that was not permitted. My son, being of the male gender, was not allowed in a women-only swimming session.

I asked why this policy had been put in place, in a way which prevented families swimming together, at a peak time, on the one day of the week during which both mothers and fathers were likely to be doing family things. What reason was there for barring very little male children from the training pool? Why schedule the single-gender swimming session right in the middle of the morning, so that families which arrived at (say) 10.15 would only have half an hour before they were chucked out? Why not schedule it for early in the morning or late in the evening, or on a week day?

Apparently, the policy had been set by Hackney’s Equal Opportunities officer.

However, there was a paddling pool open at 11 in which he would be allowed to splash around. No use for learning to swim, we discovered when we got there. The pool was absolutely filled with families with toddlers, many of whom had been chucked out of the training pool in order to make way for the women only swimming session. They stood around for 10 minutes, dripping in the corridor, before the paddling pool was finally open.

While in the paddling pool, I met a woman whose husband was a Hackney councillor. She was also rather angry. I suggested that this was a classic example of an equal opportunities officer trying to cater to an illusory problem, and in doing so, simply feeding the xenophobic prejudices peddled by the Daily Mail.

Apparently not, she said. There were fierce battles in Hackney Council over the issue. The main movers for prime time single sex swimming were the Hassidic jews. She was not racist, she stressed: but they had the advantage of being able to run an effective community-based letter-writing campaign, and of organising politically around the issue.

Fine, I said. And what would the policy be if a group of racists decided that “sensitivity” to their cultural preferences resulted in a whites only swimming session? Why should a public institution subsidise the expression, in a public place, of the gender apartheid practice mandated by a small religious minority at all?

She laughed. Perhaps I have spent a little too long arguing about this sort of stuff on Harry’s Place. But she was still pissed off at the timing of the swimming session: snap bang in the middle of the traditional day for family activities. If we wrote letters to councillors, perhaps we would be able to persuade the Council to move the gender segregated swimming time to one which was less disruptive for the majority. The Hassidic jewish councillors had made an almighty fuss about the issue, and the arguments had been fierce: but a compromise had been reached, which was to schedule women only swimming for Sunday mornings.

My wife suggested that it might be an idea to have the sessions during a weekday, before 6 p.m., when the Hassidic jewish women - who are less likely to work than non-religious women - would be able to make use of the pool without preventing working families from enjoying a traditional Sunday pastime.

Anyhow, what do you think?

For what it’s worth, my views are the same as they were then. This is what I said on Dave Hill’s blog:

By reserving the baths to one particular group for a weekend afternoon, many others are unable to use a facility they pay for, at one of the times that would suit them best. If any group wishes to reserve a public facility to themselves for any period of time, I think they should have to pay full hire charges, which should then be passed on to other users in the form of improved facilities or lower charges.

The flaw in this (if not the argument) is, of course, that the Orthodox Jews would not, for religious reasons, be able to use the baths. But to let them do so, at the expense of others (both in terms of money and convenience), is surely the more objectionable situation?

What’s your view?

I’ve been getting on well with my walk round Homerton, but it’s taking an age to properly research and write up.

I have, though, discovered a cache of fascinating films that have been put online by the Hackney Archives Department. You can find all of them here, but the one that has been of greatest interest to me so far has been this one of a slum clearance.

Note: It’s easy to find on the site linked to above - I’ve removed the clip from this page as the QuickTime was crashing some PC browsers.

The Bereavement & Protection service, according to this page, “arranges funerals for anyone who dies in Hackney with or without any next of kin or person able to carry out this duty”.

Am I the only one who thinks it rather sinister for it to share a site with Hackney’s “Licensed Waste Management Facility (Transfer and Storage)” and the “Animal Warden Service”? Hell, I know it’s expensive to bury people, but you don’t want folk to start thinking they’re going to end up as landfill or petfood.

This just in from someone at Harry’s Place. If you have a weak stomach, turn away now.

