This guide to Hackney is mostly derived from the Conservation Area guides produced on behalf of the London Borough of Hackney
ABBOT STREET
Fitzroy House to the rear of the paint works which fronts Abbot Street, parallel with Ashwin Street, is a former fabrics manufactory and is a good example of c.1950 industrial architecture which replaced the bomb-damaged part of the works after World War Two. It is identified as a Building of Townscape Merit.
ABNEY PARK CEMETARY
A rapid expansion in the population of the area led to an acute shortage of land for burials, as the older parish churchyards were almost full. Throughout London, new Acts of Parliament enabled the setting up of new cemeteries, and in 1839 a new company was established to run the Abney Park Cemetery under the leadership of its Secretary and Registrar George Collinson. He was a City of London solicitor and also son of the president of the Hackney Congregational Theological College. Eight further dignitaries acted a co-directors, most of whom were Protestant businessmen like Collinson.
The new company purchased two houses and their estates to the north of Stoke Newington Church Street (Fleetwood House and Abney House), financed by selling shares in the company. The new Cemetery was specifically designed to provide a suitable burial place for the poor as well as the more affluent middle classes, with a wide catchment area which included the City of London, Tottenham and even
Enfield. Furthermore, the Cemetery was available to all types of Christians, including dissenters, and eventually it became one of the major burial places for members of the Congregational Church. Significantly, the cemetery was unusual in that no special Act of Parliament was obtained and no consecration of the land by a bishop of the Established Church was needed before burials commenced.
Abney House was eventually demolished in 1843, and the site subsumed within the Cemetery. Fleetwood House survived until the early 1870s. Fleetwood House had been an experimental school (established 1824 by Willam Allen, Grizell Birkbeck and four other Quakers as a girls school teaching sciences – astronomy, globes, physics etc. as well as needlework – parodied by Cruickshank). The eight acres of land that had been its garden were acquired by the Abney Park Cemetery Company in about 1836. The grounds were one of the main attractions of the school, and it closed sometime between 1836 and 1840. Allen and Birkbeck continued their educational and other projects at Lindfield in Sussex.
ALBION DRIVE
Albion Drive runs from Queensbridge Road to Haggerston Road and comprises two short groups of houses (Nos. 36-18) and (Nos. 16-8), which are built on the south side of the road. The south side of Albion Square bisects Albion Drive. Built by Islip Odell in the mid-1840s, they are similar in design to the houses found elsewhere on the Middleton Estate, including those found in Albion Square and Middleton Road. Most are two-storeys in height; a few towards Haggerston Road have basements as well. All are built in dark stock brick with stucco dressings and are a mixture of paired villas
and short terraces. In essence they are similar to the houses found on the south side of Albion Square.
ALBION ROAD
In 1848, houses in Albion Road could be purchased for £400. Albion Square houses would have fetched a similar sum.
To the rear of Albion Hall were the Albion Baths. Built in the early 1860s, they were first advertised in The Times in May 1864 when the swimming bath was said to be ’now OPEN’. It measured 100 feet by 50 feet and the advert said that swimming was taught and season tickets were available. Privately owned, it was amongst the very first swimming pools in Hackney. It is clearly shown on the 1871 OS Map. Although connected to the Hall, the main access to the baths was from Albion Road. It cost 6d. To swim at Albion Baths in 1878. In 1888 the pool was described as an ‘extensive and well-arranged public swimming baths fitted with dressing rooms and also with private hot and cold baths’. The dressing boxes were arranged around three-sides of the bath. In the same year the baths and the hall were let to the Albion Baths Company Ltd for £300 per annum and during the first year of occupation the company spent £1000 on upgrading the premises.
Stoke Newington end
In the 1830s a number of developers purchased land in the Stoke Newington area for new houses, and the fields to the south of Church Street were incrementally developed. The best known builder was Thomas Cubitt, who built a long row of villas along Albion Road, to the south of Church Street, only some of which remain due to war time bombing.
By the middle of the 19th century the population had grown to such an extent that a new church was needed. The old rectory, a timber-framed building on the south side of Church Street, was demolished, and a new church, designed by George Gilbert Scott, was built, work starting in 1865 although the spire was not completed until 1890. Even at this point, the economy was still mainly agricultural, and local nurseries, allotments and cows provided food for the local inhabitants as well as the markets of the City.
ALBION SQUARE
Albion Square was developed on lands owned by the Middleton family during the second quarter of the 19th century, when much of this part of Hackney began to be speculatively developed.
Historically and well into the 19th century the land on which Albion Square was built was farmland. In 1800 Dalston was well known for its nurseries and market gardens. On Greenwood’s Map of 1827 just north of the field that was to become Albion Square, was Grange’s Nursery and further north towards Dalston Lane was Smith’s Nursery. The land on which Albion Square was developed belonged in the 18th century to the Acton family, whose heir Sir William Middleton began to develop further south in Shoreditch in the early 19th century. One of his fields extended into Hackney, just east of Stonebridge Common and it was here that Albion Square was built.
The Middleton family’s development in Hackney began with an agreement in 1840 with Islip Odell, a builder of Upper Clapton, for the land immediately east of Stonebridge Common. The Middleton Arms PH (now closed) on the corner of Queensbridge and Middleton Road was the first property to be built, followed by the houses in Middleton Road, leased in 1842. Odell was also a brick maker and speculator and he promoted development by others on the Middleton family lands.
The Middleton’s surveyor George Pownall was probably responsible for the design of the houses built in Albion Square and also the plan and layout of the garden square.
Almost all the houses within the development had been completed by 1849.
From 1849, the western end of Albion Square was occupied by Albion Hall, which was built between 1849 and 1850 by Islip Odell, the developer of the rest of Albion Square. It was erected for the ‘Kingsland, Dalston and De Beauvoir Town Literary and Scientific Institutions’, a short-lived organisation with a certain pretension and aimed firmly at the middle-class residents who were moving to Dalston and De Beauvoir at that date. The Institute was ‘for the purpose of offering to the neighbourhood the advantages of the diffusion of useful and entertaining knowledge, the absence of which is felt and much regretted’.
But the venture was evidently not a great success as less than ten years later in 1897 when Charles Booth’s researchers visited the area they stated that ‘Albion Hall, a literary institute and swimming baths is now closed. Dances were formerly given there and the baths open. Now the institute has lost its licences owing to the character of the dances given and the swimming bath is also closed’.
Soon after in 1899 the London School Board purchased the property including the swimming baths; and this was transferred to the LCC in 1906. Part of the premises were used as a clinic for public health. The LCC used the baths for swimming as a further education subject. Although the baths were never ‘public’, a range of clubs and specialist associations used them and sometimes during the last few weeks of the summer holidays, local children were admitted.
During the 1930s the hall and gymnasium were used for a variety of events including Girl Guide festivals and dramatic performances. The pool and hall were damaged by a flying bomb in 1944, and demolished soon after.
The Albion Square Conservation Area is centered on the garden in the heart of the square, around which the streets of this smart Victorian development were formally laid out and built up during the 1840s. Albion Square Conservation Area is notable for the excellent survival of high quality early Victorian housing much of which is listed. Bridget Cherry in The Buildings of England describes it as ‘a satisfyingly complete picturesque Italianate composition of 1846-49’.
The houses within Albion Square Conservation Area remained fashionable until the 1920s, despite the square itself becoming seriously neglected in the 1890s when the Metropolitan Public Gardens Association found it in ‘an abandoned condition’. Due to their public spirited actions, the gardens were restored and reopened to the general public for the first time in 1899. From the 1930s onwards there was an exodus of middle-class and professional people from South Hackney and many houses within the Albion Square Conservation Area became shabby and multi-tenanted. However, from the 1960s Albion Square, like nearby De Beauvoir Town, became one of the first parts of Hackney to regain popularity with families returning to the inner city, largely because of the fine early 19th century houses that could be purchased at bargain prices.
The garden square and the houses surrounding it were endangered by demolition during the mid-1960s when Hackney Borough Council threatened the owners with compulsory purchase. The Albion Square Action Group was formed in 1966 and pressure from that group and other national conservation bodies, encouraged the statutory listing of many of the houses and ultimately prevented the wholesale destruction of the garden square. Conservation Area status was achieved in 1975, which has resulted in a very well-preserved enclave of early-to-mid Victorian houses which today survive almost intact, with very little detrimental alteration. Where unsympathetic changes do occur such as at No. 18 Albion Drive, where the original sash window on the ground floor has been converted into French doors, the changes are particularly noticeable.
ALCONBURY ROAD (1883)
Alconbury Road is an attractive curved street running between Brooke Road and Northwold Road.
The builder, Edward Withers erected at least 50 of the houses there in 1883.
ALLENMOUTH ROAD (1880s)
ALVINGTON CRESCENT (1876)
Alvington Crescent was built by Jordain and Paine in 1876, rather later than the rest of St Mark’s Conservation Area. It was partly built on land that formerly was occupied by Baddley as a market garden until the mid 1850s and also on the extensive back gardens of older properties on the south side of Shacklewell Lane. There were also a number of factories and warehouses on the site in the 1860s including Tolkein’s Piano works, which was later relocated further down St Marks Rise.
There was some bomb damage to the street during World War II but the houses that survive there today are on the whole well preserved, but rather less grand than some of the larger houses elsewhere within the Conservation Area.
AMHURST ROAD (1850s)
The ford of Hackney Brook was often flooded and at the end of the 18th century a bridge was built over the ford, reputedly constructed from materials from the demolished medieval church. The brook
was diverted through a culvert by the Metropolitan Board of Works in 1861, which covered the waterway for ever. Soon afterwards, Amhurst Road was laid out and a fine terrace (formerly nos. 1-19) on the south side was built in the 1870s. It was on this site that Gibbons Furniture shop was established in 1898.
It survived for over one hundred years, occupying a number of the shops until it closed in 2002. A fire in 2003 destroyed the store and part of the adjoining terrace.
By the 1850s parts of Downs Park Road and Amhurst Road were lined by middle-class villas.
APPOLD STREET (1894)
Appold Street was formed from earlier streets running along the west side of Broad Street Station to join Curtain Road at Worship Street. This historic street pattern has largely been fossilised
in the modern street layout, but it is the building plots lining and filling the blocks created by the network of streets that have been subject to most change.
APRIL STREET (1881)
In around 1880 much of the Tyssen estate associated with Shacklewell Manor was sold to a local builder, John Grover, who built shops on Shacklewell Lane and the small enclave of workers housing in Seal Street, April Street and Perch Street between 1881 and 1886. In 1883, Shacklewell Green was taken into public ownership by the newly created Hackney District Board of Works.
ARCOLA STREET
The street comprises a series of former warehouses and industrial buildings, including the site of the original Arcola Theatre opened in 2000, which was a former textile factory. Today the building is a restaurant – Jones and Sons. There are a number of live/work units and artists’ studios and the part of the street closest to Stoke Newington Road has undergone much refurbishment, including Nos. 4-8 Arcola Street, the headquarters of Cell Studios.
ARDLEIGH ROAD
Ardleigh Road is one of the radiating roads which cut across the grid pattern of streets.
The De Beauvoir Estate was always intended to be residential apart from around the Kingsland Basin and the canal to the south. Public houses were permitted in De Beauvoir and included the Sussex Hotel (later the Scolt Head) on the corner of Ardleigh Road and Clifford Road. In 1897 it was described as ‘a large old-fashioned public house’ which had a dancing license and assembly rooms and was described ‘as more characteristic of what the neighbourhood was than what it is’. It was said to be more like a county town hotel than a London public house’.
ASHTON STREET
Non-conformist believers, so common in Hackney during the 18th and 19th centuries, built a Baptist Chapel in Ashton Street in 1871 (now the Shiloh Pentecostal Church). Ashwin Street was also a place of leisure and entertainment in the mid-19th century with many social events (dances, musical events, amateur dramatics and public lectures) taking place in the Luxembourg Hall, until it was demolished to build Reeves Colour Works. A short-lived Turkish Baths existed in Ashwin Street from 1888 to 1900, and the Dalston Theatre on the south side of Dalston Lane was built in 1866 (demolished 2007).
ASHWIN STREET
Ashwin Street suffered particularly badly from bomb damage in the Second World War with Nos. 1-5 Ashwin Street destroyed in November 1940, and all but the front façade of Reeves and Son badly damaged later in the same year. In the 1970s, the traditional street pattern of terraced housing to the south of Dalston Lane was replaced with council housing, and as vehicular traffic and urban decay increased especially towards the end of the 20th century, the area went into decline with many of the shops and buildings to the south of Dalston Lane falling into disuse, resulting in the eventual demolition of many of the Georgian properties to the south of Dalston Lane in recent years. However, the area retains a core of interesting, historic buildings from the Georgian, Victorian and later era.
The Print House, at Nos. 18-24 Ashwin Street are the former premises of Reeves and Son artists’ colour manufacturer, who came to Ashwin Street in 1866 when it was called Beech Street. The main part is a late 19th factory, with a fourth floor added in 1913 by John Hamilton & Son. Reeves were suppliers of artists’ materials and after the Education Act of 1870, concentrated on cheap paints for schools and beginners and also publishing instruction books. Reeves moved out in 1946 and for many years Tyer & Co., inventors of the block system of railway signalling had their works there.
Also located in Ashwin Street, on the west side is one of the oldest church buildings in Dalston – the Shiloh Pentecostal Chapel. It was built as a Baptist Chapel in 1871 and designed by Charles Searle.
A managed community space – the Eastern Curve Garden, lies to the north of Dalston Lane, between Ashwin Street and Tyssen Street.
BALLS POND ROAD
Balls Pond Road is a principal east-west route.
Balls Pond Road takes its name from a disreputable pub in the hamlet of Balls Pond which lay just to the west of the Conservation Area. During the 18th century, the owner John Ball provided his clientele with such activities as bull-baiting and duckshooting on his pond. In the late 19th century Balls Pond Road was described as ‘a shopping but not a market road’ with ‘many private houses on the south side’. The same could be said in the early 21st century. It was a main road from at least the 18th century and has buildings that are of an earlier date than the rest of the De Beauvoir Conservation Area. In addition, as an arterial route which carries buses and many heavy goods vehicles, it tends to be much busier, noiser and more polluted than the streets that lie to the south.
However it is a road of high architectural quality as there are many fine historical buildings along Balls Pond Road and a large number are listed or locally listed.
BALMES ROAD
When De Beauvoir Town was originally built in the early to mid-19th century it formed a pleasant and fashionable residential area which was attractive to city merchants and middle-class families. For over eighty years the area remained well-to-do, the wide well-planned streets with most of the houses in pairs or short terraces of fours, rather than in the more common long terraces that were built in adjacent parts of Islington and Hackney from the 1850s onwards. However from the 1920s, lack of adequate maintenance, multiple occupation of the houses and especially from the 1930s the infill of long rear gardens for industrial premises meant that the social status of De Beauvoir declined. The 1950s saw the area threatened from wholesale redevelopment. Indeed just over a quarter of the southern part of the estate, including Balmes Road and Benyon Road and the canal side De Beauvoir Crescent were demolished in the late 1950s. Municipal tower blocks of 19 storeys and slab blocks of maisonettes which formed the LB Hackney’s De Beauvoir New Town Estate were erected on the southern part of the original estate in the 1960s.
BATEMAN’S ROW
Bateman’s Row was already depicted on a map of 1740.
BENTHAL ROAD (1877)
Benthal Road was built between 1877 and 1879.
Benthal Road is an attractive street with interesting houses and numerous street trees. The southern section of Benthal Road is built in the style found in Maury Road and Jenner Road – terraces of two-storey cottages interspersed at regular intervals with a taller house creating a pleasing composition. Each side of the street ends with a three-storey house. The houses in the northern section of Benthal Road are somewhat different to those in the adjacent streets. Stylistically they appear to be of a slightly later date.
BERESFORD ROAD (1862)
Beresford Road was first laid out in the early 1860s.
BERKSHIRE ROAD (1870s)
Immediately close to the local factories was Berkshire Road, originally Windsor Road was built in the 1870s.
BOWER ROAD (1870s)
BOWL COURT
Bowl Court is depicted by name on a map of 1799.
Nos. 5 and 6 Bowl Court, all that now remain of the mass of buildings that covered this former alley and an adjoining yard, known as Crown and Shuttle Court. Such simple, poorly built premises have left little official trace of their construction, use and occupation, but were mainly used by the furniture trade.
BRADBURY STREET
Bradbury Street is a rarity in the Dalston Conservation Area – a small street of terraced houses and shops, mostly three-storey, dating from the mid-Victorian era. Over recent years the shops have been renovated and turned into small independent retail use. There are cafes, jewellers, a book shop, salons and consulting rooms and some offices. The Bradbury Street area was first brought back into use from almost complete dereliction by Hackney Co-operative Developments and the London Borough of Hackney in 1982. Recent developments include the white concrete circular building that houses Dalston Jazz Club and cafe that forms the entrance from Bradbury Street to Gillett Square.
