Patrick Vernon, founder of Every Generation

What do you really know about your family? What secrets are embedded in the past and are waiting to be discovered? Get to know the real you by unearthing your family’s history and find out why and how you ended up in Hackney with ‘Hackney Routes’.

Led by Every Generation, the Hackney Museum and the Hackney Archives, this new initiative is set to help African, Caribbean and mixed race families delve deep into their pasts and create a picture of the who, what, why and when.

Supported by Discover Hackney, participants are invited to attend a number of free workshops and events to help in their search for answers in what can be a minefield of information.

Patrick Vernon, facilitator of the sessions, said, “I first had the idea after speaking to a number of young lads who knew nothing or very little about their family history. I strongly believe that   understanding your family’s roots and why you’ve ended up in a borough such as Hackney can really help people develop a sense of identity and belonging.”

And, as founder of Every Generation, an online resource for the black community, Patrick has years of exploring family history and genealogy under his belt.

“ It’s all about giving people security and confidence in the area they live and encouraging them to foster a personal connection to Hackney,” he continued.

“This in turn will hopefully motivate these residents to invest in the area and become a solid part of the community, helping them make a difference. It’s all about the sense of belonging and wanting to contribute to the community.”

Anyone wishing to take part should email Patrick Vernon egeninfo@tgis.co.uk or call 0845 260 5565.

Romanies who settled on Hackney Marshes near the end of the 19th century Photo: Hackney Archives

The story of the Gypsies in England is little known even among the people themselves and certainly not to Londoners as they press on with their daily concerns. So it may surprise some readers to learn that Hackney has played a key part in the Romany narrative.

Historically, families of Irish Travellers had settled on the trailer site between London Fields and Mare Street that Hackney Council had provided to meet the provisions of the 1968 Caravan Sites Act.

The travellers were happy with the fifteen or so pitches for their caravans and mobile homes. Others were not, particularly when the Irish upset drinkers at the Cat and Mutton and threatened the wife of Patrick Dutton, the licensee, several times. A sign saying ‘Sorry, no Travellers’, was posted outside the Cat and Mutton.

A local resident, who did not use the pub and knew nothing of the disruption complained to the Commission for Racial Equality, which agreed that the sign was discriminatory. In June 1987 it took Dutton, to Westminster County Court for an alleged breach of the 1976 Race Relations Act.

Judge Harris dismissed the case, so the CRE appealed to the appeal court, where the CRE maintained that “travellers” was synonymous with “Gypsies” and that the no-Travellers sign was illegal.

The judges in the higher court accepted the argument and the commission won: Gypsies were a racial group, a decision that, though it had sprung from discrimination against Irish Travellers, would bind English courts and have what the law terms “persuasive authority” in Scotland for cases involving the ethnically separate Gypsies, people of Romany origin.

Gypsies had been passing through and living in Hackney for five centuries. No records have been found of their presence in Hackney during the 1500s but they were becoming known in London.

The statesman Sir Thomas More wrote in 1529 of having been told 15 years earlier about an “Egyptian” [Gypsy] woman who could tell “manye mervaylous thynges”.

The palm-reader was unlikely to have predicted what More and his friends had in store for her: 15 years later as Lord Chancellor to Henry VIII he was preparing legislation “concernynge outlandyshepeople callynge themselves Egiptians” that ordered them out of the kingdom on pain of death.

The laws had little effect, however, and generations of Romanies continued to tell fortunes in London. In the summer of 1663 Samuel Pepys noted in his diary that he had seen groups of them in then-rural South London. Five years later he took his wife to them to have her fortune told.

The plays of William Shakespeare include references to an “Egyptian” and his last play, The Tempest, written in the early 1600s, gave a slave the name “Caliban”, a word that any speaker of deep Romany will know means “blackness” or “darkness”.

Such knowledge by an outsider suggests that a lot of information on Gypsies was available to scholarship and that they have been better established in this country than once thought.

More common Romany words such as kher, a house, were entering English in various forms; in the example of  “ken” or “kenner”, to mean a house or a drinking place, a pub.

Another common Romany word chav, a boy/lad/baby, has only recently and to the dismay of Gypsies, been appropriated as slang to mean a person lacking aesthetic sensibility.