A friend of mine was walking his dog in the local cemetery some years ago. This is a pretty busy cruising area. This guy is gay, but was genuinely walking his dog, and in any case could do rather better than the fairly desperate sorts who hang around the graves.

Anyhow, this old and shabby bloke sat down beside him on a bench, and started to pet his dog, while mumbling something.

After a bit, my friend realised that this guy was muttering “nice pussy, nice pussy”. And on looking down, he realised that this guy was fingering his dog’s vagina.

My mate asked this guy to stop (although the dog was chilled about it).

The guy said:

“You have a nice dog. Do you fuck her?”

I told you it wasn’t nice. It did, though, remind me a little of an experience I had in the same cemetery some years ago. I wrote it up on my old blog like this:

Apart from being a pleasant detour on the way to the Auld Shillelagh, Abney Park is perhaps the most tranquil spot in London. Originally a combined cemetery and arboretum, the trees soon conceded room for thousands of graves and monuments to people from all over London. Then space almost completely gave out and, predictably, Hackney Council left it alone until the place became ramshackle, the vegetation had crawled over the graves and people congregated to drink lager and shoot up in the chapel.

Nowadays there’s a Trust that has a go at preserving it, giving the public a chance to wander round and inspect graves belonging to Salvationist William Booth, Chartist James Bronterre O’Brien, music hall star Champagne Charlie and the renowned Talbot Baines Reed, author of school stories such as The Fifth Form at St Dominic’s and Cockhouse at Fellsgarth.

Nothing could be more appropriate. The other day I was taking a few photographs when a bloke emerged from behind the tomb of some heroic fireman and addressed me in broken English:

“Iss Snice. Iss Snice.”

Well, yes, it was a pretty nice day and I said so, moving on to see if I could find Champagne Charlie’s grave (sadly, I still haven’t). But then I heard this disgusting slobbering noise from behind me:

“Iss Snice. Iss Snice. Grrrk. Grrawkwk Knah. Grrk. Sshnn. Iss Snice.”

And there was the bloke pointing at his crotch in a most enthusiastic manner.

Naturally, I did the bold thing and ignored him but, after the fifth time of turning round to check this slobbering perv wasn’t still following me, I resorted to sign language, pointing to him and gesturing in the other direction. He took my advice. Then began to relieve his tension in the bushes.

He’s probably still there now.

Two of my must-read local bloggers, Dave Hill and Cllr Luke Akehurst, have both put in a good word for this article by Hackney’s elected mayor, Jules Pipe.

Pipe’s piece boils down to three main elements.

1. Collectively, crime in Hackney is going down.
2. Violent crime is going up.
3. Something must be done about violent crime.

I’ll take his word for the first point; the evidence of my own eyes convinces me of the second; and, of course, violent crime needs to be tackled vigorously.

So far so good. So how do we tackle it?

Dave draws attention to this part of Pipe’s article:

This is a problem that society finds hard to debate intelligently. The pendulum tends to swing between crass demonisation of young people on the one hand and helpless hand wringing on the other. Both stances are equally short on answers.

Yes, absolutely. But what no-one has asked yet is this: “Jules, how can we find some answers?”

Pipe continues:

While young people feel excluded from the growing prosperity of this city, gang culture will continue to flourish. It is not enough to provide more youth clubs. The only way this cycle can be broken is for the minority of marginalised young people to see a positive future for themselves in which they can believe.

Again, I’m with him all the way. So what next?

This is a job not just for politicians and the police, but for schools, employers, faith groups, communities, and most importantly for families and parents. A Labour government and Labour councils must continue to give those families the support that they need to achieve this.

Oh dear. So the logic is this:

1. Violent crime can be most effectively tackled by helping families to help their children see a positive future for themselves.
3. A Labour government and Labour councils are giving those families the support they need to achieve this.
4. Violent crime is on the rise.
5. A Labour government and Labour councils must continue to give those families the same support as they do now.