BROOKE ROAD (1868)
In 1831 the eastern end of what was to become Brooke Road was an established path or way through the fields of the Tyssen-Amhurst estate.
By 1868, the former cart way behind Brooke House formed the east end of Brooke Road, which continued as a footpath through the brickfields to Stoke Newington Common.
The southern boundary of the Northwold and Cazenove Conservation Area is Evering Road between the junction of Rectory Road to the west and Brooke Road to the eastern end of Upper Clapton Road. It comprises the compact group of streets that cross Brooke Road and continue northwards to Northwold Road. This area was mostly built in the 1870s and early 1880s.
BROOKFIELD ROAD (1855)
In 1855 Brookfield Road and some of the other streets lying between Victoria Park Road and Cassland Road to the north-east of Well Street Common were being laid out for building as a freehold estate by the Suburban Villa and Village Association – aimed at the lower middle-classes.
BUCKINGHAM ROAD
This road follows the horizontal grid. On the north side the Kingsgate tower block rises to 11 storeys and has little positive impact on the Conservation Area. Other parts of the Kingsgate development front onto the north side of Buckingham Road.
On the north side of Buckingham Road near to the corner with Ardleigh Road are some very distinguished houses. Many of the houses in Buckingham Road have attractive gardens and there are many street trees.
CADOGAN TERRACE (1868)
Cadogan Terrace lies just outside the north-east corner of Victoria Park close to Molesworth Gate. Most of the terrace was built by Henry Robert Allen, who was responsible for the construction of 26 of the 28 houses between 1868 and 1872.
CASSLAND GARDENS (1850s)
Well Street Common is the largest open space in the immediate area and there is also the small garden square of Cassland Gardens, opposite Hackney Terrace in Cassland Road. In recent years this garden has been restored by a local users group. Just to the south, lie the 217 acres of public open space that is Victoria Park.
Cassland Gardens were laid out in the 1850s, between a palace-fronted terrace of 1793 and a crescent of Victorian Italianate villas. The gardens were originally created by the Sir John Cass Estate for the private use of the residents of the villas in Cassland Crescent. Cassland Gardens was passed to Hackney Council in 1913 to keep as an ‘ornamental garden’ for which they were to pay the yearly rent of 10s to the Sir John Cass Foundation. The gardens are laid to lawn and surrounded by mature limes and London planes (planted c.1860).
CASSLAND ROAD (1786)
In 1786 the Cass estate leased c.70 acres to William Gigney who built a short terrace in Well Street and then laid out a new street leading to Hackney Wick which was later to become Cassland Road. After his bankruptcy in 1790, part of the land was leased to Thomas Jackson, a City linen-draper. His under tenants/developers (William Fellowes, a surveyor based in Southwark; John Shillitoe, a plumber and Thomas Pickering, an attorney) planned and built the first important development in this part of Hackney – the fine palace-fronted terrace known as Hackney Terrace (today Nos. 20-
54 Cassland Road). The enterprise was organised as an up-market building society with subscribers. Eighteen people could subscribe to the scheme paying a monthly subscription, and after four years each person was entitled to a lease of one house and one stable to be allocated by ballot.
CAZENOVE ROAD (1860s)
The Northwold and Cazenove Conservation Area lies to the west of Upper Clapton Road and comprises a compact group of streets running westward towards Stoke Newington and northwards towards Clapton Common. Almost the whole area was developed on lands owned by the Tyssen-Amhurst family and built during the late Victorian period between 1870 and 1890.
The northern part of the Northwold and Cazenove Conservation Area are the roads running north of Northwold Road crossing the other main east-west route, Cazenove Road, and include Osbaldeston Road, Kyverdale Road, Fountayne Road, Filey Road and Forburg Road. This area was not completed until the 1890s.
Due to the strength of the Tyssen-Amhurst family in controlling the housing development on their estate, there are similarities in the design of the speculatively built homes, but monotony has been prevented. The individual houses and terraces in the Conservation Area are much more varied than one might first imagine in this late Victorian suburb.
Cazenove Road was first cut through from the Clapton end, probably around the mid-1860s. It was first called Foulden Road, and originally did not run straight through to Stoke Newington as now, but turned southwards and followed the course of Fountayne Road terminating at Stoke Newington Common. It was not extended westwards until around 1880. It was named after a house called ‘The Cazenoves’ that formerly stood in Upper Clapton Road. By 1868, there were only seven houses built in the street including Nos. 120 and 122, which still survive.
After the construction of sewers in 1874, the rest of the street was built during the 1870s and ‘80s. Built for the professional and business classes it is one of the grandest roads in the Conservation Area, however parts of it have fallen onto hard times. The grand houses are all converted into flats (up to six per house), with others being used as educational buildings and places of worship.
CECILIA ROAD (1863)
From at least the 18th century the route of Cecilia Road was originally a country lane, known as Love Lane that ran between Downs Park Road and Dalston Lane.
The name Dalston is Anglo-Saxon in origin and derived from Deorlafs’s farm (tun) on the banks of the Hackney Brook. By 1300 it had become a hamlet known as Derleston, centred around the junction of the present day Cecilia Road (formerly Love Lane) and Dalston Lane.
A watercolour entitled ‘Love Lane, Dalston’, dated 1850, shows an idyllic rural scene with the muddy lane (which was later diverted and renamed Norfolk Street (now Cecilia Road) running up to Shacklewell Lane. In the distance, the backs of houses in Shacklewell Lane can be seen and on the right is a property known as Betty Harcombe’s Cottage, a favourite bun house where ginger beer and gingerbread was sold. Perhaps surprisingly (given the fairly recent Napoleonic Wars) a French flag flies from the cottage. (St Mark’s CA)
Just before the demolition of the building and the diversion and creation of the paved streets of the estate, the cottage was photographed, giving a unique record of 19th century Hackney. In the foreground of the photograph is visual evidence of extensive brick earth workings. The clay dug and the bricks made and burnt on the site were used to build the houses in the St Mark’s Conservation Area. The majority of the streets within the Conservation Area were constructed between 1863 and 1866. St Mark’s Church was built between 1862-6 and consecrated in August 1870.
Some of the first houses were built in Cecilia Road in 1863.
By 1860, the fields to the west were being actively exploited for their brick earth and bricks being burnt on the site. In 1862, permission was granted by the vestry for the slight diversion of Love Lane to form Norfolk Road (as Cecilia Road was known until 1938). Norfolk Road was the first street paved and developed in the St Mark’s Conservation Area. It was presumably named after the East Anglian connections of the Tyssen-Amhursts, the landowners. The terraced houses were largely constructed during 1863 and 1864 by a variety of builders including Cornelius Margett.
CHAPMAN ROAD (1860s)
The first known school in the Hackney Wick/Fish Island area was a small Boys and Girls Congregational School located on Chapman Road, which existed by 1870.
CHARDMORE ROAD (1880s)
The houses of Chardmore Road date from the 1880s.
Chardmore Road was built in the same manner and style as Forburg Road.
CHRISTOPHER STREET (early nineteenth century)
COLVESTONE CRESCENT (1866)
Colvestone Crescent runs on an east-west axis from Ridley Road in the west to Cecilia Road in the east.
Many of the houses in Colvestone Crescent were built by Charles Paine and George Jordain during 1866, especially those west of St Mark’s Rise and Nos. 64-88, south of St Mark’s Church. Indeed in 1866, these two men, who were the principal builders of many of the houses in the St Mark’s Conservation Area actually ran their business from No. 14, Colvestone Crescent. The houses in this part
of the street are generally four-storey in height, built in yellow stock brick with red dressings and tiled string-courses.
COMMERCIAL STREET (1845)
Commercial Street was built between 1845 and 1858.
CHRISTINA STREET (mid-late eighteenth century)
Christina Street was formerly Motley Street.
CLAPTON
The name Clapton comes from the Saxon word Clop’ton meaning ‘farm on the hill’. The church of St Augustine’s founded c.1300 was sited at the centre of the medieval settlement of Hackney. Over the next four hundred years agriculture was central to the village economy. The 16th and 17th centuries also witnessed the growth in residential properties in this part of Hackney, and it was commonly
known as a place of genteel retirement for wealthy Londoners. Many fine houses (Church or Urswick’s House, the Black and White House and Brooke House, all now demolished) stood around the church and in Homerton High Street, as well as just outside the Conservation Area in Lower Clapton. Only Sutton House, built by Thomas Sutton in 1535 survives to remind us of Hackney’s importance in the 16th century.
CLAPTON COMMON
Clapton Common was originally called Broad Common and in early modern times was of greater extent than it is today. It was reduced in size in the early 19th century with the enclosure of the grounds of Summit House and an adjacent field.
The former Broad Common had been reduced in size throughout the 18th and 19th centuries with landowners and Lords of the Manor enclosing parts for private use.
Around 1816, the eastern boundary of the common, which was very irregular in shape, was altered. An agreement was made with adjacent landowners and the Tyssen family, the Lords of the Manor, to swap pieces of land in what was called a ‘give and take’ arrangement to straighten the eastern boundary of the common.
Clapton Common was preserved forever in 1872 as public open space, as a result of a successful public petition that led to 180 acres of common and Lammas land in Hackney being protected from encroachment of development. At first the common was maintained by the London County Council but by the early 20th century responsibility passed to the Borough of Hackney.
The pond was created at the end of the 18th century or beginning of the 19th century in the shape of an artist’s palate and it was fed by a spring. In 1914 it was lengthened by 75 feet so that the model yacht club could run competitions.
Clapton Common became more attractive to middle-class families after the 1870s with the introduction of the horse omnibus and tram into the city. The ordinary worker was also helped by the arrival of the train in 1872 with the opening of the Great Eastern Railway to Enfield, with the stations at Stamford Hill and Stoke Newington. This allowed for a more modest commuter, than the gentlemen merchants and bankers with their private carriages who had favoured the area prior to 1850.
In the 1920s small areas of the common were turned into roadways by the Borough Council.
There is much public housing surrounding and looking over the Clapton Common Conservation Area. Development started in the 1930s with the Fawcett Estate designed by Messrs. Joseph which opened in 1937 (Nathan Joseph established the architectural practice which became associated in the early days with philanthropic housing) and the Wigan Estate was built soon after. But most public housing around Clapton Common was constructed during the 1950s and ‘60s. New blocks replaced the detached and semi-detached villas that lined the common which were by that date not only considered old-fashioned, but some were run-down or had been damaged in the war. Many villas occupied large garden plots and they were considered suitable for redevelopment for the desperately needed public housing being built by the London County Council and Hackney Borough Council. Some older properties were compulsorily purchased (e.g. Nos. 1-7 Clapton Common), while the owners of others willingly sold up. The fine Georgian Buccleuch Terrace was demolished and Buccleuch House, a six-storey range of ‘self-contained bed-sitting room flats for single women’, opened in 1951 to the designs of Messrs. Joseph. This in turn was demolished in the early 2010s. At the northern end of the common Tower Court (including one nine-storey block) was erected in the mid-1950s, to the designs of Harry Moncrieff, a friend of Frederick Gibberd, replacing some rather grand semi-detached villas. On the west side of the common the Summit Estate was built between 1955 and 1957.
Upper Clapton and the streets surrounding Clapton Common are today at the heart of the largest Chasidic Orthodox Jewish community in Britain. There had been Jewish residents in Upper Clapton from the 18th century, but the first real influx came in the 1880s. Egerton Road (just north of Clapton Common) was the home of the New Synagogue which transferred from the City of London in 1915 and in 1926 the Union of Orthodox Hebrew Congregations also established themselves in Stamford Hill, making the area a magnet for strictly observant sects. In 1987 the New Synagogue was sold to a Chasidic Bobov community who have undertaken a fine restoration of the building which had been on English Heritage’s Buildings at Risk Register. The sight of members of the community with their distinctive dress is ever present around Clapton Common today.
CLAPTON SQUARE
Part of the Clapton Square Conservation Area formed part of the extensive Tyssen Estate that covered much of Hackney.
Clapton Square was laid out in 1816.
CLAPTON TERRACE
Around 1750 the White Swan Inn was built opposite the common and by 1740 parts of Clapton Terrace (Nos. 49-67) were begun.
When St Thomas’s Church was built, it was separated by building land from 11 houses in Clapton Terrace, behind which were mews and a brickfield.
The rest of Clapton Terrace was built by c.1800.
CLIFTON GROVE
This is small, with only seven houses; it provides an effective foil to the German Hospital.
CLIFTON STREET (early-mid nineteenth century)
COMBOSS ROAD (1880s)
CRAVEN LODGE
Craven Lodge was the largest house herby and stood near the Stamford Hill end of the estate of John Craven (d. 1836), who enclosed waste around the Leg of Mutton Pond in 1806.
His land stretched north and east to the Lea, where his son Arthur bought land from the Tyssen family executors in 1846 and extended the estate to about 70 acres. As seen on the OS Map of 1868, Craven Lodge dating from the 1820s had extensive pleasure grounds laid out in the manner of Capability Brown and Humphrey Repton, with lakes, bridges and even a folly. The folly (Grade II listed) survives to this day heavily covered in ivy and is the last remnant of the estate, most of which was cleared for building development in the 1880s. Craven Lodge itself stood empty from the 1870s and was demolished in 1904.
CROWN PLACE
Crown Place was formerly the south end of Clifton Street. It provides a modern pedestrian route from the City on the south side of Sun Street towards the historic quarter of South Shoreditch.
CULFORD GROVE
Culford Grove is pleasant short street of three storey houses, most having moulded architraves. There are fine trees in this street.
CULFORD MEWS
Culford Mews is sited to the south of Balls Pond Road and originally had stables for carriages and horses. Most of the buildings surviving date from the end of the 19th century. Nos. 9 has a date plaque ‘erected 1881 by T. Flowers’ Today it is quiet and narrow with original granite sets or cobbles. There are a variety of two storey warehouses, artist studios, garages used for a variety of industrial purposes and some residential units. In recent years there have been a number of interesting conversions of properties by architects using interesting modern materials.
Behind Balls Pond Road and Kingsland Road are two narrow and short streets which form part of the historic street pattern, possibly from the days when St Bartholomew’s Chapel stood near by. The roads retain their granite cobbles.
CULFORD ROAD
Parts of Culford Road were built in 1849 by the builder George Hearn. Culford Road is predominantly two storeys with basement, rising to three storeys nearer to Balls Pond Road. Many of the groups of houses are arranged in terraces of four, with ‘bookends’ slight projections at the ends of the terraces defining their ends and making for an attractive design (see Figure 32). On the east side, north of Englefield Road, there are six individual groups (Nos. 116-162).
De Beauvoir Conservation Area is notable for the excellent survival of high quality short terraces and houses dating from c.1830-50. The spacious tree-lined roads within the Conservation Area display different styles of domestic architecture and perhaps one of the most important elements of the De Beauvoir Conservation Area is the unique character of the individual streets. Despite many years of neglect during the early to mid-20th century, the handsome houses in the De Beauvoir Conservation Area are now sought after and generally well-maintained; a tribute in part to the De Beauvoir Association (formed by local residents in 1966) who pressed for the official designation of the area as one of the first Conservation Areas to be created in Hackney and prevented the demolition of the whole of De Beauvoir Town in the 1960s. Today the houses in De Beauvoir command high prices with their N1 postcodes and close proximity to Islington and the City.
CURTAIN ROAD (<1576)
The Augustinian priory of St John the Baptist was located in Haliwell, said to be near a sacred well, within an area approximating to Shoreditch High Street, Holywell lane, Curtain Road and Bateman’s Row. The priory was dissolved under Henry VIII in 1539, but by then Shoreditch had begun to develop, taking on more of the character of a suburb of the city, with ribbon development along High Street and Old Street and increasing numbers of industry-focused activities, such as brick making. Some of the fields had become market gardens, which presumably supplied local needs and possibly some of the city’s. A predecessor of St. Leonard’s church was constructed on the site in the 12th Century and this subsequently became the parish of St Leonard’s Shoreditch. As the English Heritage 2004 study concludes, ‘proximity to the City provided much of the impetus for early growth and southern Shoreditch became one of the first outlying districts into which London spread’.
In the 16th century the first of London’s play houses (theatres) were constructed in South Shoreditch – the Theatre (1576) and the Curtain – both belonging to James Burbage, the head of the Earl of Leicester’s company of players and sometime patron of William Shakespeare. Both playhouses were situated along Curtain Road, the Theatre being dismantled in 1599 and the Curtain demolished in 1627.
