Mr Khanh Thanh Vu. Photo: Tim Sullivan

Thirty years ago, thousands of Vietnamese refugees left their country to escape Communist-controlled Vietnam following the fall of Saigon in 1975. Known as ‘boat people’, many of these refugees came to settle in Hackney, and are now a thriving and vibrant part of the borough’s community. With Vietnamese New Year, or ‘Tet’ taking place from 2-7 of this month, the community looks forward to a new year whilst commemorating the turbulent history of Vietnamese refugees.

The circumstances under which the first Vietnamese people came to Hackney were uncertain and perilous.  Mr Khanh Thanh Vu, who travelled from Vietnam to Britain in 1979, is the founder and managing director of the An Viet foundation in Hackney which provides practical help for Vietnamese refugees. As one of the original ‘boat people’ Mr Vu explains the process of resettlement, “Unlike the South Vietnamese, who fled to the Philippines, Thailand, or Guam at the end of the Vietnam War in 1975, those from the North, like myself, were forced from our homes after the 1979 border war between China and Vietnam.”

After an international conference designed to resolve the problem of South East Asia’s ‘boat people’ the British Government took responsibility for 30,000 Vietnamese refugees, “Only the boats picked up by British ships were allowed to come to Britain,” recalls Mr Vu, “and because of the war between Vietnam and China in 1979, most of the refugees coming to Britain were ethnic Chinese Vietnamese who were forced from their homes by the Vietnamese authorities who feared they would support China in the struggle”.

As Mr Vu describes the difficulties involved in the settlement of the British-based Vietnamese refugees, a delicate balancing act between social integration and cultural preservation is apparent: “In the wake of the Brixton riot in 1979, Mrs Thatcher didn’t allow the Vietnamese to settle in one area, but instead spread the refugees around the countryside.  The British Government were averse to having concentrated numbers in one place.  So even though English people were very welcoming, the feeling of isolation for refugees in the countryside was overwhelming.”

It was this policy of dispersing the ‘boat people’ throughout England that led to the eventual formation of the large Vietnamese community in Hackney, as Mr Vu describes, “Because at the time Hackney and Tower Hamlets were quite rough areas, there were plenty of empty flats and houses.  The Vietnamese in the countryside moved down to London and squatted, whereupon Hackney council gave them tenancy agreements.  The total number of refugees living in Hackney in the early 80’s was around 5,000 – the largest number of refugees in any one borough.”

From this point on, the Vietnamese contingent in Hackney has become a part of the borough’s varied make-up, although this process has not been an easy one, “The two main problems facing the refugees were language and employment.  In general, skill levels were very low because in Vietnam most of the work centres around the field and the house.  The refugees had no experience or understanding of how to work in a city, but we are also very quick learners and had no welfare system so we never minded hard work.”

To support the integration into Hackney, Mr Vu’s foundation An Viet, which means ‘well settled’ was set up in 1982 and has been dedicated to securing a brighter future for the Vietnamese refugees, “When I started the foundation, the main priority was with settling down – ensuring that the children had places at local schools, offering translation between parents and schools, working with the welfare system and the problems with squatters.”

From then, the foundation focused on encouraging employment within the community: “Although the clothes-making industry moved to Eastern Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, from 1982 to 1995 every single Vietnamese family had a sewing machine, worked in factories and would bring garments home to improve their skills and expertise,” describes Mr Vu.

“In our centre, we offered training in sewing and garment-making, gave the workers a year to run their own business from a room at the back of the building, and then encouraged them to move out on their own.  In that period there were around 40-50 Vietnamese factories making clothes in Hackney alone.”

The evolution of the Vietnamese community in Hackney in relation to industry is remarkable.  Moving from textiles into beauty parlours and restaurants, An Viet has worked to support and facilitate changing employment demands, “We now offer both food hygiene training and courses for those to set up hair and beauty salons.  You only have to walk down the street to see the results – it’s been very successful, with new businesses opening all over East London.”

Mr Vu’s wife runs Huong-Viet, a restaurant in the An Viet centre itself, and his daughter runs the acclaimed Namo in Victoria Park. He expects his New Year’s celebrations to be as food-oriented as any other Vietnamese family, “The holiday is very much about traditional Vietnamese food.  We have a huge meal on the day before visiting family and friends.  No Vietnamese family will be without the traditional Vietnamese cakes, one is square-shaped and represents earth and family and another is round, which represents heaven.  This is an important part of our heritage that will never die out.”