So violent crime, presumably will - er - continue to rise?

It seems a bit strange for a politician to berate others for being short on answers, whilst offering none himself. As it stands, we’ve got kids wandering around with knives and wearing body armour and - for more than a few of them - any family intervention would be too late to be of the slightest use.

So yes, let’s see the council working with others to help tackle the immediate crisis, as well as preventing young people from getting involved with the gangs in the first place. But, Jules, can we please learn more about how you’re going to do it other than by carrying on as before?

I’ve been poring over the Booth Poverty Map for London (1898-1899), taking a close look at the areas in Hackney that I’m most familiar with. My house isn’t on the chart - it stops short at the bottom of Stamford Hill, whilst I live near the top. Indeed, most of the redbrick terraces that characterise much of my area had only just been built.

Charles Booth created the maps as part of his Inquiry into the Life and Labour of the People in London, which he undertook between 1886 and 1903. His broad aim was to create a detailed picture of how poverty was spread throughout the capital, and where the worst afflicted areas were. A first map, Descriptive Map of London Poverty 1889, was compiled from information gathered from School Board visitors. A second series of maps, of which part of one is reproduced above, covered a wider area and was also based on the findings of social investigators who accompanied London policemen on their beats.

As you can see, the map is colour coded. Each colour represents the level of poverty or affluence to be found in the different streets and houses. Black was the most miserable coding and was used to denote:

The lowest class which consists of some occasional labourers, street sellers, loafers, criminals and semi-criminals. Their life is the life of savages, with vicissitudes of extreme hardship and their only luxury is drink.

The shades of blue indicated poverty, pink represented people with reasonable earnings, whilst red and yellow were used respectively for middle and upper-middle class residents. You can find a more detailed breakdown here.

Booth’s work was valuable, not only in giving us a detailed economic picture of London’s inhabitants, but in helping him to push for the introduction of Old Age Pensions. The owner of a successful shipping business, Booth saw his pensions plan as a necessary step to nip socialist revolution in the bud.

You can argue amongst yourselves about whether he achieved that - for good or ill. What I find particularly fascinating is using the map to see how the different areas of late 19th-century Hackney have fared. Broadly speaking, the poorest areas on Booth’s map appear to be the parish of St Mary of Eton (the site of the former Eton College Mission, now in Hackney Wick); the area to the south and south east of the then Smallpox Hospital in Homerton; the area surrounding the southern tip of London Fields; parts of central Dalston, spreading up to the southern part of Stoke Newington; and large areas of Haggerston, Shoreditch and Hoxton.

Haggerston is, even today, one of the most run-down parts of the borough, although it is slowly being regenerated as the gentrification of Shoreditch and Hoston creeps north. Hackney Wick is in dire need of investment (so let’s hope that the small part of the 2012 Olympic Park that creeps over the Newham border in Hackney Wick does it some long term good). Homerton is still a depressed part of the borough, and the southern end of London Fields is attracting wealthier residents round the Broadway Market area.

On the other hand, areas like Lower Clapton and Clapton Pond which have suffered greatly in recent years from poverty, crime and violence, are very much on the up and - increasingly - reverting to the fairly comfortable or affluent places they were about 100 years ago.

Of course, the summaries I’ve made about these areas are massive generalisations, although they are based on what I have seen as I’ve walked the borough.

That’s why I’m going to try and find time to make a better comparison in some of these places.

As I mentioned before, Booth was able to improve his second series of maps by sending researchers out to accompany policemen on their beats. They would make detailed notes of their walks and record some of the comments made by the officers. These notebooks have been digitised and put online, and they make fascinating reading. For example the notebook relating to my own area begins:

Thorpe [the policeman] has corns on his feet so I went round this district on a bicycle & then went over the street with him on the map afterwards. There is a marked absence of Public Houses and poor streets. Olinda Road at the NE corner of Stamford Hill is the only exception.