Much of the North London Line ran on a viaduct through South Shoreditch, constructed between 1861-5, and which necessitated the demolition of some 650 houses along the route between Curtain Road and Shoreditch High Street.
DALSTON LANE
Large scale development spread along Dalston Lane from the west, with the developer Robert Sheldrick being active on the Rhodes Estate lands to the south side of Dalston Lane in 1807, and building Dalston Terrace. The surviving properties at the Kingsland Road end of Dalston Lane (Nos. 18-22) comprising two-paired villas may also be by Sheldrick. Land to the north was part of the Tyssen Estate. Development took place not just along the main streets, such as Kingsland Road and Dalston Lane, but also began to occur to the rear, where fields were released for building plots.
By the 1830s the hamlets had merged and were linked to the north with the hamlet of Shacklewell, and to the new development of De Beauvoir Town in the south, as London expanded into the surrounding countryside. Until the mid-19th century, Dalston was still largely rural, but by the 1830s all the principal landowners of the area, the Benyons, the Rhodes and the Tyssen-Amhursts were leasing or selling plots of land to developers, gradually creating the Victorian suburb that is still evident today. The demand for vast quantities of bricks was supplied locally from Hobson’s brickfields, on the east side of Kingsland Road, as market gardens were dug up for the clay beneath.
The construction of the North London Line in 1848 added further impetus to the construction of residential estates around Dalston Lane. By the 1870s major housing developments had been constructed to the east of Dalston Lane, following the culverting of Pigwell Brook. However, photographs from this period show that the open space at the corner of Dalston Lane and Queensbridge Road still retained a village green feel, with mature trees to a grassed area.
The late Victorian era saw a period of increasing urban development as all the old open fields were built on. Dalston Lane and Graham Road became a major tram route (hence the large number of buses today), and the corner of Dalston Lane and Queensbridge Road became a commercial centre for the surrounding estates, with projecting shop-fronts added to the Georgian buildings to the south of Dalston
Lane. Map regression and contemporary business directories, suggest that this probably occurred in the 1870s and 1880s. Municipal and religious buildings were also constructed in the late 19th century. The Kingsland Police Station was moved to Dalston Lane in 1872.
DALSTON TERRACE
The developer Robert Sheldrick built Dalston Terrace between 1813 and 1819. It was demolished 2015-16.
Dalston Terrace fronting to the north on to Dalston Lane had houses set back from the road, with front gardens.
DAVEY ROAD (1864)
DE BEAUVOIR ROAD
De Beauvoir Road forms one of the longest north-south axis roads in the Conservation Area. It has a variety of house types including paired villas with recessed front porch areas so characteristic of other buildings in the Conservation area and short terraces.
By the 1890s workshops, many of which were processing wood products, existed at the edge of the estate especially in Derby Road, De Beauvoir Crescent and south of Downham Road towards the canal. At the centre of De Beauvoir were a small group of factories that filled the east side of De Beauvoir Road between Northchurch Road as far as Englefield Road.
Between Northchurch Terrace and Englefield Road on the east side of De Beauvoir Road are a number of two and three storey factories and workshops. These industrial buildings had their origins in the manufactories that occupied the long back gardens of Mortimer Road mentioned in the Booth enquiry during the late 1890s. By 1902 the site was occupied by a builder’s merchant, a picture-framer and a wheelwright.
Today some of these industrial premises have been converted into residential accommodation, including live/work units. However the east side of De Beauvoir Road still has an industrial character now occupied by purpose built factories (sign makers and clothing manufacturers) mostly dating from the 1950s.
DE BEAUVOIR SQUARE
De Beauvoir covers the area formerly occupied by the Hackney estate of the Beauvoir family, lords of Balmes or Baumes, which extended south into Shoreditch and ran northwards towards Balls Pond Road. The De Beauvoir Conservation Area lies within a regular shaped boundary and the outer boundaries are defined by the existing road layout within which the De Beauvoir Town estate was planned in the 1820s. It is located just to the west of Kingsland Road and to the east of Southgate Road (the eastern side of which is within the Conservation Area). It is bounded on the south by the north side of Downham Road and to the north by the south side of Balls Pond Road. At the centre of the Conservation Area are the exceptionally fine streets and houses (many of which are listed) around St Peter’s Church, including the only square in the area – De Beauvoir Square, which forms the centrepiece of this unique ‘new town’ development from the early 19th century.
Development of De Beauvoir began around 1821, soon after the opening of the Regent’s Canal which was cut through the southern part of the Balmes Estate. William Rhodes, whose family had farmed the 150 acres of the Balmes Estate since 1757, was granted a 99-year building lease in 1821 at a cost of just £1,300 per annum from the Revd. Peter Beauvoir, the estate’s elderly and absentee landowner.
In 1821 James Burton, at the time the most successful and prolific speculative builder in London and a great friend of John Nash, drew up a plan for the proposed estate for Rhodes, which if it had been completed would have been the largest example of town planning ever contemplated in England to that date and the largest development proposed by any speculative builder in London.
The east side of De Beauvoir Square was completed by 1823 during the first phase of development by William Rhodes. At that time the square was known as Park Place. Along the east side was a long terrace (three-storey with basement) known as Nos. 1-16 Park Place, built for Rhodes by John Sanders c.1822, and erected virtually back-to-back with another terrace (three-storey) in Derby (from 1909 Lockner) Road. These buildings were demolished c.1970 for the Lockner Estate.
On Beauvoir’s death, his heir and distant relative Richard Benyon challenged the legality of the lease that Rhodes had obtained, and pursued a long and difficult legal battle to get it nullified. Benyon eventually won his case in 1835 and the land reverted to the family, by which time some parts of the estate (especially south of Downham Road near the Kingsland Basin and off Kingsland Road) had already been developed by Rhodes and his sub-lessees. From 1834, the leases granted by Richard Benyon de Beauvoir were aimed at a more spacious layout, with terraces in short blocks and many semi-detached villas. The planned squares and octagon of the original scheme were abandoned apart from De Beauvoir Square, where interesting Tudor-Jacobean houses were erected in the late 1830s probably to the designs of W.C. Lockner, the architect of the nearby St Peter’s Church.
De Beauvoir Square was retained – it was already grassed, gravelled and railed – and remnants of the road layout can be seen today in the diagonal streets that were to lead to Rhodes’s proposed central octagon (Ardleigh Road, Stamford Road and Enfield Road). Benyon altered the layout to make it simpler and built more spacious houses than had originally been envisaged, including shorter terraces (often of four or six houses) and semi-detached villas.
On the other three sides of the square the builder, Thomas Smith erected from 1838 semi-detached ‘Dutch’ gabled villas of very unusual Tudor-Jacobean design for Benyon de Beauvoir. It is probable that they are to the design of W.C Lockner who designed St Peter’s Church (1841) and the adjacent vicarage, which is very similar in style to the villas in De Beauvoir Square.
DOWNHAM ROAD
Downham Road is the gateway into De Beauvoir. This busy east-west route from Southgate Road to Kingsland Road, forms the southern boundary of the Conservation Area. Immediately to the south are the tower blocks and six storey slab blocks in dark brick of the LB Hackney’s De Beauvoir New Town Estate built between 1962 and 1972, which contrasts dramatically with the low-rise houses of the De
Beauvoir Conservation Area to the north.
DOWNS PARK ROAD (1820s)
The large works of the King’s printers Eyre & Spottiswoode (before 1831 Eyre & Strachan), originally for producing bibles, was in Shacklewell in Downs Lane (later Downs Park Road) by 1829. It later expanded to become a general printers’ which remained there until the late 1930s. Later occupants of the building included another printer, Swears & Wells and a toy factory. Foskett Terrace at the curve of Downs Park Road into Shacklewell Lane was built in 1866. Foskett Works to the rear was occupied by J & H Tracey, umbrella and stick manufacturers from the 1870s to the 1930s.
DOWNS ROAD
The prevailing activity until well into the 19th century was agriculture, notably grazing land and commercial gardening. There was one important Market Garden, Hollingtons until 1860 which occupied land that formed the northern part of Downs Road.
DYSART STREET (early nineteenth century)
The early origins of the wider South Shoreditch can be seen in the pattern of irregular streets which have developed from the three earliest roads of Old Street, Shoreditch High Street and Worship Street. The piecemeal infilling of the landscape between these roads in the eighteenth century laid down a network of smaller streets which linked these earlier routes: Paul Street/Wilson Street, Leonard Street, Curtain Road and Clifton Street all formed north-south and east-west communication routes within the wider area. The spaces between these interlinking streets in the Sun Street vicinity were further divided by smaller streets such as Dysart Street, Earl Street and Christopher Street on a grid pattern laid down in the early nineteenth century.
EARL STREET (early nineteenth century)
Earl Street was formerly Christopher’s Alley. It follows a different line to its earlier counterpart.
EASTWAY (1870s)
Eastway started life as Gainsborough Road.
Bacon’s Atlas shows that by 1888 a board school was built at the junction of Gainsborough Road and Osborne Road.
EDENBRIDGE ROAD (1864)
Edenbridge Road was built after 1864.
ELGIN STREET (1870s)
ENGLEFIELD ROAD
Englefield Road is the main east – west street that runs through the centre of De Beauvoir Conservation Area. In Rhodes’s original plan for the estate of 1821, it was to be the site of the central octagon (Benyon Octagon) where the radiating streets of the estate were to meet. It is a busy bus route and the street does not have such a coherent quality as some of the other roads of the Conservation Area have.
The historic layout can still be seen in part today, for example in the street patterns of Culford Road, Ardleigh Road, Tottenham Road and Buckingham Road. There are a number of streets radiating outwards across the grid pattern, which has resulted in the creation of triangular plots with semi-detached houses. In the eastern central part is a large square, De Beauvoir Square (one of four originally planned for the development). Nearby is the church of St Peter’s with its large green plot and adjacent former vicarage and grounds. The only other small green public space is Ufton Gardens on the corner of Downham Road and Ufton Road.
EVERING ROAD (1875)
Evering Road is one of the most attractive streets in the Northwold and Cazenove Conservation Area and has many examples of well-kept houses with attractive gardens. During the 1860s the site had been at the centre of the brickfields that covered much of the land south of Northwold Road. The road was formed in 1875, a year after the sewers were laid in preparation for building. A variety of men took building leases and Evering Road was largely completed by 1880. The builders were men active elsewhere on the Tyssen-Amhurst estate, including William Osment (who built much of Osbaldeston Road), Louis Clement Arnal and Henry Foot, who built Lorne Villas.
FAIRCHILD STREET/PLACE
Fairchild Street/Place – amongst the oldest in South Shoreditch.
FASSETT ROAD
Fassett Road has the front door steps and porches as seen in Albert Square on “EastEnders”, which are not in Fassett Square itself.
FASSETT SQUARE
In more recent years, much of the area was threatened with redevelopment by the local authority in the early 1970s. Local people successfully fought the proposals, fostering a sense of local pride and involvement. More recently, in search of an ‘authentic’ physical model for the fictional neighbourhood of Walford, the architecture and form of Fassett Square and Fassett Road were used as the basis for Albert Square in ‘EastEnders’.
The design of Fassett Square and Fassett Street are thus known to millions of people. The central garden is a protected London Square (London Squares Act 1931). There is a rose garden and pollarded lime trees, and cast iron painted black front railings which are replacements. This square has a very pleasant atmosphere overall and an intimate feel.
The five storey 1936 wing of the German Hospital is on the west side, behind a high mesh fence. It dominates, but is not oppressive, and is a fine and dramatic piece of modern design.
FELSTEAD STREET (1870)
Felstead Street and Prince Edward Road were built in 1870. Other streets soon followed, including many with names that have since been lost to Second World War bombing or later twentieth century redevelopment.
FILEY AVENUE (1890s)
Filey Avenue is a quiet street with street trees and at the western end is very open as it overlooks the playing fields to the rear of Jubilee Primary School. The houses towards Upper Clapton Road, were not completed until the 1890s and Filey Avenue was one of the last parts of the Tyssen-Amhurst Estate to be completed.
There are some particularly attractive houses in Filey Avenue and a variety of different designs can be seen.
FLEETWOOD STREET (1870s)
After the railway arrived in 1872, the Stoke Newington area became very densely developed and many of the 18th and 19th century mansions were demolished and their gardens cleared to allow the construction of terraces of small houses. A notable example is Fleetwood House, which was demolished to make way for Fleetwood Street, but on either side of Stoke Newington Church Street, new streets of terraced cottages and houses sprung up : Summerhouse Road, Kerswell Road, Defoe Road, and Woodlea Road being the most obvious
FORBERG ROAD
The houses were probably amongst the latest to be built on the Tyssen-Amhurst Estate – in the 1880s.
FOREST ROAD
The local street layout is a result of individual speculative house builders developing plots of land leased as part of a larger redevelopment along the street. There is a strongly defined grid pattern, most marked in a succession of streets running west to east, from Forest Road in the north to Shrubland Road in the south. This orientation continues in wider thoroughfares up to Dalston Lane. Then there is a succession of streets running north to south, from Parkholme Road right across to Horton Road.
FOUNTAYNE ROAD (1860s)
A wide new street, Foulden Road (later to become Fountayne Road) had been formed by 1868. Then it continued to the right instead of its later northwards course to join Upper Clapton Road. This stretch
was to become the eastern end of Cazenove Road.
Within twenty years the whole area to the west of Upper Clapton Road had been released on building leases by the Tyssen-Amhurst’s and under their control, a wide variety of individual builders had taken the land on leases to develop speculatively. Consistency in the design was achieved by strong estate regulation under the direction of Chester Cheston, Steward to the Tyssen-Amhurst Estate.
The estate carefully regulated the leasing of building lots from the 1860s onwards. Their control accounts for the consistency of design and careful layout of the streets, the integrity of the streetscape and planting and most importantly the consistency, but not uniformity in the design of the houses built. The streets were named after parts of the family estates in Norfolk, Northumberland and Kent.
GASCOYNE ROAD
By the time of Charles Booth’s Poverty Survey in the 1890s many of the roads within the conservation area were classed as occupied by the ‘well-to-do’ although some were merely ‘fairly comfortable’. As was to be expected the streets adjacent to Victoria Park and Well Street Common (including Gascoyne Road) were the wealthiest with their large villas, along with Cassland Crescent.
GATESBOROUGH STREET (mid-late eighteenth century)
Gatesborough Street was previously called Thomas Street.
GELDERSTON ROAD (1880s)
The modest cottages in Gelderston Road were built in the early 1880s. Although some houses in the street have been altered, there are well-restored examples at the western end of the road.
GILLETT SQUARE
In the mid-1990s work was undertaken in the area with architects Hawkins-Brown to convert a disused car-park to a town-centre square (Gillett Square) which was planned as a community meeting place and a venue for outdoor local cultural events.
The masterplan for Gillett Square was drawn up in 1998 and it opened in 2006. An important element is the Dalston Culture House, a hub of culture, creative and third sector services that work with the ethnic and cultural heritage of the area. The actual square is an important open space in a built-up area.
Kingsland High Street and Gillett Square are part of an established evening economy. In the late 1990s, the Rio Cinema was restored, reopening in 2000, the same year that the Arcola Theatre was set up in a former factory in Arcola Street. The theatre, together with the relocation of the Vortex Jazz Club to Gillett Square in 2010, helped establish Dalston as a place for entertainment once more. In 2009, Italian Vogue described Dalston as the trendiest, coolest neighbourhood in London and the young and fashionable of East London increasingly visit the area’s music venues, clubs, bars and restaurants that are changing the shop scene of Kingsland High Street from a ‘traditional’ lively Victorian high street to something more eclectic and dynamic.
GLOUCESTER SQUARE (1989)
Towards Queensbridge Road on the south side of the canal is some low-rise housing, including the award-winning Gloucester Square (1989) by Levitt Bernstein and the new development on the site of Adelaide Wharf completed in 2007 designed by Allford Hall Monaghan Morris. These developments are on the site of the former gas works and Haggerston Basin which was filled in 1967, soon after the gas works closed.
GOLDSMITH’S ROW
Haggerston is first recorded in the Doomsday Book as Hergotestane, a name possibly of Viking origin and was an outlying hamlet of Shoreditch. By the time of Rocque’s map in 1745, the village was known as Agostone. In Chassereau’s map of the same date, it is spelt as Haggerstone. By the mid-18th century there was very little local development – an exception was at the end of what is now Goldsmith’s Row.
Goldsmith’s Row is named after the picturesque almshouses which were established in 1703 by Mr Morrell and belonged to the Goldsmiths’ Company.
