Church Path, Town Hall & West Reservoir: The third and final post from my walk on April 1st 1990. The previous post was Reservoir, Castle & Lordship Lane
The Old Church is the only remaining Elizabethan church in London, built in 1563 when the then Lord of the Manor decided to rebuild the near-derelict parish church, including a private chapel for him and his family. The Church was extensively restored in 1827-9 by Charles Barry who almost doubled its seating and replaced its wooden spire – not visible in my picture. But although much has changed it has retained its Tudor character.
The Old Church was heavily damaged in wartime bombing in October 1940, but repairs were made quickly and it was back in use only a couple of months later. Later there were more repairs and most of the box pews were removed. In 2013 the interior was remodelled to make it a flexible arts and community space.
The Old Church is on the right of my picture, rather overshadowed by its successor; there was a call by the end of the eighteenth century for a larger building to cope with the growing population of the area, but the new and much larger church was only opened in 1858. The new St Mary’s Stoke Newington was designed by George Gilbert Scott but its spire was completed by his son, J O Scott, in 1890. The building is in the Decorated style of the late C13/early C14 made popular by Pugin and the Ecclesiologist Movement. The Old Church became a ‘chapel of ease’ and has never been deconsecrated. Both churches are Grade II* listed.
One of the several impressive monuments in the churchyard around the Old Church, but I cannot make out the names of those buried here – though one of them died in 1789.
Several people prominent in the abolition of the slave trade have their graves here including James Stephen (William Wilberforce’s brother-in-law, a lawyer and chief adviser on the anti-slavery bill) and Wilberforce’s sister and daughter. He also asked to be buried here but when he died it was decided he should be in Westminster Abbey.
Two tombs in the cemetery are Grade II listed, that of James Stephen and of the Romantic woman poet and abolitionist Anna Laetitia Barbauld (1743-1825) and her ‘beloved brother’, John Aikin (1747-1822)
Stoke Newington Town Hall is an impressive municipal building, designed by J Reginald Truelove as the Town Hall for the Metropolitan Borough of Stoke Newington and built in 1935-7 and still in use as council offices.
On its noticeboards are fly-posters from the TKiH, the Türkiye Komünist isci Hareketi, Communist Workers’ Movement of Turkey, illegal in Turkey. Founded in 1984 it merged with other Turkish groups in 1994 to form the Marxist-Leninist Communist Party, MLKP who still appear in force in London’s May Day March.
I returned to the West Reservoir and took a walk around it – I think this picture shows the New River at right and was taken from a bridge over it. There appears to be a channel with a sluice gate joining the reservoir and the river just beyond the skip in the centre of the picture.
And I think this view was from more or less the same place but looking in the opposite direction, with the New River now in the foreground and council estates and solid blocks of council flats at Woodberry Down, a huge LCC estate built immediately after the war and now redeveloped.
This wasn’t quite the end of my walk, as I made my way back to Manor House station from here, and I took my final picture of the day going down the escalator there – but it was not worth digitising. For my next walk I returned to south London.
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