As London spread out, Hackney became a suburb of the capital and that offered opportunities to Gypsies: as fortune-tellers, traders of small goods and labourers they could benefit from the wealth of the great city.

Some families struck camp along Pond Lane (now Millfields Road), near Hackney Marshes in Clapton. The 1871 census lists Lees and Phillipses living in “Gipsey tents”, probably the same clan pictured in 1900 trying to keep still for the slow shutter of one of the bulky cameras of the time.

Some of their descendants have moved into houses or married non-Gypsies. Their Romany origins may be little more than a family legend.

Others still consider themselves Gypsy, and though they prefer to be called “travellers” because of what they see as the stigma of the G word, they have become settled, on private and council sites around London and the home counties.

But not in Hackney: the new traveller site, in Homerton Road near the Olympic stadium, has been allocated to Irish Travellers.

Other Gypsies have come to the borough. Since the break-up of the Soviet Empire from 1989 onwards, the Roma, ethnic relatives of London’s Gypsies, have been arriving in England. The racism that erupted after the bonds of totalitarianism snapped has driven thousands of them from the countries of Eastern Europe that have been their homes for centuries.

Like Britain’s Romanies, the Roma are believed to be descended from nomads who left northern India a thousand or so years ago, but there, apart from linguistic commonalities, the connections end.

The original Romany heritage has left local connections. Every June a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it display is held in one or two Hackney libraries to mark Gypsy, Roma and Traveller History Month and in the Mare Street museum is a standing exhibition of a model Reading-type horse-drawn wagon and a cart, probably the best such in England.

They were two of several miniatures made in prison by an Irish Traveller, Paddy Doran, and sent on permanent loan to the museum by his wife, Nelly, when she and her family were camped on a rubbish tip in Hackney 20-odd years ago.

There are also two Gypsy and traveller ‘units’, one run by the council and one in Westgate Street, two minutes’ walk from the Cat and Mutton, the now-fashionable pub where Irish Travellers inadvertently put the Gypsies on the road to ethnic recognition.

Note: the picture accompanying this story was updated on Friday 5 February 2010.

This small park, not yet thirty years old, has had something of a renaissance in the last few years, as local residents have worked with the Parks Department to improve facilities and make it the kind of place where you’d actually like to spend time.

The park seems quite small when you first go in but, once inside, it is surprisingly big as it opens up into a series of green ‘rooms’ such as a bandstand area, a grassy space, a small wood and a series of playgrounds including a real gem for children and young people, Shakespeare Walk Adventure Playground.

There are two parts of the park that are particularly unusual: the orchard and the stream. The orchard is one of London’s first ‘community orchards’ and is only in its third year.

With help from the Council and social enterprise Growing Communities, Shakespeare Residents’ Association (SRA) has planted over thirty fruit trees, including favourites such as apples and plums, as well as increasingly rare traditional English fruit trees such as quinces, crab apples and medlars.

Butterfield Green’s very own stream is not quite as ancient as the Thames but it does make an attractive focal point for young people and families. It is one of the original features of the park which sadly had stopped working within a year of its construction.

Now, twenty years later, the stream is running once again, thanks to a grant from the Learning Trust and some hard work by the Butterfield Green Users’ Group, part of the Shakespeare Neighbourhood Residents’ Association.

The history of the park evokes Victorian brickmakers and poets, as well as 1970s urban reformers.

In the Middle Ages, the area which comprises the current Butterfield Green was open fields of pasture for sheep, cows and hay-making, in between the hamlets of Newington Green and Stoke Newington. Then, market gardens began to be established here, catering for the expanding population of London.

By the 1830s, the metropolis of London had reached beyond the old village of Islington and so Stoke Newington was no longer a remote rural outpost.

As has happened many times in London’s history, the first signs of the imminent new developments were the ‘brickearth’ quarrymen, digging up the brickearth subsoil to fire in improvised kilns to make bricks. Some  of these bricks came from earth at Butterfield Green.

Meanwhile, in 1849, the large private estate in this area known as the Foy estate was sold and parcelled out to developers in bundles of leases.