Goldsmiths Row formed part of the ancient “‘Market Porters’ Route” that ran into the city from Hackney and allowed the goods from the many market gardens in Hackney to be transported by handcart to the London food markets.
Indeed, a famous ‘bun house’ at the northern end of Goldsmith’s Row’ was renowned for being as good as any [18th-century café] in Chelsea.
GORE ROAD (1870s)
Gore Road has particularly good uniform sweeping terraces in crescents, built in yellow brick with stucco dressings and detailing. Small canted bays enhance the ground floor front rooms.The terraces were built in the 1870s. The houses have neat and colourful front gardens and many privet hedges separate the pavements from these gardens. The preservation of architectural detailing and the general condition of these properties is generally excellent and today Gore Road is one of the most desirable streets within the Victoria Park Conservation Area with all the houses having
extensive views southwards over the park, especially from the upper floor windows.
GRAHAM ROAD
Well known figures associated with the area include Florence Nightingale and Marie Lloyd, a highly popular music-hall artiste, who lived at 55 Graham Road. Towards the end of the 19th century, the more affluent residents started to move out of the area, and during this period, many areas within the Dalston region became populated with poorer residents.
On 6 September 1940, the first bomb fell on the East End and the Graham Road and Mapledene area suffered damage. The war prompted redevelopment schemes such as the Mapledene Estate, Lenthall House and
Lovell House.
GREAT EASTERN STREET (1876)
The growing road network saw several changes in Souyth Shoreditch, the most notable resulting in the construction of Great Eastern Street in 1876 along the line of a former lane (Willow Walk) and which linked Old Street and Shoreditch High Street with the relatively newly constructed Commercial Street (1845-58) to the east.
GROOMBRIDGE ROAD (1866)
Much of Groombridge Road was built in 1866.
GROSVENOR AVENUE (1862)
In 1862 Beresford Road and Grosvenor Avenue were built over brickfields.
HACKNEY ROAD
In the 16th century, Hackney Road was referred to as the highway from Shoreditch to Mare Street and throughout the 17th and 18th centuries was one of the main roads leading eastwards from the City. During the 17th century it was sometimes referred to as Colyer Lane, but seems to have been generally known as Hackney Road by 1700.
A lithograph entitled ‘Upon the Hackney Road’ and dated 1730 shows an idyllic rural scene and the road as little more than a winding farm lane, running through fields with a few rustic style buildings.
Until the 1730s Hackney Road was little more than a winding lane leading eastwards from the city. It was a major route from Essex to Smithfield Market. Many cattle, sheep and heavy carriages used the road, making it hard for the Shoreditch and Bethnal Green vestries to keep in good condition. The establishment of the Hackney Turnpike Trust in 1738, soon transformed the lane into a major thoroughfare.
There was little building development along Hackney Road until the end of the 18th century. Up until that date the fields adjacent to Hackney Road were occupied by farmers and market gardeners as clearly depicted on Chassereau’s map of St Leonard’s, Shoreditch which dates from 1745. The earliest building developments began at the Shoreditch end of Hackney Road (where St Leonard’s Church was completed in 1740 to the designs of George Dance the elder). The fine terraced houses, built as part of the early speculative residential development, gave way to more modest buildings as the nature of Hackney Road changed in the mid 19th century. Much of the area between Hackney Road and the Regent’s Canal acquired a strong industrial nature during the Victorian period. Part of the area now
occupied by Haggerston Park was the site of one of London’s largest gas works, established by the Imperial Gas Company in 1823.
In 1908 Sir Walter Besant wrote in The Fascination of London: Shoreditch and the East End that ‘Hackney Road, a curving thoroughfare traversed by tram-lines, is sordid and depressing’. He implied that the decline was fairly recent, as in 1848 the Shoreditch Observer had written that Hackney Road was little altered, with the exception of a few private houses being turned into shops. It is therefore likely that the commercialisation of Hackney Road occurred during the second half of the 19th century. Indeed when Charles Booth and his social observers were visiting the area in 1898 they stated that Hackney Road ‘is in the intermediate stage between a living and a shopping street’.
Throughout the 20th century the fortunes of Hackney Road were mixed and today despite the survival of handsome Georgian terraces and a variety of architecturally interesting 19th century pubs such as Ye Olde Axe, the overall impression is down-at-heel. Empty sites await new development, both within the Hackney Road Conservation Area and just outside. Hackney Road has a distinctive, edgy, urban feel, reminiscent of London in the 1980s.
HACKNEY WICK
The distinct geography of Hackney Wick and the Old Ford area was formed by the manipulation of the waterways and the building of transport infrastructure in the nineteenth century. The area became an integral link between Essex, the Docklands, and the City itself, attracting industries which used water directly and could boat or train resources in and products out.
The building of canals through Hackney Marshes was the fi rst major factor in shaping the landscape, determining its use, types of industry, and architecture. The Hackney Cut (1770s) created a bypass between the River Lea and Old Ford, and with the opening of the Hertford Union Canal (1830), established the route as a major link between Regents Canal and the Docklands.
The East & West India Docks & Birmingham Junction Railway, with investment from the London and North Western Railway, was established in the late 1840s. The Victoria Park to Bow line was opened in the autumn of 1850, including Old Ford Station, and extended to Poplar Docks by the start of 1852, also connecting to Fenchurch Street and Bromley. The Illustrated London News of 15 November 1851 describes a journey on the line; after Bow Station ‘passing onward through the verdant fields we came to the retired village of Homerton’. Within a decade the surrounding area was busy with factories which congregated between the canal and the stations.
The company changed its name to the North London Railway in 1853. Victoria Park station was opened in 1856 on the junction with the Eastern Counties Railway from Stratford.
The layout of the tracks quickly determined the shape of local development, effectively isolating the Hackney Wick and Fish Island area. The stations at Old Ford and Victoria Park encouraged the building of factories along railway lines. This, combined with the building of large depots to the northwest of Hackney Wick and just south of Old Ford Station, had the effect of confining the residential areas and preventing their linking with nearby south Hackney or north Bow.
The railway line from Victoria Park Junction to Poplar was closed to public passengers in 1944, and to Bow by 1949; Old Ford Station was closed in 1944.A goods line still operated until in the 1960s when the line between Victoria Park Junction and Bow was dismantled. The stretch was built upon as the part of the East Cross Route A102 (M) Road (now the A12) as part of the GLC’s plans for the ‘London Motorway Box’, cancelled in 1973. Victoria Park station was built over by the new road and Old Ford station was replaced by housing.
Hackney Wick has been synonymous with chemical industries like dye, confectionary, plastic and later printing. Namingly, Clarnico,the largest confectioner in Britain; Achille Serre, the pathfinding entrepreneur who introduced Dry Cleaning to England; Alexander Parkes who invented the world’s first true synthetic plastic the Parkesine; Eugene Carless who established a distilling and oil refining business that later invented the brand name petrol; are the testimony to this very fact.The remnants of the industrial heritage is still found as clusters in the central industrial cluster around the Hackney Wick station.
HAGGERSTON BASIN
The long and narrow basin was dug during the 1820s soon after the Gas Light & Coke Company took the site. Coal was barged up the canal and into the basin where it was unloaded to be burned in huge furnaces called retorts to make gas. The gas was distributed by pipes to houses and businesses, especially from the 1840s when more and more middle class homes were connected. The gas was stored in a huge gasometer 75 feet high and 195 feet in diameter. Gasworks were huge new visual features in central Hackney, the most striking elements being the retorts where coal was loaded and heated to produce gas, and the vast gasholders, where it was stored. They worked day and night and the locale around these huge industrial centres was often polluted (no gardens would flourish within a quarter of a mile of them) and had a stench of gas. There was also the risk of explosions. The gas works remained on the site until 1964. In 1964 the borough council created Haggerston Park from the waste land left over from the gas works. At the same time they drained the basin and filled it with soil. At Haggerston Park the high brick walls surrounding the old basin survive and through the centre of the park the line of the canal is visible where a sunken garden follows the canal’s path.
HAGGERSTON PARK (1956)
Haggerston Park is a distinctive area within the conservation area and includes Haggerston School, and Hackney City Farm, to the west of Goldsmith’s Row.
Haggerston Park is a six hectare green space that was created in the 1950s from the former land reclaimed from a gas works, tile works and terraced housing. The original park was laid out by Hackney Borough Council in 1956-1958, being one of the few, formal landscaped gardens in Hackney.
In historic terms, both Haggerston Park and the City Farm are fairly recent additions to the area, being created in the 1950s and 1970s, respectively.
The Park and the City Farm both serve as a pleasant relief, an oasis away from the built edge of the borough.
HAGGERSTON ROAD
Albion Square Conservation Area is largely tucked away from the nearby main routes (Kingsland Road and Queensbridge Road) that pass north to south through this part of the borough. It lies just to the north-west of an ancient road formerly called Stonebridge Lane (now Haggerston Road), that ran northwards from Hackney Road in the south, through Stonebridge Common and towards Kingsland Road.
HEARN STREET
Influence of the historic urban form and activities on the area – the historic urban form and former activities of the Hearn Street-Hewett Street area is seen in the pattern of small streets and alleys that reflect the largely late nineteenth century development of the area.
In 1873 (1st edition OS map), the road was known as Cumberland Street but by 1893 this had changed to its present name.
HEPSCOTT ROAD (1867)
Davey Road and Hepscott Road may have been one of the earliest residential terraces in the area.
HERTFORD ROAD
The three classical villas – Benyon Cottages, with a date stone of 1839, were built in Hertford Road and the rest of the road was built soon after.
Hertford Road south of De Beauvoir Square is quite different in character to the surrounding streets because it has an industrial and new-build character. It looks over the former Metropolitan Hospital on Kingsland Road, and towards the former Metropolitan Hospital Nurses Home of 1927 (by Young and Hall) in Enfield Road.
HEWETT STREET
In 1873, Hewett Street was called Gloucester Street, changing in 1893.
HOLYWELL ROW (about 1750)
Holywell Row has early links both in name and route to the pre-Victorian development of South Shoreditch, commemorating Holywell Priory that lay formerly to the northeast and originating from a path that connected Worship Street with Holywell Street in the early eighteenth century. It has maintained much of its Georgian footprint and (residential) building scale. Worship Street and
Curtain Road, the southern and eastern boundaries of the zone, both appear to pre-date Holywell Row, appearing on a map of 1690.
HOMFRAY STREET (1880s)
HOXTON SQUARE (1683)
Hoxton Square was laid out shortly fter 1683. In the eighteenth century it was an upmarket residential area with a market to the west and interspersed with gardens. The street pattern surviving today can be directly related to the early eighteenth layout of streets around the square and between Old Street and Hoxton Street. Rocque’s map of 1747 depicts essentially the same pattern of blocks as found today reflecting a continuity.
Hoxton Square gradually ascended to became a desirable residential area, in some contrast to the centre of South Shoreditch. The development of the land between Worship Street and Sun Street in the early eighteenth century on the estate of the Earl of Darnley also marked the beginning of the more planned development of South Shoreditch.
To the west of the square, Coronet Street leads into the former Hoxton Market.
ICKBURGH ROAD (1880s)
In architectural style the houses in Ickburgh Road appear to be amongst the latest built on the Tyssen-Amhurst estate and probably dating from the late 1880s.
ISABELLA ROAD (1860s)
Isabella Road was built during the 1860s and 1870s, along with the former National Schools nearby. It is a good examples of small terraces of the mid-to-late Victorian era and contribute to the overall quality of the Clapton Square Conservation Area.
JENNER ROAD (1875)
Constructed between 1875 and 1878, much of Jenner Road was built by a local builder, William Redmond, who was responsible (along with his brother Isaac, who eventually went bankrupt) for over 200 buildings on the Tyssen-Amhurst Estate.
Redmond, sublet the construction of a few of the properties to other men including Alfred Lee, Louis Clement Arnal and James Prout.
JOHN CAMPBELL ROAD
This short street comprises well-preserved terraces of three-storey houses dating from the 1860s and 1870s. There are also a number of converted warehouse buildings now in use as flats. At No. 2A is Dalston Pier, a former warehouse now a multi-purpose studio.
KELDAY ROAD (1880s)
KINGSLAND APPRAISAL
Non OCR
KINGSLAND BASIN
When the Regent’s Canal was completed in 1820, it initially formed a boundary between the more industrial areas to the south where industries such as furniture making were well established and the middle-class speculative estates that were emerging in central and northern Hackney. But within five years industrial premises, wharves and factories were built beside the Regent’s Canal. Kingsland Basin, dug out during the mid-1820s, took commerce and industry further north along Kingsland Road, deep into what was soon to become De Beauvoir Town.
Kingsland Basin was built to the south of the planned De Beauvoir Town between 1822-7 and forms part of the estate leased from the family in 1821 by the speculative builder William Rhodes, who developed the area. It was Rhodes who undertook the excavation of the basin which was originally called Shoreditch Basin. By 1830 the De Beauvoir Estate had granted sixteen leases for new wharves on both sides of the basin. At first the wharves had few built structures on them, apart from a long building on the northern boundary of Hertford Wharf and a whiting works near the canal.
Throughout the period 1830-50, when De Beauvoir Town was being built, the basin allowed for the easy import and storage of materials for the development and therefore few buildings were needed.
Originally along the Kingsland Road frontage there were high brick walls protecting the goods stored on the wharves of the basin; a practice no doubt directly copied from the massive walls protecting the East and West India Docks from theft of high value goods. The Kingsland Basin was from the outset associated with the timber and building trades.
KINGSLAND HIGH STREET
The Roman ‘Ermine Street’ was later known as the Old North Road and, in this area, now Kingsland High Street. Despite being a continuation of Kingsland Road, it was principally built as a shopping street, and the streetscape north of Dalston Junction exhibits a different architectural character to that further south. The historic nature of the properties in Kingsland High Street and further north on Stoke Newington Road, which are mainly long rows of purpose-built terraces with shops, is intrinsically different to that south of Dalston Junction where many of the shops tend to be later additions built out into the front-gardens of 18th and early 19th century houses. Much of the building fabric of the conservation area is Victorian and Edwardian and development was encouraged by the opening of the first Kingsland Station by the East and West India Docks and Birmingham Junction Railway in 1850, and the later Dalston Junction Station of 1865 that replaced it.
With growth in residential population in both Hackney and eastern Islington to the west, new provisioning and shopping areas were needed. This was largely found in Kingsland Road to the south and High Street, Kingsland which according to the Post Office Directory was almost entirely commercial by 1849. In 1869 the street was renamed Kingsland High Road. By 1877 trams as well as omnibuses connected Kingsland High Street to the City. The London General Omnibus Company ran 304 return journeys a day from the Crown and Castle Public House to the Elephant and Castle every day.
Traditionally Dalston has always been one of the main entertainment centres of North East London. From the late Victorian and Edwardian era pubs thrived especially close to the railway station, and several theatres and later on cinemas, clubs and dance halls appeared. Kingsland High Street had a Lyons Corner tea shop and F. E. Cooke’s jellied eel and pie shop and restaurant at 41 Kingsland High Street (Grade II listed) was open from 1910 to 1997.
KINGSLAND ROAD
Kingsland Road runs along the route of Ermine Street.
Evidence from cases heard at the Old Bailey suggest that it was notorious for armed robbery and highwaymen, especially at night. The road (known as the Old North Road) was one of the most popular routes in and out of the City of London and constantly busy with wagons and carts and the road surface became difficult to pass. A Turnpike Trust with a toll gate (known as Kingsland Gate), was established there in the early 18th century with a further gate at Stamford Hill.
Housing development in the area was rapid after the opening of the nearby Regent’s Canal in 1820. Large numbers of new houses were built between 1840 and 1860 and the former farmland and nursery grounds east and west of Kingsland Road were amongst the first to be developed into an urban form. The paired-villa was the most common house type built in the 1840s and many of the houses erected by Islip Odell, the main builder/developer of Albion Square, take this form. The other dominant house type in the Albion Square Conservation Area is the short terrace of four houses.
KYVERDALE ROAD (1890s)
Stoke Newington Common (saved for public use by the Metropolitan Commons Act of 1872) had been bisected by the Great Eastern Railway and further northwards, the Tyssen-Amhurst Estate had started to develop Cazenove, Osbaldeston and Kyverdale Roads running towards Clapton Common.
LAURISTON ROAD
Grove Street was known as Lauriston Road after 1877.
Well into 19th century, the land on which the area stands was fields and market gardens. In Starling’s Map of Hackney from 1831, there are few built structures in the area apart from Hackney Terrace dating from 1790s; the large house owned by the Norris family in Grove Street (now demolished) and some properties in the hamlet of Grove Street.
In the early 19th century there were still fields between the hamlets of Well Street (now Victoria Park Road) and Grove Street (the current Lauriston Road).
