Abney Park | >Re-PHOTO

Cemetery, Synagogue & Snooker – Stoke Newington 1989

Cemetery, Synagogue & Snooker continues my walk on Sunday 8th October 1989 which had begun at Seven Sisters Station. The previous post Stoke Newington Shops – 1989 had ended with me opposite the gates of Abney Park Cemetery, which I had visited on a walk the week before, Abney Park & South Tottenham, and I wrote more about the cemetery there.

*Angel, Abney Park Cemetery, Stoke Newington, Hackney, 1989 89-10e-45*

The cemetery has a huge assortment of memorials and I photographed a few of them, including this angel, perhaps a fairly typical depiction, with similar angels in memorials across the country. It also gives an idea of the wilderness which the cemetery had become by 1989.

*Angel, Abney Park Cemetery, Stoke Newington, Hackney, 1989 89-10e-23*

Another angel erected by a husband in sacred memory of his wife Elizabeth who “departed this life” only 28 years old in 1865. This is a rather more unusual monument and I wondered if it might perhaps resemble this young woman who may well like many of the time have died in childbirth. There are two cherubs on the plinth and below them a rather strange pipe with perhaps shoots emerging at both ends. I suspect someone may know the significance of this. I cannot quite make out the name of her husband, although someone had clearly removed the creeper from the stone in order to reveal it.

*John Swan, Engineer, Abney Park Cemetery, Stoke Newington, Hackney, 1989 89-10e-26*

The text on the monument at the right of this picture is clear, and this is the Grade II listed memorial to John Swan (1787-1869), the inventor of the screw propellor for use on ships, and also of the self acting chain messenger which apparently saved the nation around £70,000 a year, for which he “never received the slightest remuneration.”

I took around 20 pictures in the cemetery and have only digitised seven of them – you can find four not included in this post on Flickr.

*Northwold Rd, Synagogue, Northwold Rd, Stoke Newington, Hackney, 1989 89-10e-13*

Built as a Primitive Methodist Chapel in 1875, this building was bought by members of the Beth Hamedrash Ohel Yisrael Synagogue as “more suitable and commodious premises” than their previous synagogue at 46 Brooke Rd in 1953 and consecrated in 1955. It became known as Beit Knesset Ohel Yisrael or Northwold Road Synagogue.

The synagogue closed the month before I made this picture. The building at 16 Northwold Road became the Sunstone Women Only Gym and is now the Tower Theatre.

*Northwold Rd, Stoke Newington, Hackney, 1989 89-10e-14*

Northwold Road begins opposite Abney Cemetery gates and its first secition still includes a number of interesting buildings as well as the former synagogue, but these on the north side of the road opposite it have been replaced by a large grey six-storey block of housing.

The flats at right re a part of the George Downing Estate on Alkham Road and are on the other side of the railwa line.

*House, 187, Stoke Newington High St, Stoke Newington, Hackney, 1989 89-10f-64*

Grade II* listed along with its neighbours 189 and 191, this is part of what the listing text describes as “an Early C18 large scale composition of 3 houses, the centre one projecting, touching at corners”. (It actually says proecting, but this building has a large yard in front and 189 has its porch almost on the street,)

This house was built in 1712 for Silk merchant John Wilmer (1696-1773), a wealthy Quaker. It later became ‘The Invalid Asylum for the Recovery of the Health of Respectable Women’. Substantially rebuilt in 1983 it is now the Yum Yum Thai Restaurant.

Snooker, Slindon Court, 149, Stoke Newington High St, Stoke Newington, Hackney, 1989 89-10f-66 — *Snooker, Slindon Court, 147, Stoke Newington High St, Stoke Newington, Hackney, 1989 89-10f-66*

Hard to remember why I cropped this so tightly as to remove the S from Snooker and the SLI of Slindon Court, but probably it was just to make what I felt was a more satisfactory composition. I had previously photographed this in colour with a slightly wider view.

*Snooker, Slindon Court, Stoke Newington High St, Stoke Newington, Hackney, 1989, 89e04-62*

Slindon Court is now the entrance to a gated mews development behind the shops here.

The final post on this walk is still to come.

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Requiem For A Bee

Getting to Clissold Park in Stoke Newington isn’t the most convenient of London journeys, at least not if you are in a hurry. And having been at Euston to photograph the HS2 protest it took me a while to arrive there – the Underground to Manor Park, a bus ride and then a run (or rather a mixture of walking and running we used to call ‘Scout’s pace’) across the park.

