Marks of the past

If you can’t quite put your finger on the true character of a London street, then take a close look at its flowerpots. That’s what social investigator George H. Duckworth did as he toured the capital’s streets, accompanied by local policemen who knew every mews, court and alley. In 1897, as he passed through Stoke Newington Church Street and the area to its south, he realised what marked it out as a district inhabited more by artisans than clerks:

“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.