Just to the north of what became Victoria Park was the Three Colts tavern and tea garden. The fields were criss-crossed with a number of small lanes and foot paths. At the centre lay Well Street or Hackney Common. In 18th century parish records, the common was often referred to as the “common field” and was used mainly for growing arable crops. By the 19th century it was more usually used for grazing land. The individual fields that made up the common were owned by three different landowners. However as it was manorial common or Lammas land, the inhabitants of Hackney had the right to graze animals there between August and March.
To the south of the hamlet of Grove Street, during the medieval period was the deer park of Bishop Bonner. Situated in the parish of Bethnal Green, the park became agricultural land after the Dissolution and became known as Bonner’s Fields by the 18th century. This land was eventually purchased by the Crown Commissioners c.1840 to be laid out as Victoria Park.
Rocque’s Map of 1745 shows the area as predominantly agricultural, with many small fields. The hamlet of Grove Street lies near to the modern Lauriston Road, but the line of the modern road is slightly different following a footpath to the west which is more clearly shown on Starling’s Map of 1831.
Research by historian Isobel Watson has found that at the time of the Tithe Survey of 1843, over 60% of land in South Hackney lay in the hands of just four owners – Sir John Cass’s Charity Estate, the Norris Family Estate, the heirs of William Thompson and St Thomas’s Hospital Estate.
The formation of Victoria Park was a spur to the development of this part of South Hackney, but as the map of 1862 shows the area was largely rural well into the second half of the 19th century.
LAWFORD ROAD
Lawford Road is a short street that runs south from Northchurch Road to Downham Road. It was originally the southern continuation of Culford Road and was renamed in 1985 when it was made a cul-de-sac.
LEA BRIDGE
The first bridge at Lea Bridge was constructed of timber in 1757, replacing Jeremy’s Ferry. The second Lea Bridge was constructed in 1820, but was itself replaced in 1892. By the 1830s Paradise Dock (later known as Lea Bridge Dock) had been cut and a more coherent cluster of development had been constructed around along its sides. Throughout the C19th this was supplemented by further residential, commercial, and industrial development. The East London Waterworks (Lea Bridge Station) were also constructed during this period, to the east of the River Lea.
The C19th also shows residential development springing up around the Millfields Recreation Grounds, although as this is common land (now designated as Metropolitan Open Land) the buildings around Lea Bridge remained as a distinct group.
An auction catalogue and plan (see figure 13) from 1902 lists a variety of lots for sale at Lea Bridge: a glass factory, boat builders (with dressing rooms and club rooms), a carbonic acid gas factory, an India rubber works, and cottages, as well as the Ship Aground Beer House. The area around Lea Bridge reflects the many uses of the River Lea.
In 1935 a furniture works was constructed to the rear of the carbonic acid works to Otley Terrace. Drawings from this period indicate that the Lea Bridge Dock was still in use, although by the 1960s it had been filled in.
LEA BRIDGE ROAD
The Princess of Wales Public House, Lea Bridge Road
The Princess of Wales is a prominent building in views along Lea Bridge Road and along the River Lea. The current building dates from 1920 when the Prince of Wales Public House was rebuilt. It is well detailed building which retains many of its original features, and remains in use a pub.
LEONARD STREET (mid-late eighteenth century)
LONG STREET
After the Second World War, many small East End firms were displaced. Long-standing businesses lost out as new uses emerged. Some firms manufacturing furniture, leather products, and clothing were displaced by large-scale London County Council housing schemes. Other businesses and factories suffered from bomb damage, so lost their buildings during the war.
To encourage industry to remain in the area, the LCC decided to build a series of workshops to re-house such firms. Forshaw and Abercrombie’s County of London Plan (1943) recommended the creation of flatted factories to accommodate the clothing, furniture, light chemical and light engineering trades.
The Long Street scheme was the first in the LCC’s programme.
Many of the first tenants came from nearby Bethnal Green where their workshops were being redeveloped for public housing.
Long Street and Waterson Street were established areas, with a mix of working class housing and factories in the late 19thC. to early 20th Century.
In the post-war period, the County of London Plan zoned the area for industry. The purpose of the flatted factory was to allow a large number of small firms with different activities to be housed together, providing a high density.
The Long Street factories were designed in 1955 by the LCC Architect, Hubert Bennett and constructed in pre-cast concrete.
LORDSHIP PARK
Lordship Park is a long, completely straight road orientated approximately east to west.
At the western end is Green Lanes, a major route connecting Turnpike Lane to Dalston.
This junction is dominated by the striking tower of the former Pumping Station, built in 1856 and now listed grade II*.
Lordship Park lies to the north of Clissold Park and Stoke Newington, in the north-west part of Hackney Borough area. To the north lies Allerton Road, which backs on to a vast 19th century reservoir called ‘West Reservoir’, with, to the west, the grade II* listed pumping station which faces Green Lanes. To the east are a number of streets of late 19th century housing, with some areas of 1930s housing and more recent development, particularly for institutional uses. The area is generally flat, with the land falling slightly to the south, to mark the line of the Hackney Brook. This is now totally within a culvert, and lies below the northern boundary to Clissold Park, turning southwards along Queen Elizabeth’s Walk, and under Grazebrook Road. The New River, which follows a meandering course from Hertfordshire to the centre of London, lies partly within Clissold Park and to the west of Lordship Park.
A map of 1855 shows a dotted line across fields marking the location of Lordship Park, and also how the old footpath was diverted to allow development. The map also shows how new houses were being erected along Albion Road but the area still retained a focused village character with Church Street and St Mary’s Church being the most prominent features. A new church had been needed for the ever-expanding population and this was started in 1865 although not completed until 1890.
Lordship Park was built on demesne land from the late 1860s onwards. The map of 1870 shows most of the street with the larger, more substantial semidetached houses at either end having been completed. These are the Buildings of Local Significance, nos. 77-91 (odd) and nos. 78-92 (even), and to the west, nos. 1-15 (odd) and nos. 2-16 (odd). Each end of the development was marked by tall brick piers, decorated with lions holding a shield. Two of these remain.
LOWER CLAPTON ROAD
The Clapton Square Conservation Area is located in central Hackney, at the junction of two ancient roads running north-south; Lower Clapton Road and Mare Street and the two east-west routes of Dalston Lane and Homerton High Street. Much of the development of this area can be traced back to the mid-18th century when the villages of Hackney and Clapton were both favoured centres for those seeking solitude and country recreation outside the City of London.
LUKE STREET (early-mid nineteenth century)
MADINA ROAD
Madina Road is the recent name for the street running from the Dalston Lane end of the German Hospital to the former administration block.
The modern development fits in well into the layout of the existing complex.
MAPLEDENE ROAD
In the seventeenth century, the Dalston area was mostly fields, as can be seen in John Rocque’s map of 1769. Part of the Dalston region was ‘London Field’, later the ‘lammas land’ where people had the right to graze animals, and was larger than it is today. It is interesting that some of the earlier field and path patterns in Hackney can still be traced, as street developments followed the lines of these, such as in the Mapledene Road area. This helped dictate today’s grid pattern.
In 1971, the Mapledene area was subject to Compulsory Purchase Orders, which were not implemented as a result of residents’ opposition. 120 properties were declared part of a Housing Action Area in 1976 (becoming a General Improvement Area in 1981). 345 properties were additionally included in a General Improvement Area in 1978 and another was set up in 1980 in the Graham Road area. A number of modest improvement schemes were carried out, such as tree planting and clearing up backlands.
MARE STREET
Hackney can be traced back to the 12th century and Mare Street is one of its earliest routes. It was known as Church Street until 1868.
In Rocque’s map, the stretch below the Westgate Triangle is called Mears Street, as a ribbon of houses surrounded by fields and market gardens.
Well Street is well established, as is Morning Lane (as Money Lane), Sylvester Path, and The Grove (the Town Hall Square) and the diagonal routes of Hackney Grove (part of the Market Porter’s Route,, and Lyme Grove are evident. London Lane and Lamb Lane are evident as the two defined routes connecting Mare Street to the common land of London Fields.The surrounding land is a patchwork of market gardens, with watercress beds along the Hackney Brook, and to the north side of Morning Lane.
In the Rocque map of 1745, Sylvester Path is also developed along its length. The warehouse to the south occupies the space of the former Spurstowe’s almshouses, which were established here in 1689, and rebuilt in 1815 before being moved to new accommodation in Navarino Road. On the east side of Sylvester Path, No.4 was built in the mid to late 18th century, though its facade was partly reconstructed in the early C19th.
Another feature of the Rocque map of 1745 is the articulation of the Market Porter’s Route which was the path along which produce was transported from Clapton and Hackney to the City by Mond burthern° or porters. The Market Porter’s Route started at the present day St. Augustine’s Tower, then south down Mare street, before turning Into Sylvester Path, around Town Hall Square, and south along Hackney Grove, continuing Into Martello Street and across London Fields, across the Regent’s Canal to the Nag’s Head in Hackney Road.
(Mare Street Conservation Area to be OCR’ed)
MAURY ROAD (1877)
Maury Road was built between 1877-1879 by Charles Baker, H. Foot and Louis Clement Arnal. The houses built by Baker were to cost at least £420 each, while those by Arnal were to cost £400. It is a street with a mix of two-storey cottages arranged in terraces with a few three-storey houses, as exists in parts of Benthal Road and Jenner Road.
Almost all of the Northwold and Cazenove Conservation Area was built in a thirty year period between 1865 and 1895 on land owned by the Tyssen-Amhurst family. It is an excellent example of a late-Victorian residential estate built under the strict control of the ground landlord, but with different builders undertaking specific terraces or streets, which resulted in a variety of different house types and designs, but with a uniformity that gives the whole area a distinct character and integrity.
MAYFIELD STREET
Greenwood’s map of 1824−6 shows moderately-sized suburban houses or villas within the local Conservation Area. Dalston Lane was broad enough to be divided in places there, with narrow greens or buildings in between. Side roads ran south from Dalston Lane, and included Roseberry Place and Mayfield Street, which had already been laid out between groups of the houses.
MEHETABEL ROAD (1860s)
From the mid-19th century much more speculative development occurred in the area, including purpose-built shops with flats above in Lower Clapton Road. Both sides of Dalston Lane as far as the Pembury Tavern were also developed at this time, along with Amhurst Road. In the 1880s smaller homes were developed in Clapton Passage; Holly Villas in 1882 and Ivy Villas opposite a little later. Mehetabel Road was built during the 1860s onwards.
MEYNELL CRESCENT (1894)
Some properties including Meynell Crescent to the north of Well Street Common were not built until 1894.
MEYNELL GARDENS (1932)
Under the site of the current Meynell Gardens was a house dating from 1787. Meynell Gardens hosted a small enclave of Arts and Crafts houses of the 1930s.
In this cul-de-sac at the north-west corner of Well Street Common, a small enclave of Arts and Crafts houses were built in 1932-3 and designed as a group by Alfred Savill. Parts of the old house survive in the garden walls.
MIDDLETON ROAD
The houses in this area were aimed at a middle class resident and were lit by gas from the beginning.
The Albion Square area is a compact and cohesive early to mid-Victorian speculative estate of high quality. It was constructed to a planned scheme, initiated by the ground landlords, the Middleton family between 1840 and 1850. Albion Square and Middleton Road were laid out by the estate surveyor James Pownall, who was probably also responsible for the architectural design of the attractive Italianate houses. The development was undertaken by the speculative builder Islip Odell. Many of the terraces and villas are of recognisable architectural merit, both in their overall design and in their architectural detailing and many are listed or locally listed.
MILDMAY PARK, MILDMAY GROVE, MILDMAY STREET
The Mildmay Estate, to the south of Newington Green, was leased for building and in the 1840s and 1850s Mildmay Park, Mildmay Grove and Mildmay Street were built.
MILLER’S AVENUE, MILLER’S TERRACE
These two former mews streets lie to the north and south of Arcola Street behind properties fronting onto Stoke Newington Road. On the western side of Miller’s Avenue is a long range of Victorian commercial buildings – two storeys in height that have now become Miller’s Junction, a creative space of artists and illustrators. Miller’s Terrace is a longer mews and contains a mixture of commercial and residential buildings of two and three storeys and includes Castle Gibson’s MC Motors, a large former warehouse and adjoining industrial buildings used for filming and photo shoots. For many years in the mid-20th century parts of Miller’s Terrace were stores and workshops for Ascot Lamps and Lighting Ltd., who also occupied Nos. 15-17 Arcola Street. There is also modern social housing in Miller’s Terrace.
MONTAGUE ROAD (1866)
Sandringham Road, Colvestone Crescent and Montague Road were built in 1866-7. These smart new middle-class homes were undoubtedly aimed at those who might commute from Dalston Junction into Broad Street Station in the City, which opened in 1864.
Montague Road contains some of the most distinguished and unusual terraced houses of the Conservation Area. The majority of the houses in the street were built in 1866 and several builders were involved in their construction. Nos. 5, 7, 9 and 11 were built by Cornelius Margett in 1866. Edmund Hammond built the terrace numbered 1-8 on the west-side, in 1866. Another builder Robert Bankes was active in the street in 1866.
MORNING LANE
From the medieval period until c. 1850, the surrounding areas were largely fields and market gardens. This is clearly shown in Rocque’s Map of 1746. Indeed so fertile was the soil in the locality that the watercress beds off Morning Lane, watered by Hackney Brook survived well into the age of the railways. Although few ancient buildings remain today the topography of the area has changed very little. Many plots, roads, footpaths remain as they were in earlier times, their routes dictated by manorial boundaries.
MORTIMER ROAD
It was noted in the Booth notebooks that two factories were built in the large back gardens of Mortimer Road. One was owned by a straw hat manufacturer, employing about 25 women and another was an artificial flower maker who employed up to 60 girls. This growth in light industry and manufacturing was something that expanded throughout the early 20th century on the De Beauvoir Estate. Over the years, especially between the wars, many small industries were set up on the estate, often behind houses in former mews; on vacant pieces of ground and at the rear of large gardens.
NARFORD ROAD (1882)
Narford Road’s houses were built in 1882-4 by Edward Withers and were amongst the smallest homes built on the Tyssen-Amhurst estate with 17ft frontages and at a cost of just £300 each. A photograph taken in 1908 shows the street in its original condition as built. Narford Road took a direct hit from a VI Flying Bomb during the Second World War and the Northwold Road end was largely destroyed, being replaced during the 1950s and 1970s by low blocks of Local Authority flats.
NARROWAY
Hackney Brook crossed Church Street (now the Narroway) a few yards south of Bohemia Place at the centre of the village. Church Street was forded by pedestrians and carriages at the present corner with Amhurst Road and additionally on the eastern side.
In the Narroway, a large house built in 1840 was occupied by the Tyssen’s steward and acted as the manor house. Although much altered on the ground floor the house survives today. The form, width and plot development in the Narroway is reminiscent of a medieval high street, even though the surviving buildings were built in the 19th and 20th centuries.
The population of the parish of St John at Hackney increased from 12,730 in 1801 to 22,494 in 1821, rising to 218,998 at the end of the 19th century.
Starting during the 18th century, but accelerating more rapidly during the following hundred years the area was developed with a variety of speculative housing developments. A prosperous shopping street developed, following the line of Mare Street from near the current Town Hall Square northwards along the Narroway into Lower Clapton Road.
NAVARINO MANSIONS
Navarino Mansions is a complex of separate Edwardian tenement blocks.
They were built for the Four Per Cent Industrial Dwelling Company and completed in 1904, designed by Nathan S Joseph, the Company’s architect. They were intended to attract Jewish artisans from the overcrowded east end.
Navarino Mansions is dramatically different from the rest of the area with a real sense of drama in its long “streets”, sheer height and excellence of design. The blocks are five storeys with an attic storey and made of red brick with elaborate stucco dressings. Attractive details abound, such as the Art Nouveau cast iron balconies and subtle stucco reliefs. The lettering at the
entrance spells ‘NAVARINO MANSIONS’, and is in an Art Nouveau typeface. Despite its height, the complex manages not to look too imposing, but has human scale, aided by details such as balconies, stucco relief of children. Sky, unobscured by high rise buildings, is visible over the railway line at the end of the “streets”. The complex has recently been successfully and sensitively refurbished by architects Hunt Thompson, with a high degree of tenant involvement.
NEW INN YARD (mid-late eighteenth century)
NEW NORTH PLACE (early-mid nineteenth century)
This street pattern remains to day despite losing its residential focus in the late nineteenth century.
NEWINGTON GREEN
The area around Newington Green was once part of the Manor of Newington Barrow, which in the thirteenth century was in the possession of Alice de Barowe. It included the two ancient settlements of Newington Green and Kingsland. Both originally had a green, but the one at Kingsland was completely built over by the end of the nineteenth century. Newington Green, however, eventually became common land and is now preserved as a London Square.
