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 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.