By 1854 the developers had built houses along newly built Milton Row, Shakespeare Road, Spenser Road and Cowper Road: the new suburb was patriotically known as Albert Town, after Prince Albert and the roads were named after England’s great (and male) poets. (Somehow the road known as Cut Throat Lane, leading north from Newington Green, didn’t quite fit into this scheme and had to be renamed Wordsworth Road).

Albert Town soon had a school, the Anglican church of St Matthias and a number of nonconformist chapels including a Baptist Chapel in Wordsworth Road and a Congregational Trinity Chapel (now the Walford Road synagogue).

By the late nineteenth century the area was one of the most densely occupied parts of Stoke Newington with an average of 24 houses or 172 people per acre (the modern figure is much less, around 50 people per acre).

The area was occupied by middle class families such as clerks and craftsmen, with the smaller terraced houses occupied by skilled workers such as brickmakers.

The area comprising old Albert Town was quite heavily bombed in World War II and so the borough housing department began replacing the damaged Victorian houses with new flats, beginning with the first parts of the Milton Gardens estate in 1949, extending it further north in the 1950s and 1960s with Binyon, Shelley and Browning Houses, continuing the earlier tradition of using poets’ names.

Architecturally, the estate has a rich variety of post-War housing types, with both mid-rise blocks and houses.

By the 1970s some of Stoke Newington’s private Victorian houses were in a poor condition; the Greater London Development Plan of 1976 had defined several ‘housing problem areas’ in north and east London, including this area between Dalston and Stoke Newington.

In 1976, Hackney Council therefore designated a series of ‘action areas’ for improvement, including the ‘Shakespeare Walk Action Area’. Victorian houses on Spenser Grove and Cowper Road were demolished, new council houses were built and public money was used to restore Victorian houses in other parts of the area.

By the end of the 1970s, a large open space of wasteland remained in between the Milton Gardens estate and Allen Road: the site of Butterfield Green.

The park was designed by landscape architects from the council (Angela Hodkinson, Penny Gardiner and Felicity Roberts), who laid it out in phases in the early 1980s, although part of the open space – the Shakespeare Walk Adventure Playground – had been informally set up a year or two earlier, probably in 1979.

The park was named Butterfield Green after William Butterfield, the architect of St Matthias church and a celebrated builder of London churches.

The first phase was the westernmost area (by Milton Grove) where a small self-contained park, almost a London square in shape, was laid out, containing a complete range of park leisure facilities (grass, trees, playground and football area), in part as a precaution in case further funding was never obtained.

In the event, the funding for the subsequent phases was obtained and the next phase of the park lay between Cowper Road and Wordsworth Road (the far south-east corner of Butterfield Green), incorporating the former Baptist Chapel and the old electricity generating station on Wordsworth Road.

To the south of the chapel another playground and grassed area was laid out. The final phase took place in 1986–7 and created the main park area, featuring a slightly raised green, a spectacular artificial stream (newly restored in 2009), a wooded area and an updated version of the traditional park bandstand.

This phase of work also joined the main park area to the western part of the park with a BMX biking and skateboarding area (damaged and disused in recent years and replaced by the community orchard in 2007).

Today, Butterfield Green is thriving once again. The planting of the community orchard is part of this success story and local residents are very proud to have recently received  an award  from the  British Urban Regeneration Association (BURA) for their community regeneration work in creating the orchard.

Around this time, plans for high density, high rise council estates were unveiled. Local historical societies sprung up to defend old buildings these threatened. One such society was The Hackney Society, established 1967. Lisa Rigg, current project officer, points to a map of the streets around London Fields. “In the sixties, this whole area was full of cheap housing. Lots of artistic types came here and then realised the Council’s housing programme was going to demolish most of it. The Society was set up in response.”

The Society was instrumental in saving many of the Victorian terraces around London Fields. In so doing, it earned a reputation for subversion. Rigg says: “There was a notice in the Council offices saying staff weren’t to talk to the Society. All organisations go through their radical phase.”

Fast forward a few decades, and, while people have arguably never been hungrier for knowledge about Hackney’s past, the Society has fallen on hard times.

“For many years, we have not had any funding. We used to receive Council funding because we are their official planning consultee. We lost the grant about four years ago. I’m fundraising so we can get back to where we were.”
Plans to reverse the Society’s brief decline include a new project, “From Fever to Consumption – the Story of Healthcare in Hackney”. Benefiting from a £50,000 grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund, this will examine the development of local hospitals and GP surgeries in relation to medical advances.