But events were running late, and I was pleased and surprised to find that the funeral procession to Stoke Newington Town Hall that should have left just over 15 minutes earlier was only just forming up. And I had another 5 minutes to recover my breath before it finally moved off.

The bee in question was apparently the Red Girdled Mining Bee, previously found in Abney Park Cemetery was now extinct there due to loss of habitat with increasing development in Hackney. It was a local example of species extinction that is occurring on a huge scale world-wide as a result of human activities destroying ecosystems and increasingly from the changes in weather and climate from global heating due to rising levels of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.

Although I could see the idea of concentrating on a small local example, I did rather wonder how clearly and powerfully it would communicate with the many citizens of Stoke Newington going about their daily business who saw the procession, though other aspects were clearer from many of the placards and banners. But Extinction Rebellion does sometimes seem to be a very much a highly successful movement of the educated middle class making relatively little connection with the bulk of the population.

After the funeral orations at the Town Hall, the procession and the coffin moved on down Stoke Newington Church St and up Stoke Newington High St to the wonderful Egyptian-style listed 1840s cemetery gates. It was a shame that the protest did not take greater advantage of the location and pose with their various banners and flags.

Rather it slid uneasily into the kind of new-age reflection and meditation that while it may appeal to some gets very much up my nose. As I commented on My London Diary, “Had I been protesting rather than photographing the event I would have left for a pint. ” I hung on hoping that something more interesting might happen, but it didn’t. While this aspect of XR may go down well with some I think it probably causes many to avoid it. But perhaps it’s just me.

More at Requiem for a Bee.

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Highgate to Stoke Newington

On the early May Bank Holiday – the one that should have been on May Day but isn’t – Linda and I walked another short section of the Capital Ring, from Highgate to Stoke Newington.

After a short walk along footpaths and roads, the route joins the former railway line which is now the Parkland Walk. Quite a lot of this is in a cutting, though there are some embankment sections, but except where the line has bridges over roads the view is often very limited by trees and bushes which have grown beside the former line.

A long bridge takes you across the East Coast main line and its suburban outliers and into Finsbury Park, where both cafe and toilets were very welcome.

Across the park you join the New River, supplying water to London since 1613, thanks in particular to the efforts of Sir Hugh Myddelton, though I expect he had quite a few others to dig it for him (and it wasn’t his idea in the first place.)

This goes along the edge of the Woodberry Down Estate, a large area bought by the LCC for housing in 1934, but only developed after the war as a ‘utopian estate of the future‘. Building began in 1949 and the 57 large blocks of flats were only completed in 1962. The estate included the country’s first purpose built comprehensive school and a medical estate opened by Nye Bevan, but unfortunately was allowed to deteriorate over the years, and beggining in 2009 became one of Europe’s biggest single-site estate regeneration projects.

The controversial scheme by Berkeley Homes, Notting Hill Genesis and Hackney Council will involve a loss of around a fifth of social housing in the area estimated by the council at around 320 homes and has been described as ‘state-sponsored gentrification‘ with 3 bed flats selling for around £800,000 and many being bought up as investments by foreign investors rather than used as homes.

On the opposite side of the path, across the New River are large reservoirs of open water, part now a nature reserve with public access (and another tea room with toilets) and another used for sailing and other water sports. The remarkable Scottish Baronial castle built as offices for the water board is now a climbing centre.

From there it’s a short walk to Clissold Park (another cafe and toilets – this must be the best provided section of the Capital Ring) and Stoke Newington Church Street, often described as a ‘hipster hub‘. Next to the park are the two churches of St Mary, the older locked but with an atmospheric and overgrown churchyard and the Victorian built in 1858 to the design of Sir George Gilbert Scott, open and well worth a visit.

As a final climax we came to Abney Park Cemetery, one of London’s finest, set up in 1840 as a burial ground for non-conformists and the final resting place of around 200,000 Londoners, now a nature reserve. We looked up the train times from nearby Stoke Newington station and rather than rushing through to the station spent some time wandering around and finding a few of the better-known graves and some other interesting monuments.

In our rush from there the few hundred yards to the station I lost a little concentration and we went down to the wrong platform and caught a train going into London rather than out and had to re-plan our journey home. It turned out to be almost as fast.

More pictures from the walk at Highgate to Stoke Newington.

All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated, are taken by and copyright of Peter Marshall, and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.