In the fifteenth century Newington Green was a forest clearing. However, by the middle of that century a number of prosperous people built houses around the Green, attracted by the rural surroundings only a short journey from London and Westminster.
A large house, known as the Bishop’s Palace, was built in the sixteenth century on the north-east corner of the Green. The Palace is thought to have been owned by the Earl of Northumberland, having been given to him by Henry VIII; the building stood until the late eighteenth century.
In 1611 William Halliday, a wealthy Alderman of the City of London, bought a 44 acre estate to the south of Newington Green and built a large three storey house which was later inherited by Henry Mildmay. Mildmay House, as it became called, later became nos. 9 & 10 Newington Green; it was used as a boarding school in the early nineteenth century and in 1885 it became a nurse’s home. Another old house on the west side of the Green was replaced in 1658 by a terraced row of four houses, nos. 52-55 Newington Green. These are the oldest terraced houses still surviving in England and were restored in the late 1990s with the aid of an English Heritage grant.
Around the 1660s the area around Newington Green became a haven for nonconformist preachers and teachers, who had become social outcasts under the repressive laws of James II. After the Act of Uniformity in 1662, about 2,000 clergymen from across the country were banished from the church and many went to the Newington Green area to worship in secret. Several academies were set up to educate
those refused entry to Oxford and Cambridge for religious reasons. Both Daniel Defoe and Samuel Wesley were educated at Charles Morton’s Academy (1667-1696).
Charles Morton emigrated to America in 1686 and became the first Vice-President of Harvard University. Defoe married a girl from the area and lived in the locality for many years.
Mary Wollstonecraft, the writer of the seminal work, “Vindication of the rights of Women” and mother to Mary Shelley, was another famous resident of Newington Green.
At the end of the eighteenth century Newington Green was still largely surrounded by farmland. This changed rapidly in the nineteenth century. Starting in 1860 new streets were laid out to the west of Newington Green Road.
Streets to the north of the Green, east of Albion Road were laid about around 1855-58; those to the west of Albion Road being laid out in the 1870s. The School Board of London built the Matthias Road Board School in 1884, later renamed the Newington Green Primary School.
Newington Green itself was formally enclosed in the 1740s, when it was given railings, and was protected as a London Square in 1908.
NICHOL’S SQUARE (1841-1967)
The former Hackney farmland began firing bricks for building materials before the streets were laid out. Greenwood’s Map of 1827 shows the north side of Hackney Road completed between Goldsmith’s Row and Weymouth Terrace and some smaller streets to the north: York Street, Goldsmith’s Row and Great Cambridge Street, began to take shape. On the map, the tile factory is clearly shown along with the large Bunker’s Pond, lying just south of the gas works. Even as late as 1827, the large market garden of the Allport family survived. However, it replaced shortly after by Nichol’s Square.
Nichol’s Square was named after John Nichols, a well-known antiquary and editor of the Gentleman’s Magazine. It was laid out in 1841 to the designs of John Henry Taylor. In 1908 it was described as ”a quaint square, the centre filled with double-gableended, semi-detached houses with a touch of originality in their design.” Nichol’s Square consisted of a mix of flat-fronted classical terraces with porticos that lay around the perimeter, with semi-detached, Tudor-style cottages in the centre. However, in 1963, Shoreditch Borough Council demolished the square as part of their comprehensive house clearance policy, despite objections from local conservationists. In 1967, the Fellows Court development was built on the site.
NORCOTT ROAD (1880)
The houses in Norcott Road are two-storey cottages on raised basements. Mostly single bayed with paired entrances, there are a few double fronted houses that are very attractive. One builder, Edward
Withers, built all the houses between 1880-1884.
NORTHCHURCH ROAD
Northchurch Road with handsome Italianate stuccoed semi-detached villas was built during the early 1840s.
In the original plans for the estate this street was known as Church Road and so it remained until well into the 20th century. The north side of Northchurch Road was built between 1841-1846, while the south side was constructed slightly later between 1844 and 1847. Northchurch Road (and its continuation, Northchurch Terrace, formerly also Northchurch Road) is of great importance to the Conservation Area; both for its central location in the layout of De Beauvoir Town and for it being the only access point to De Beauvoir Square from the west. Currently there is only pedestrian
and cycle access to the Square from Northchurch Road and Northchurch Terrace.
NORTHWOLD ROAD (pre 1745)
Northwold Road, which runs from Upper Clapton Road to Stoke Newington Common has had a variety of names during its history and is the oldest way through from Clapton to Stoke Newington. In 1745 it was called Dow’s Lane and was entirely devoid of building except to the immediate north of Stoke Newington Common. By 1799 and at least until 1845 it was always called Kate’s Lane and throughout the first half of the nineteenth century there was plenty of cottage development along both sides, probably associated with the need for accommodation of those working in the farms and nurseries in the area and after the 1860s, in the brickfields that covered many of the fields directly to the south.
For a short period it was later called Brook Street, after Hackney Brook – Northwold Road forded the brook where it joined Stoke Newington Common. The present name, Northwold Road is named after part of the Norfolk estate of the Tyssen-Amhurst family.
Roque’s 1745 map shows very little settlement north of Brooke House, but lanes from Upper Clapton Road such as Dow’s Lane can be seen to wind through the agricultural fields owned by the Tyssen-Amhurst’s leading towards Stoke Newington Common. By 1821, it is evident that there was more building development along Upper Clapton Road and Kate’s Lane which had several clusters of cottages and houses along its course.
Over 70 labourers’ families lived in Kate’s Lane in 1821 and in 1827 complaints were made to the Parish Vestry about drinking, Sunday shopping and gambling in the brickfields in the area. Just ten years later, a plan of the landholdings of the Tyssen-Amhurst family shows Kate’s Lane extensively built on from Upper Clapton Road to the corner of what was to become Fountayne Road. On the west side of Stoke Newington Common stood Sanford Place, which had been built in 1788.
A new large brick church, St Michael and All Angels had been erected in 1885 on the corner of Northwold Road and Fountayne Road as a place of worship for the middle class residents who were moving into the stylish villas and houses being built.
OLDHILL STREET
Much of the land in the area was owned by the Tyssen family, the largest landowners in Hackney in the 18th and early 19th century. Other lands near Oldhill Street were owned by the Webbe family and it was in Oldhill Street that some of the earliest houses in Upper Clapton were built. As the Victoria County History states ‘planned development in Upper Clapton began on Webbe’s 24 a, where by 1774 Oldhill Street (then Chapel and Hill streets) had rows of 4 and 10 cottages.
St Thomas’s Church opened as the Stamford Hill Chapel in 1774 and was built by Joseph Devall for his tenants living nearby (possibly in the adjacent terrace, parts of which were completed by that date). Often known as Stamford Hill Independent Chapel, the intention was to provide a local chapel for gentlefolk buying houses in the area, saving them the long journey to Hackney Parish Church in the Narrow Way.
In 1827 four local men bought the church and it was consecrated as a chapel of ease for the parish of Hackney, and dedicated to St Thomas in October 1827. The stuccoed east tower was added in 1828 by Joseph Gwilt, who also altered the body of the church at the same time at a total cost of over £10,000. The brick body of St Thomas’s was rebuilt in 1960, by N.F. Cachemaille-Day after war damage demolished the original church in 1940, but fortunately spared the tower.
ORCHARD MEWS (1984)
On the south side of Southgate Grove near Southgate Road are four refurbished and new build flats and houses (Harbour View, Tides Reach, Starboard and Portside) with nautical elements hidden behind very modern railings and gates. Hidden down a cobbled mews to the rear of the south of Southgate Grove is Orchard Mews a modern courtyard development which is of excellent design. Designed in 1984 by
Campbell, Zogolovitch, Wilkinson and Gough (CZWG) for Kentish Homes, it comprises 15 mews houses with quirky Arts and Crafts motifs including substantial side turrets hung with red tiles that have domed roofs with wide projecting eaves.
Interestingly (and intentionally?) the shape of the roofs at Orchard Mews are similar in design to motifs employed on the brick piers of garden walls in De Beauvoir Square
OSBALDESTON ROAD (1880s)
Victorian suburbs were built for people whose work took them to the city, so they were built on parcels of agricultural land near to the expanding railway network.
The location also needed to be attractive and healthy if the suburb was to succeed.
Long term prosperity also depended on the provision of necessary public facilities such as shops, schools and churches. The Northwold and Cazenove Road Conservation Area had from the beginning all these necessities – railway stations at Lower Clapton and Stoke Newington as well as trams and buses, important shopping streets in Upper Clapton and Stoke Newington and significant open spaces on Stoke Newington Common and Clapton Common.
This unique area still has all the assets needed for a successful suburb and those living in the Northwold and Cazenove Road Conservation Area today not only have chosen the area for the variety of housing stock of different sizes and tenures that it offers, but also the excellent transport links, recreational green spaces and good shops.
Osbaldeston Road has remained residential since its construction during the 1880s. A photograph of the street taken in 1905 shows the quiet respectability of the road and its residents and, interestingly, the Edwardian love of ivy, which covers many of the homes. A similar view taken one hundred years later shows little change, except for the removal of the iron railings which occurred
during the Second World War.
PARKHOLME ROAD
The route of Dalston Lane and Parkholme Road can be seen on John Rocque’s 1769 map ,and Dalston Lane has surviving Georgian and early 19th century buildings. The road was formerly called Park Place.
PAUL STREET (mid-late eighteenth century)
The piecemeal infilling of the landscape main roads in the eighteenth century laid down a network of smaller streets interlinking the older roads: Paul Street, Leonard Street, Curtain Road, Holywell Row/Lane, Bateman’s Row and New Inn Yard all formed north-south and east-west communication routes. The spaces between these interlinking streets were further divided by smaller streets such as Gatesborough Street (formerly Thomas Street) and Christina Street (formerly Motley Street).
PENSHURST ROAD (1864)
Penshurst Road and Edenbridge Road were built between 1864 and 1867.
Victoria Park Conservation Area is a mix of planned development notably on the former Norris estate, where the villas and houses along Lauriston Road and Southborough Road and Penshurst Road were planned in the 1850s and built in the 1860s, and more haphazard development by smaller developers.
PERCH STREET (1881)
Perch Street and its neighbours consisting of late Victorian terraced housing is the jewel in the crown of the local conservation area. The streets were laid out between 1881 and 1886 on the former Tyssen family estate by John Grover and are reminiscent of low rise philanthropic housing of the time. However, despite having the appearance of model dwellings, there are no known connections with any local company, institution or philanthropic organisation. Instead, it appears that the land formerly occupied by Shacklewell House passed from the Tyssen estate to John Grover, perhaps under a lease or instruction to provide housing for the working classes.
In 1965, the parishes of Shoreditch, Stoke Newington and Hackney were merged to form the London Borough of Hackney. During this period, many of the buildings in Seal Street, April Street and Perch Street were owned by Grover Estates based in Charing Cross and some local residents recall paying their weekly rent to a warden who lived at 21 April Street. In 1978, many of these properties were bought by the London Borough of Hackney, possibly because of concerns over living conditions and in 1982, the Council carried out extensive modernisation works on these buildings.
PERCY TERRACE (1880s)
PETCHEY ACADEMY
The Kingsland Secondary School, originally built as the Dalston County School in 1937, closed in 2003 and demolished shortly after. The Petchey Academy was built in its place, named after East End entrepreneur Sir Jack Petchey.
PHIPP STREET (mid-late eighteenth century)
By the end of the eightennth century, the gradual growth of formally laid streets resulted in the creation of blocks of land, which naturally came to be fronted by houses, workshops, shops and other commercial premises. To the rear of these blocks were gardens, yards and temporary industrial activities, but overall the individual plots were mainly domestic in scale.
PLOUGH YARD
Plough Yard is one of the oldest streets in this area.
It is a narrow road that zig zags between Shoreditch High Street and Hearn Street. It was bisected by the viaduct of the North London Railway in 1861-5, the arches of which provided workshop accommodation. The section to the east of the now redundant viaduct was largely cleared of its workshops and sawmills in the late 20th century.
PLOVER STREET (1880s)
Those streets built by 1888 included Plover Street, Homfray Street, Percy Terrace, Comboss Road, Allenmouth Road and Kelday Road.
POET’S ROAD
The area around Newington Green was heavily damaged by bombing during the Second World War. Newington Green School was partially knocked down, and 22 people were killed when a bomb fell on Poet’s Road. The site (where Masefield Court is today) was later used as a prisoner of war camp. During the 1950s a large amount of council housing was constructed in areas surrounding the Green, some of it, like Kerridge Court, on bomb damaged site. Others were built on demolished sites, like Hathersage Court that replaced the Memorial Hospital and the old Mildmay Mansion.
Extensive council estates continued to be built in the 1960s.
PRINCE EDWARD ROAD (1870)
QUEEN ELIZABETH’S WALK (1700)
It is said that Queen Elizabeth I visited Stoke Newington as a guest of Dudley, who was a kinsman to Earl of Leicester, her favourite. This visit is reflected in the naming of Queen Elizabeth’s Walk on the northern edge of Clissold Park, which appears on early 18th century maps as a public walk.
QUEENSBRIDGE ROAD
By the beginning of the nineteenth century, speculative ribbon development was starting to occur along the main arterial routes in the area, such as Kingsland Road.
The surrounding countryside largely remained as open fields. Milne’s Map of 1800 shows an increase in development around the hamlet of Dalston, with the beginnings of development at the corner which now forms the junction of Dalston Lane and Queensbridge Road.
Haggerston Basin lay just to the east of Queensbridge Road (then called Great Cambridge Street).
REGENT’S CANAL
The Regent’s Canal was first proposed in 1802 by Thomas Homer, who was the owner of a fleet of boats operating on the Grand Junction Canal that carried coal and building materials into Paddington and took away horse manure to the country. The Regent’s Canal was designed to connect the newly opened (1801) Paddington branch of the Grand Junction Canal (that extended to the Midlands) to the river
Thames at Limehouse. This would mean cargo arriving by sea in London could be distributed throughout central and southern England by canal barge.
The majority of England’s canals were built in the 18th century. The Regent’s Canal, built between 1812 and 1820, was of later date and built to a much higher standard of construction and engineering technology. The provision of twin locks along the canal‘s length made for speedier journeys. Some trade was lost to the railways in the mid 19th century and after the First World War to the roads, but the canal remained a commercial waterway until 1950. By the 1950s much of the central and eastern sections were run down and derelict. The severe winter of 1962-3 when canals
throughout the country were frozen for weeks, broke inland water freight forever, as cargoes transferred to the roads and never returned. From the 1960s onwards campaigning by groups such as the Inland Waterways Association, British Waterways and local amenity societies has done much to improve the canal as a leisure and environmental entity and to regenerate industrial and residential premises adjoining the canal. Throughout much of the length of the canal in Hackney, to both the south and north banks are extensive public housing estates, especially between Actons Lock and the Kingsland Basin.
REGENT’S ROW (1820)
Beyond Actons Lock there is a long section of cobbled road (Regent’s Row) beside the towpath, an interesting survival of the early road that was built beside the canal soon after 1820. It runs for the entire length beside the canal from Actons Lock to Queensbridge Road Bridge. The cobbled road is substantially complete except where repairs have been undertaken and setts replaced by tarmac. It is unusual for a cobbled street of this length to survive in any urban area and even rarer in London.
REIGHTON ROAD (1879)
Reighton Road was built by Samuel and John Tucker and Charles Barker between 1879-81, these houses cost £400 each to build and comprise long terraces of three-storey flat fronted houses with white stucco dressings and ground floor bay windows. The road follows a sweeping curve and along with the street trees provides a imposing view from Brooke Road.
RENDLESHAM ROAD (1864)
‘New roads’ called Rendlesham Road, Nightingale Road and Walsingham Road was offered for sale by the owner, Whittingham in 1864.
RICHMOND ROAD
On Thomas Starling’s map of 1831, some developments were already in place (some being evident in an OS map of 1805), mostly along the main roads, including Richmond Road, Forest Road and Lansdowne Place. The major landowners in the area were William Rhodes, Baron Graham, the Tyssen-Amhurst family and the trustees of Spurstowe’s Almshouses. By the early 19th century, Dalston was still known as a small hamlet; one writer described it as “a very pretty, quiet spot, much favoured by young lovers”.
RITSON ROAD
Ritson Road forms an important vista to the German Hospital. It is a quiet, very attractive street, pleasant, having two storey houses very like Stannard Road.
