I can’t say I like the PKK (Kurdistan Workers’ Party) any more than the many countries that list it as a terrorist organisation. But I’m glad we still live in a country that allows its supporters to protest if they want to. Something tells me, though, that this demonstration won’t convince Turkey to release Abdullah Öcalan.

More camera-phone photos are here.

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.

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.