Rigg explains: “The study will look at four institutions: The Mothers’ Hospital, St Leonard’s Hospital, the John Scott Health Centre and Hackney Hospital. The East End is known for its poverty and the poor health of its inhabitants. If we get funding from the Wellcome Trust we will look at ten more institutions, most of which have been demolished.
“Hospital buildings have never been seen as an iconic building type. I suppose people are interested to see how these buildings developed and why there were so many in such a small area.”

The Mothers’ Hospital, an institution for unmarried women opened by the Salvation Army in 1894, became Hackney’s main maternity hospital. It was closed when the Homerton opened in the 1980s. Rigg says: “Behind it there were isolation wards built in 1913, which were demolished in 1987. These were colonnaded, bungalow style, single storey wards, separated from the main building but linked to it via walkways. I believe the idea was that if there was an outbreak of an infection in one of these, it could be isolated.”

Though the Society is passionate about reusing old buildings, Rigg acknowledges this can be difficult in the case of hospitals. In a sign the Society has mellowed since the sixties, she says it is impossible to save everything.
“I think buildings make places special,” she says. “The housing to be built on the Olympics site looks sterile, but whether it will look like that in one hundred years time is hard to say. I don’t know what the streets around London Fields would have looked like when they had just been built by the Victorians. I’m sure people would have been outraged.”

The Hackney Society is looking for contributions from former nurses, doctors and patients of the four hospitals mentioned in this article. Those with memories to share can contact Lisa Rigg 020 8806 4003. www.hackneysociety.org

“Flowers in pots usual in the ground floor front window but the flower pots not so often put in painted china outside pots as in more clerical districts.”

These days, a decent china flowerpot placed in any of the same gardens would last about a day before being smashed or stolen, so it’s a fair bet that intact specimens are owned by people rich enough to replace them.

It’s easy enough for me to be flippant, but the wider point is that social indicators change over time. Where Duckworth looked at pots and gardens, you would probably keep an eye out for the types of car parked in the street, plus the types of wine bottles and newspapers in people’s recycling bins. Eye-wateringly expensive Bugaboo prams would be the clinching sign that modern day Stokey continues to prosper.

But if the contrast in social markers is fascinating, what really draws me to Duckworth’s writing is the fact that he’s a sharp observer of Hackney life – workmanlike, but also unafraid of peppering his work with dry anecdote, snippy moralisation, hearsay or the odd sprinkling of scandal. It’s all the more refreshing when you consider that the notebooks he compiled formed an important contribution to Charles Booth’s inquiry Life and Labour of the People in London (1885-1903), famous for its colour-coded maps that indicated the prosperity or poverty of every street in the capital.

Certainly, much of what Duckworth had to say was factual observation of the “3 storied tenements let out by floors” kind, but he’s at his best when he’s talking about the people who live in an area. Here he is on the subject of policemen and strong drink:

“[Inspector Thorpe] said that it was certainly to the advantage of a policeman, if he was minded to have his beer that a house should be badly conducted… The danger of taking drink now is such that whereas 15 years ago not one policeman in 100 was a teetotaller, now he put the average proportion as 1 in 5.”

And, in this passage, describing how he saw some boys bathing near Cow Bridge, not far from where Clapton Park’s Mandeville Primary School is today.

“Then on to Cow Bridge where many boys were bathing in the ditch on the other side of the Cut. A policeman came up & at the sight of him the boys cut & ran, hurrying away with their clothes in their arms. There had been complaints of the boys bathing without any clothes so near houses, that is why the policeman was there.”

In isolation, these events are fascinating; but to get the most out of the notebooks, nothing compares to printing them out and using them to plot your own tour of Hackney’s streets. Not only will the snippets about people’s occupation and behaviour bring the houses and alleyways to life, but you’ll also be amazed by how much – and, sometimes, how little – our borough has changed over the last century.

To browse and print George H. Duckworth’s notebooks visit the Charles Booth Online Archive at http://booth.lse.ac.uk .

Ben Locker is an author and freelance writer who lives in Stamford Hill.