An extraordinary view is given of the very tall spire of Lutheran Church soaring up and view of the German Hospital beyond. The church spire is major landmark and can be glimpsed over rooftops at various places in area. The foundation stone was laid by “HRH Duke of Cambridge KG 4 May 1875.” It was built in 1875-6, for the Lutherans using, living and working at ‘The German’. It has a very imposing presence on what is a small street. It has yellow brick, stone dressings and a steeply pitched roof to eaves, in a cruciform plan. The style is geometrical Gothic revival.
RIVER LEA
The River Lea, along with the River Fleet, is second only to the Thames, as the oldest of London’s waterways. The Danes sailed up the River Lea in the late C9th to sack Hereford, and since the early C13th the River has been used regularly for the transportation of goods into and out of the capital. Navigation along the River Lea has been continually improved throughout its history; many of the improvements being sanctioned by Acts of Parliament and funded through tolls. Improvements to the River took the form of dredging, removing obstacles from the waterway, and cutting new channels and locks. Flood relief channels were also constructed. Warehouses and wharfs were built on the banks of the River, although in many areas it retained its open rural character. Improvements continued until as recently as the 1930s, and even as recently as the 1960s the River was used regularly for the transportation of goods, such as timber and coal. There are few remaining timber-yards on the banks of the River, and any that remain are now supplied by road transport.
The River Lea has also been used as a source of power by a number of mills along its banks. In certain areas this led to a reduction in the navigable width of the River, causing friction between the millers and the bargemen. Industries and communities along the River also used it as a source of water, again leading to friction with the bargemen as water levels were often reduced.
RIVINGTON STREET (early-mid nineteenth century)
ST MARK’S RISE (1867)
St Marks Rise was formerly St Marks Road.
As its name suggests, the street rises gently uphill from Ridley Road towards Shacklewell Lane. St Marks Rise is the main north-south road through the St Mark’s Conservation Area running from Ridley Road to the south to St Mark’s Villas dating from 1867.
St Marks Rise is bisected by Colvestone Crescent and Sandringham Road. The builders of the houses include Jordain and Paine.
ST MARK’S ROW
Historically and well into the mid-19th century the land on which St Mark’s Row stands was fields and market gardens. Just north of Shacklewell High Street and Shacklewell Green lay an important 16th century house, Shacklewell Manor, the home during the 16th century of Sir John Heron, Master of the Jewel House and his wife Cecilia, daughter of Sir Thomas More. By the late 17th century the manor house was occupied by Francis Tyssen, Lord of the Manor of Hackney.
Almost all of the land that now comprises St Mark’s Conservation Area formed part of the Tyssen-Amhurst estate during the 18th and 19th century. By the early Victorian era the family owned the largest landed estate in Hackney. As its name suggests Shacklewell was the site of an ancient well and in the 17th and 18th centuries a number of inns and hostelries, including the Black Queen Coffee House and Tea Gardens were located near to the green. They functioned as leisure places for Londoners, to whom Hackney at that date was a rural retreat.
ST MARY’S CHURCH, STOKE NEWINGTON
By the middle of the 19th century the population of Stoke Newington had grown to such an extent that a new church was needed. The old rectory, a timber-framed building on the south side of Church Street, was demolished, and a new St Mary’s Church, designed by George Gilbert Scott, was built, work starting in 1865 although the spire was not completed until 1890. Even at this point, the economy was still mainly agricultural, and local nurseries, allotments and cows provided food for the local inhabitants as well as the markets of the City.
SALCOMBE ROAD
A well-restored and attractive late Victorian mansion block covers the eastern side of Salcombe Road. The purpose-built four-storey block called Eagle Mansions was built in the mid-1890s and finished by 1897 when the freehold of the 48 mansion flats was sold. Originally erected in plain stock brickwork, it seems roughcast was applied to parts of the elevations at a later date. The flats are arranged off six common staircases, each of the stairwells having an entrance doorway from one of the three recessed entrance pathways at the front of the building. They are a particularly well-preserved mansion bock, a building type that grew in popularity in the 1880s.
SANDRINGHAM ROAD (1867)
Sandringham Road was laid out in 1867 and many of the houses were constructed soon after. The principal builders of Sandringham Road were Charles Cleverley Paine and George Bidnell Jordain who were employed by the Tyssen-Amhurst Estate to lay out all the proposed new roads around St Mark’s Church, and therefore in effect were the major developers of what is now St Mark’s Conservation Area. In
1867 Paine and Jordain constructed 120 dwelling houses in Sandringham Road.
Other builders active in the street include William Stevenson who built Nos. 168-174, during 1868.
SANFORD TERRACE (1788)
This important terrace of Georgian houses built in 1788 were at first were known as Sanford Place.
SCRUTTON STREET (early-mid nineteenth century)
SEAL STREET (1881)
The name Shacklewell was first recorded in 1490 by Thomas Cornish, a saddler who owned a business there. Its name may refer to a well-spring in a sunken place or where animals could be shackled or tethered. By the early 16th century, Sir John Heron, senior financial advisor to the first two Tudor monarchs and reputedly the richest man in Hackney, owned a large estate, which centred on a manor house called Shacklewell Manor. The house was located approximately on the site of today’s Seal Street. In 1672, 14 householders were assessed for the Hearth Tax in Shacklewell. Just over a century later in 1735, the number had risen to 47 households.
SHACKLEWELL GREEN
The Shacklewell Green Conservation Area comprises a small area of development originally laid out on the line of field boundaries and centred on the ancient hamlet of Shacklewell. The area has a fine urban grain, and contains a variety of buildings, predominantly from the late 19th century onwards. The western edge of the area is defined by Shacklewell Row, now predominantly 20th century housing, punctuated by the neo-gothic late 19th century Merchant Taylor School Mission. This is the entrance to an enigmatic treasure behind – the Grade II* listed St Barnabas Church. On the north side of Shacklewell Lane are two and three storey late 19th century buildings with shopfronts on the ground floor, the exception being numbers 77 – 89, which date from the Georgian era and are the oldest buildings in the conservation area. To the west on Shacklewell Lane sits the Shacklewell Arms, formerly The Green Man Public House, also built in the late 19th century. An early 20th century complex of industrial buildings is located just off Shacklewell Lane, now known as Lighthouse Studios. The jewel in the crown of the conservation area lies behind the main street line where a distinctive enclave of small late 19th century two storey terraces can be found – April, Perch and Seal Streets. The terraces and streets retain a character of late Victorian, working class housing with double arched entrances and a series of decorative plaques. To the north east of Shacklewell Green is Milton House Mansions, a row of Edwardian flats in the form of terraced houses. Adjacent is the development now known as Cotton Lofts, an early 20th century former industrial building with an impressive stone façade that has connections to the East End rag trade (clothing manufacturing & selling).
SHACKLEWELL LANE
Shacklewell Lane is an ancient route that ran from Kingsland Road towards the old village of Hackney. Around Shacklewell Green a small settlement grew up in medieval times.
In 1685, the Manor House passed to the Dutch Tyssen family who went on to own much of the surrounding land and large areas of Hackney. The Lord of the Manor at this time was Francis Tyssen, a wealthy merchant. The land around the manor would have largely been made up of fields and market gardens and the village of Shacklewell gradually grew up along both sides of Shacklewell Lane where a strip of wasteland formed the green. Several villas for gentlemen were built interspersed with lesser properties for tradesmen, two pubs and Dogget’s Dairy on the south side of the village green. A number of inns and hostelries are recorded in the 17th and 18th centuries, including the Black Queen Coffee House and Tea Gardens, which were located near the green. These establishments functioned as leisure places for Londoners, to whom Hackney at that time was a rural retreat.
Having passed down several generations of the Tyssen-Amhurst family, the original Shacklewell Manor was demolished in 1743 to be replaced by a second Manor House nearby. The Manor and surrounding area was later leased to the Rowe family, another substantial local landowner. By the beginning of the 19th century, a number of houses had been built on both sides of Shacklewell Lane but the area was still largely rural. Between 1801 and 1815, leases were granted in the Shacklewell area for permission to dig brick earth (sometimes up to 18 feet in depth) and to make bricks. The area was largely fields and gardens well into the mid-19th century as shown in the map of 1830, in which the various other nearby hamlets can be seen.
SHACKLEWELL ROW (1880s)
Shacklewell Row suffered bomb damage and post war clearance and there are generally less heritage buildings than the streets to its east. However, the exception is the Merchant Taylor’s School Mission Hall, which occupies a prominent position on the pavement edge. Built circa 1889, when Shacklewell, was a notably deprived area, the building replaced the Hindle Street Mission. The Worshipful Company of Merchant Taylors is one of the Livery Companies of the City of London. The Company was first incorporated under a Royal Charter in 1327 and originally it was an association of tailors, but by the end of the 17th century, its connection with the tailoring trade had virtually ceased and it had became a philanthropic and social association.
The east side of the street escaped bombing during the Second World War along with slum clearance, which occurred to the west where several LCC blocks were built.
SHOREDITCH HIGH STREET
Shoreditch High Street has been a main route to and from the City of London since at least the sixteenth century.
Shoreditch, possibly from the Saxon word meaning ‘sewer ditch’, does not seem to have had an existence in any real form until the medieval period, when an Augustinian priory was founded to the west of Shoreditch High Street. Prior to this, the only notable features were the intersection of two Roman roads that preceded the courses of Old Street and Kingsland Road (north of Shoreditch High Street).
An important factor in Shoreditch’s early development was that it lay outside of London’s city walls with the result that it was not subject to the more regimented development that took place in the city and became an essential area for various commercial activities not welcomed in the city, such as tanning. The remaining landscape stayed fairly rural – fields and gardens – which continued into the medieval period and beyond.
The sixteenth to eighteenth centuries were a period of change and increasing development for South Shoreditch with the piecemeal and irregular development of plots along and behind the main roads.
Wealthier London residents were known to have built ‘summer houses’ in gardens owned by them for pleasure. In the 16th century the first of London’s play houses (theatres) were constructed in South Shoreditch – the Theatre (1576) and the Curtain – both belonging to James Burbage, the head of the Earl of Leicester’s company of players and patron (?) of William Shakespeare. Both play houses were situated along Curtain Road, the Curtain being demolished in 1627, 29 years after the Theatre.
The gradual in filling of the backland areas behind High Street, Old Street, Curtain Street and Worship Street in the seventeenth century resulted in the development of yards and alleys behind
the street frontages, of varied plots and sizes.
Between and behind these continued the backlands activities of earlier: gardens, fields and, often, pungent commercial activities.
In 1736-40 St Leonard’s church was rebuilt in neo-classical style by George Dance the Elder. In some ways this heralded the beginning of the more rapid development of Shoreditch, the open fields between Old Street and High Street becoming largely built over and laid out with rows of streets. This demonstrated a mixture of town plans and speculative development i.e. Tabernacle Street, Paul Street and Leonard Street with working class terraces to the south and east.
In planning terms, the Georgian plot patterns were small but increasingly dense and by the end of the eighteenth century many of the streets and lanes familiar today were in use (for example, Leonard Street, Paul Street, Holywell Row and Curtain Road amongst others). Between these larger roads the network of smaller streets were steadily growing – e.g. Luke Street, Scrutton Street and Phipp Street). South Shoreditch had become a Georgian suburb on the city fringe, laid out with a street pattern that it largely retains today. The many buildings and rear gardens that lined these streets did not survive so well, however, and most of the artisans’ dwellings, stables, foundries and timber yards to name but a few types of premises, were replaced by Victorian buildings reflecting their need for expansion and development.
Nineteenth century expansion and change – The early part of the nineteenth century saw a rapid expansion in the population of South Shoreditch – from 35,000 in 1801 to 69,000 in 1831; by 1851 the
population figure had reached over 109,000. Some of this was due in part to the continuing expansion of London’s population in general and in part to the improvements in transport that enabled more goods and raw materials to be transported, which consequently encouraged centres of specialisation and trade to develop. The Regent’s Canal was opened in 1820; the terminus of the Eastern Counties Railway opened in 1840 (which later became the Bishopsgate Goods Station) and Broad Street and Liverpool Street stations were opened in 1865 and 1874 respectively. Broad Street Station was part of the North London Line, which also constructed a station on the corner of Old Street and Kingsland Road, opened in 1865 (Shoreditch Station).
Once the principal shopping street of the area, with a daily street market, it became increasingly dominated by wholesale suppliers in the late nineteenth century. The tobacco, clothing, boot, shoe and food processing industries also had a strong presence as well as the furniture trade. The north end of the High Street was widened in 1876-7 with the building of two new blocks on the west side. The east side of the High Street, southwards was rebuilt in a piecemeal manner, but suffered considerable bomb damage in the Second World War opening up sites for further redevelopment.
SOMERFORD GROVE
The Somerford Grove Estate occupies nine acres of land cleared for development following the Second World War. Built to the design of Frederick Gibberd between 1947 and 1949, the post-war estate breaks from the existing pattern of long straight streets lined with two- and three-storey terraced houses to form a mixed development of modern flats, terraced houses and bunglalows. Gibberd grouped the new buildings to form a series of closes and courtyards, each with their own character. The estate is an important contribution to English post-war modernism.
SOUTHBOROUGH ROAD (1850s)
From c.1850, the neighbourhood surrounding the Common began to develop, much of it on land owned by the Norris family, whose lands were laid out for development as Lauriston Road, King Edward’s Road, Southborough Road and Victoria Park Road during the early 1850s.
SOUTHGATE GROVE
Southgate Grove is a short, quiet street with some interesting and attractive houses.
SOUTHGATE ROAD
The busy Southgate Road forms the western boundary of the De Beauvoir Conservation Area as well as the borough boundary with Islington. In the 1890s Southgate Road was one of the most prosperous areas of De Beauvoir Town on the Booth Map being coloured red. There are a number of attractive houses of two and three storeys, of different styles and dates indicating development of the street was piecemeal and spread over a longer period than some of the more cohesive streets of the Conservation Area.
In recent years the houses in Southgate Road especially towards the Balls Pond Road end have been refurbished and today there are few neglected properties above Southgate Grove.
STAMFORD HILL
Rocque’s map shows that by the mid-18th century there was little development in the Clapton Common area apart from the turnpike just to the north. The turnpike was established in 1713 and remained until 1864 and was located at the top of Stamford Hill at the junction of Clapton Common.
STAMFORD ROAD
Like Ardleigh Road, Stamford radiates out from the centre of the Conservation Area, and has a number of apex sites with paired villas. To the north-west is a modern development with timber window bays, De Beauvoir Place which goes round into Tottenham Road. On the east side is The Trolley Stop Bar (formerly The De Beauvoir Arms) an attractive Victorian public house with an adjacent theatre bar. It is a three storey red brick building with a later bow window inserted into the front façade.
STANNARD ROAD
This is one of smallest streets in area.
Stannard Mews is a Housing Association backland site has steeply pitched roofs. The road has a pleasant terrace of two storeys high with stucco door surrounds and brackets.
STOKE NEWINGTON
The early settlement of Stoke Newington was based on the Manor (located beneath the modern Town Hall) and the church, the earliest record of which dates back to 1314, when a rector was appointed. In the 1930s, when the Town Hall was built, the chalk and Kentish ragstone foundations of the old medieval manor house were uncovered.
Stoke Newington remained a small manorial village, its economy based on agriculture, during the late medieval period. In the 15th and 16th centuries new houses were built along Church Street and leased to courtiers and merchants, escaping the unhealthiness of the city of London. Following the Reformation of the 1540s, influential owners of the Manor included William Patten and then John Dudley, a rich brewer who died in 1580. In 1558 the manor house was described as badly neglected but by 1565 Patten had carried out extensive repairs. He also repaired St Mary’s Church, rebuilding the tower and the south aisle. In Church Street, the Rose and Crown Inn existed in 1612 and the
Red Lion is noted in 1697.
Between 1608 and 1613, the New River was built to provide fresh water from Hertfordshire to New River Head, near Sadlers Wells. This would have added to the attractions of the Hackney area, as clean water was difficult to find. The New River meandered through the north end of the parish, with a loop which passed through what is now Clissold Park. Alterations in 1724 and again in 1946 have left just a short truncated section in the park, now used as an ornamental lake.
During the 17th century, despite the upsets of the Civil War, a number of prestigious houses were built in Stoke Newington. Fleetwood House was erected in c.1634 by Sir Thomas Hartopp, a Parliamentary supporter, whose early death in 1658 resulted in his wife remarrying Charles Fleetwood, after whom the house is named. Fleetwood was the widower of Oliver Cromwell’s daughter, and later in the century the house became the centre of non-conformist meetings, before the Act of Toleration of 1689 provided that all non-conformists could worship in peace. In 1695 Thomas Gunstan, the then lessee of the manor house, obtained permission from the prebendary to pull it down and several houses, forming Church Row, were built on the site. Gunstan then set about building a replacement to the manor house on land further eastwards along Church Street, close to Fleetwood House, although he died in 1700 before the house was complete. Gunstan left his estates to his sister Mary, wife of Thomas Abney, (d.1722) Lord Mayor of London and a founder of the Bank of England. The prestigious new red brick property was called Abney House, after Mary Abney, and consisted of seven bays, set back from the road behind metal railings and gates.