It’s no different today, except the coppers now have cars and can get the new community support officers to do most of the walking for them. Oh, and we’ve got more poor streets than before.

What I propose to do, then, is to trace the routes of some of the walks made by the social investigators and compare what they saw with what you can see now. I’ll plot the routes out on a new map, so you can compare them side by side, and I’ll add the photos I take to the Google chart over on my Hackney photo blog.

The first walk I hope to tackle is this one, undertaken on July 26th 1897.

Walk with Inspector Fitzgerald round district bounded on the South by the North London Railway, on the East by the Hackney Marshes & the Hackney cut, on the North by Millfields Road, & on the West by the Lower Clapton Road and the Urswick Road. Starting from Homerton Station.

Come back after the weekend to see how I got on, but in the meantime here’s the district as plotted out in the investigator’s notebook:

And this is roughly the same area today:

View Larger Map

I only hope I don’t get corns on my feet: I don’t have a bicycle these days.

I love finding out what this area used to be like, so I’m glad to have found Eileen Perrin’s recollections of a 1920s childhood in Hackney. She lived near Balls Pond Road, but used to come up to Stamford Hill to see boys sailing their model boats on the pond, and also to Stoke Newington’s Clissold Park to visit the animals and eat cold ices.

We didn’t stay in. Every day Mum took me out in my carpet-seated wooden pushchair when she went shopping, or she would take me to Clissold Park. I remember the mound there, with its beds of red geraniums. On top of it children would be standing on the steps of the pink granite obelisk of the drinking fountain. When I reached up to press the brass button for water, holding a heavy metal cup under the spout, I smelled iron. Then, as I bent my head to check whether the smell came from the water or the cup, Mum called out that I was not to drink it.

Children left the cups dangling by the chains. These clanged against the stone sides of the bowl as the water ran away down the steps into the flower beds.

At every step towards the animal enclosure Eileen’s new brown sandals squeaked, but Mum said they would soon wear in.

Behind a high wire fence was Old Bill, the so-called reindeer, standing chewing the cud. All manner of creatures were kept there, rabbits, a wallaby, a peacock, peahens, black and white speckled guinea fowl, pheasants and guinea pigs.

On we went, past the green metal slatted chairs set out under trees round the tea kiosk, out through the gate where a Wall’s ice cream man was usually waiting on his three-wheeled bike-trolley, Proffering my penny, I would choose a strawberry Snofrute while Mum had a tuppeny briquette in a wafer. If the Snofrute’s chequered blue and white card wrapper stuck fast to the triangular rosy water-ice, Mum would take it and squash it a bit in her hands until the wrapper cracked away, and the ice could be pushed out at one end.

You can read more about Eileen’s childhood here.

This is Nina Pope and her husband on their wedding day. They are posing in the doorway of a former pie ‘n’ mash shop in Hackney’s Well Street. They live there: Mr and Mrs Pie ‘n’ Mash.

Nina blogs here.

Anyone interested in Hackney’s built environment will already be familiar with OPEN Dalston. OPEN is “the trading name for Organisation for Promotion of Environmental Needs Limited” and, in Dalston, its deepest concerns are centred on the work that is being done to build a new “Overground” station (not, as is often claimed, a tube station) and to “regenerate” the area. As work has progressed, fine Georgian buildings have been demolished, Victorian cottages have been bought and boarded up, and a vast part of Dalston’s built heritage has been lost to make way for flats (of which only a small number will be “affordable“).

This month, OPEN Shoreditch appeared on the web. It is concerned about the proposed Bishop’s Palace development, which will see the destruction of The Light, now refurbished as a bar, which generated the first electric light for Liverpool Street Station and the Great Eastern Hotel. The high-rise buildings that will be built on the site will have a brutish impact on the area and will, in effect, strip that part of Shoreditch of much of its character in the name of making it a closer adjunct of the City.

Read more about OPEN Shoreditch here and, if its campaign strikes a chord with you, consider signing the petition at savethelight.co.uk.