These still remain and form the southern entrance to the cemetery, although the house was demolished in 1843.
The Abney’s only surviving child, Elizabeth, died in 1782 and it was under her will that the manor lease was sold for the benefit of dissenting ministers, establishing the connection, especially with the Quaker movement, for which Stoke Newington was to become famous. The area was also notable for its many writers, including Daniel Defoe, who lived in Church Street and who wrote Moll Flanders and Robinson Crusoe.
The buyer of the lease on the Manor was Jonathan Eade, and it remained with his family until 1881, when the lease was sold to the Ecclesiastical Commissioners, who leased the demesne lands piecemeal until the 1950s when they sold most of the freeholds. This demesne land occupied most of the land north of Church Street with the manor house at its southern end, next to the church. The protection of this land from development during the 19th century has provided the Stoke Newington area with its two most important open spaces: Clissold Park and Abney Park Cemetery.
In the 1830s a number of developers purchased land in the Stoke Newington area for new houses, and the fields to the south of Church Street were incrementally developed. The best known builder was Thomas Cubitt, who built a long row of villas along Albion Road, to the south of Church Street, only some of which remain due to war time bombing.
STOKE NEWINGTON CHURCH STREET
Stoke Newington Church Street dates back at least to the early 14th century when records confirm that a rector was appointed for St Mary’s Church. A manor house was located below the site of the 1930s Town Hall, close to the church, and the lordship of the Manor of Stoke Newington has remained in the ownership of the church into the present period.
During the 15th and 16th centuries new houses were built along Church Street and leased to courtiers and merchants, keen to escape the unhealthiness of the City.
In 1695 Thomas Gunstan, the then lessee of the manor house, obtained permission from the prebendary to pull it down and several houses, forming Church Row, were built on the site. Gunstan then set about building a replacement to the manor house on land further eastwards along Church Street, although he died in 1700 before the house was complete. Gunstan left his estates to his sister Mary, wife of Thomas Abney, (d.1722) Lord Mayor of London and a founder of the Bank of England, after whom Gunstan’s house was named. Abney House was a red brick building of seven bays, set back from the road behind metal railings and gates, which remain today although the house was demolished in 1843 when the site was added to the Abney Park Cemetery.
Further prestigious houses were along Church Street built during the 18th century, most notably a group named Paradise Row, located on the south side of Church Street opposite Clissold Park. Five of these remain today, all listed, and although their elevations date to a 19th century refronting they contain some earlier details dating to their original construction between 1721-1764. Members of the Quaker Hoare family, bankers and philanthropists, owned several buildings in this row, and at one point these buildings were in partial use for silk weaving, a locally important industry.
The street was notable for its many writers, including Daniel Defoe, who lived in Church Street and who wrote Moll Flanders and Robinson Crusoe.
Elizabeth Abney, died in 1782 and it was under her will that the manor lease was sold for the benefit of dissenting ministers, establishing the connection, especially with the Quaker movement, for which Stoke Newington was to become famous.
The buyer of the lease on the manor was Jonathan Eade, and it remained with his family until 1881, when the lease was sold to the Ecclesiastical Commissioners, who leased the demesne lands piecemeal until the 1950s when they sold most of the freehold. This demesne land occupied most of the land north of Church Street with the manor house at its southern end, next to the church. The protection of this land from development during the 19th century has provided the Stoke Newington area with its two most important open spaces: Clissold Park and Abney Park Cemetery.
STOKE NEWINGTON COMMON
Now called Stoke Newington Common, the area was formerly called Newington Common, and before that Cockhanger Green or Shacklewell Common. Originally the Common stretched as far as Stoke Newington High Road. But gradually strips of waste were enclosed and buildings started to appear especially to the western edge from about 1711. This common ground was bounded on the north side by Hackney Brook and was used for grazing livestock until the nineteenth century, when the Tyssen’s purchased it from the Powell family in the 1830s. The Common was originally an unpretentious village green and was defined in its present form when the surrounding area was built up, mainly in the 1870s and 1880s. The three roads that run through the common have been in their current locations for at least
300 years. The environs of the Common are mainly three-storey Victorian terraces, the exception being the Georgian, Sanford Terrace on the western side, originally built in 1788 and restored by Hackney Borough Council in the 1970s.
STOKE NEWINGTON HIGH STREET
Despite the presence of Ermine Street, along which Kingsland Road and Stoke Newington High Street run, few artefacts of the Roman period have been discovered. The only notable find in the vicinity is a stone sarcophagus, discovered in Lower Clapton.
Stoke Newington High Street is now a major shopping centre, with busy traffic and constant pedestrian activity.
STONEBRIDGE COMMON
On the north side of Haggerston Road is Stonebridge Common, a remnant of much larger Lammas or common lands that existed in Hackney from medieval times. Opposite Stonebridge Common is a modern park, Stonebridge Gardens. This was created on a site formerly occupied by small mid-Victorian cottages that were demolished after World War Two. This open space and playground has a concrete and mosaic serpent snaking across it, created by the Hackney-based Free Form Arts Trust who have been responsible for many other public artworks in the borough. Stonebridge Gardens helps to give the adjacent Albion Square Conservation Area an open and green feeling.
The houses overlooking Stonebridge Common and the small terrace of workers’ cottages in Albion Terrace have a ‘rural’ feel to them and a very human scale. Plenty of trees in Albion Square garden, on
Stonebridge Common and in the grounds of All Saints’ Church, as well as many street trees and verdant gardens, make the area unusually green for such an inner-city area.
SUN STREET
The development of the land between Worship Street and Sun Street (known as Crown Street in 1799) in the early eighteenth century on the estate of the Earl of Darnley also marked the beginning of the more planned development of South Shoreditch.
The 1799 map of Shoreditch by Horwood illustrates a street layout similar to the present one, but on closer inspection the alignment of the late eighteenth century streets differs subtly from today. For example, Dysart Street (previously known as Princes Street) and Christopher Street (previously King Street) to the north, are on a similar alignment, but Earl Street to the south (formerly Christopher’s Alley) follows a different line to its earlier counterpart.
Sun Street is like an urban island with remnants of early nineteenth century commercial and residential buildings, late nineteenth and early twentieth century industrial workshops and warehouses, and mid-late twentieth century office premises. These are encircled by Appold Street, Sun Street, Wilson Street and Earl Street whose streetscape character varies from more open thoroughfares (Appold/Sun/Wilson Street) to the narrow, enclosed Earl Street. The Conservation Area is bisected by Crown Place.
SUSSEX STREET (1870s)
SUTHER STREET (1870s)
SUTTON PLACE (1808)
Starting during the 18th century, but accelerating more rapidly during the following hundred years the area was developed with a variety of speculative housing developments. One appeared as Sutton Place in 1808.
THE GERMAN HOSPITAL
This extensive hospital was designed by T L Donaldson and E A Gruning, from 1863. It is in a neo-Tudor/Flemish style in red brick with patterns in black header bricks. Its significance lies in its radical plan and overall conception; it was one of the earliest hospitals in England designed on the principles of the pavilion plan, considered by health reformers to be far healthier than previous layouts, particularly for the circulation of fresh air.
Florence Nightingale played a major part in its development, and it played an important part of the life of the area. Up to the second world war, it was one of the best equipped hospitals in England. It was closed by the NHS in 1987.
TIN ALLEY
Tin Alley (cut through later by Great Eastern Street), is illustrated on Rocque’s map of 1747.
TOTTENHAM ROAD
Houses at the western end of Tottenham Road were amongst the first to be developed by William Rhodes, as early maps show. He continued to make subleases here in 1825 and 1828, during the court case between him and Richard Benyon de Beauvoir. It formed one of the horizontal elements of the original estate plan along with Buckingham, Englefield, Northchurch and Downham Roads. It is a very mixed road in terms of types of building and architecture with the eastern section nearest to Kingsland Road being the least architecturally distinguished.
Of interest on the south side of Tottenham Road is the Kingsgate Estate designed by the architect Fredrick Gibberd with GL Downing, Hackney Borough Engineer between 1958 and 1961. Three terraces of maisonettes with gables and a block of flats are arranged around a central courtyard square. Compared to other modern estates within Hackney the Kingsgate Estate is well maintained and well designed
and importantly maintains the street line and preserves the character of the street.
De Beauvoir Primary School built by the London School Board in 1874 forms a major complex on the north side of Tottenham Road.
TYSSEN STREET
The area around the railway increasingly became a location for manufacturing and industry, and a number of interesting buildings were constructed around the turn of the 20th century.
The architect Edwin O. Sachs designed a monumental factory in 1902-3 for Shannon, cabinet makers of office and bank furniture and fittings. It is of the highest architectural quality being built in a sophisticated style. It was constructed in a variety of steel and concrete methods – the building being steelwork encased in concrete with brick facings in warm yellow stocks and heavy eaves modelling. Sachs exhibited the designs for this building at the Royal Academy in 1902. The five-storey building comprises three linked blocks built in a u-shape. From 1906 the freehold of the building was owned by Marconi’s Wireless & Telephone Company and Siemens used the building from 1908 to 1963. Since 1979 the building has been called Springfield House and home to a variety of businesses – some in live/work units. Today there are many residential apartments as well within the complex.
UFTON GROVE
Over recent decades, the houses in De Beauvoir Conservation Area have been recognised as fine family homes by those who live there and following traffic calming measures undertaken in the 1970s, a relatively quiet and leafy green place to live.
Many have been refurbished to a very high standard and today De Beauvoir Square, Northchurch Road and Ufton Grove are very desirable Hackney addresses. Many who live in De Beauvoir Town comment on the ‘village’ atmosphere and there is an active community spirit, expressed through the activities of organisations such as the De Beauvoir Association, St Peter’s Church and the active Kingsland Conservation Area Advisory Committee which oversees planning issues within De Beauvoir.
URSWICK ROAD
During the 1820s and 1830s detached villas containing pairs of semi-detached houses were built in Lower Clapton Road and in Urswick Road. Survivals of these impressive homes with grand porches and Portland stone dressings are nos. 6-16 and nos. 26-28 Lower Clapton Road and nos. 5-7 Urswick Road.
VICTORIA PARK
Victoria Park was created after a petition signed by 30,000 local people was presented to the Queen and government requesting an open green space be made available for the ‘healthful recreation’ of the working class in the burgeoning East End. In 1841 the Government sold York House in Westminster to raise funds to purchase land on which to lay-out the park. Victoria Park was the first and largest of the new London parks of the 19th century. It was designed by James Pennethorne of the Office of Works and opened to the public in 1846.
Apart from the late 18th century Hackney Terrace in Cassland Road, the development of this part of Hackney and most of the surviving residential properties within the Victoria Park Conservation Area date from after 1845, when Victoria Park was laid out for the recreation of the people of the East End. Within the Victoria Park Conservation Area are many well-preserved examples of mid-to-late Victorian speculative houses.
Leafy, green Victoria Park to the south, although entirely lying within the borough of Tower Hamlets, is highly influential in determining the character of Hackney’s Victoria Park Conservation Area. It is a typical English 19th century landscaped park, set out with curving lawns, informal tree plantings, large lakes and meandering paths and was designed by Sir James Pennethorne, a pupil of John Nash in the early 1840s. Many streets and buildings in the Conservation Area are orientated towards the park or are laid out in long terraces around the periphery. There are extensive views into the park from many parts of the Victoria Park Conservation Area.
VICTORIA PARK ROAD
Victoria Park Road was formerly known as Wick Lane.
The main north-south route is Lauriston Road, which crosses Victoria Park Road at the centre of ‘Victoria Park Village’, where the majority of the shops and commercial buildings of the Conservation Area are located. This is the heart of the Conservation Area and is constantly busy with people, just as it was in Victorian and Edwardian times when it was known as the Broadway.
The French Hospital (later Cardinal Pole School Annexe) was built contemporaneously in 1865 to house forty men and twenty women in their retirement in a healthy environment. Today the hospital built in red brick with darker brick diapering, stands out as a focal building in this part of the Victoria Park Conservation Area.
WALLIS ROAD
Wallis Road was largely industrial and now includes buildings on either side. The majority of the buildings within this zone are buildings of architectural and historic merit from late 19th and early
20th century. The buildings range between 2-4 floors in height and vary in building footprint. The Vulcanised rubber works building, is the oldest building in the conservation area dating from 1861.
WATERSON STREET
With the establishment of a turnpike, Hackney Road was ripe for development. By the time of Horwood’s Map of 1799, small groups and terraces had begun to be built along the north side of Hackney Road itself, especially at the western end. In the triangle between Hackney Road and Kingsland Road a number of streets and courts had been constructed including Union Street and Union Crescent, some with gardens and the smaller cottages of Perry’s Rents. In Waterson Street stood a number of two-storey shops and houses probably dating from the late 18th century one of which had a fine bow-fronted shop window.
WENLOCK BASIN
In 1825 John Edwards started construction work on what was to become Wenlock Basin. The privately owned Wenlock Basin was opened at first by accident in August 1826, when the dam across the entrance gave way and water flooded into the new basin, causing a 13 inch drop in the level of the water in the main canal. The accident caused water traffic to stop until heavy rains restored the normal level. In 1832 John Edwards Vaughan, the son of the original owner, extended Wenlock Basin to a total length of 360 yards. It runs parallel to and just east of the City Road Basin in Islington.
WEYMOUTH TERRACE
Until the late 18th century, agricultural fields dominated the area, with specialist market gardens and nurseries producing flowers, vegetables, and trees. On Chassereau’s map of 1745, both market gardens and grazing land are shown alongside an extensive garden on St Thomas’s Hospital land off Haggerstone Lane (later Weymouth Terrace). There were two pioneering nurseries at Shoreditch and Hoxton in the Georgian era. The first was John Allport’s Nursery, which survived until 1825, being run by his sons. Thomas Fairchild ran the second pioneering nursery, near Shoreditch Park. He was the first scientist-gardener to understand plant reproduction and to use artificial hybridisation to create a new species. He created a new hybrid flower, ‘Fairchild’s Mule’ by crossing a Sweet William and a Carnation.
Fairchild also pioneered the first serious study of urban gardens.
WHARF BRIDGE ROAD (1830)
Wharf Road Bridge built in 1830, leads into Wenlock Basin.
WHITE POST LANE (1860s)
The principal roads leading to, or through, Hackney Wick were Victoria Road, Wallis Road and White Post Lane, upon which terraced houses were built by 1870.
WILTON ESTATE
The Council-built Wilton Estate was built c. 1939. It generally a well-designed development of yellow brick, three storeys with newly-installed PVCu windows. It has some interesting segmental arched roofs to the main roof and generous balconies with corrugated effect. Flats are spacious inside with full length windows in niche and balcony; the central garden with paths, playgrounds and playing courts is secluded and large.
WILTON WAY
Pigwell Brook (now culverted) ran near and just north of today’s Wilton Way, and the undulating line of the former brook can still be seen in house and garden plot lines.
This grid layout has seen large-scale development which have respected the street pattern, for example, Wilton Way school and the Wilton estate. Many of these developments have a distinct and separate presence, such as the twentieth-century block of the German Hospital.
WOODLEA ROAD (1870s)
The residential streets to either side of Church Street – Woodlea Road, Summerhouse Road and Fleetwood Road, were all developed in the 1870s and the Victorian Gothic style then popular has resulted in more exposed rooflines with tall gables facing the streets. Here, the gables are decorated with carved bargeboards and finials, above pointed Gothic sash windows and tall bay windows.
WORSHIP SQUARE
The former Worship Square (at the junction of Worship Street and Clifton Street) was known to be the work of George Dance the Younger, the City Surveyor and an area of increasing status.
WORSHIP STREET (mapped in 1690)
The early origins of South Shoreditch can be seen in the pattern of irregular streets which have developed from the three earliest roads of Old Street, Shoreditch High Street and Worship Street.
The piecemeal infilling of the landscape between these roads in the eighteenth century laid down a network of smaller streets interlinking with the older roads. During the nineteenth century more streets were added or completed (for instance Rivington Street, Scrutton Street and Luke Street) and one new major road constructed – Great Eastern Street – which followed the line of an earlier lane (Willow Walk) to join Old Street and the High Street via Curtain Road. This historic street pattern has largely been fossilised in the modern street layout but it is the building plots lining and filling the blocks created by the network of streets that have been subject to most change.