When asked to describe his other plans for the celebration, Mr Vu warns that’s it’s a very complicated process – and he’s right, “In Vietnam, we actually celebrate for one whole month, and is a chance to visit family and friends.  It’s an intricate event, but the main elements are lessons to the younger generations on respect and worship, and parent and grandparents always give the children a gift with which to welcome in the New Year.  There would be prayers at the church or temple, and gifts given to the priest or monk.”

In the wake of the Government’s Comprehensive Spending Review, Mr Vu emphasises that his main priority is to keep the work of An Viet going: “Luckily all the activities can keep running because the income from our restaurant partially supports the centre and we receive funding from Hackney Council. We plan to extend our Oriental Studies centre; so far we have supported ten PhDs and hope to continue that.”

He muses on how the Vietnamese refugees have come full circle:  “The first generation were so busy with their work, with settling down and integrating, but now the next generation of Vietnamese want to look back, to ask who they are, where they came from and learn about the history of South East Asia.  We hope we can give them that.”

Lauriston Road 1905 view north from Victoria Park Road. Photo courtesy of Hackney Archives

Pre-Victorian Victoria Park… Whatever could that have been like? Well, for starters, obviously the park hadn’t been thought of yet. But north-west of the land where the park is now lay a hamlet whose development would eventually bring us to the South Hackney we know today.

The settlement was situated around the junction where Grove Street, which would later be renamed Lauriston Road, met the ‘footpath’ that is now Victoria Park Road.

Records show that in 1672 there were just sixteen properties on Grove Street with the official status of having been assessed for hearth tax. The largest, with eighteen hearths, was that of a Mr Henry Monger, who along with the Norris family owned much of the land.

A hundred years later there were only a few more buildings around Grove Street, one of which was the Three Colts inn just beyond the hamlet’s southern boundary.

If you’d found yourself in the area back in 1788, you might have seen the Jewish burial ground being built on what was then Grove Street. And by 1821 there were a few more cottages around, bringing the total number of households in the hamlet to 38.

The creation of Victoria Park in 1845 led to the construction of Victoria Park Road, and it was from then the area began to take substantial shape. So, what would your life have been like if you’d lived in the area under Queen Victoria? You’d probably have been quite affluent, and possibly Jewish. And you would have doubtless taken a morning stroll in the new park that had opened to the public fifteen years earlier.

In 1865, you may have been one of the many who admired the fashionable, Gothic-style French hospital on Grove Street, built to replace the 1718 building in St Luke’s parish in Finsbury. It could be that you knew some of its residents, for they were encouraged to make themselves useful in the community. The facility continued to provide care for “poor French Protestants” – the Huguenots – until 1934, and later became a school.

Did you ever visit the tabernacle just east of the Jewish burial ground on Wetherell Road? If you’d been there in August 1876 you might have seen Josiah Henson address a bursting congregation of 2,000 – or perhaps you were one of the unlucky punters who couldn’t get in. Maryland-born Henson had been born into the slave trade and sold three times before he was eighteen, but then escaped and become an author and abolitionist. No wonder so many folk wanted to hear what he had to say.

Or you may have caught the moving talk by MP Henry Fawcett, who gave his eighth consecutive annual address to 150 of London’s blind poor at the tabernacle on 6 May 1884. Mr Fawcett had lost his sight in a shooting accident aged 25, but he spoke with great optimism on that day and was cheered at several intervals. “We who are blind have many advantages,” he said. “To no class who require friendly and generous aid is that aid more cheerfully and generously given.”

And did you hear about the ‘serious disturbance’ caused by an anti-Catholic lecturer of dubious character in the tabernacle in 1884? It prompted Labour politician Sir James Sexton to ask in the House of Commons whether anything could be done to stop it happening again. “What the honourable gentleman asks me to do is rather beyond my power,” replied the MP. “I have no power to prevent persons in this country from lecturing either for or against Protestantism.”

As Victoria’s Jubilee approached in 1887, you may have heard that twelve weaveresses from the French hospital were busy making a black silk dress, which they would later present to the Queen to mark her 50 years as our monarch.

At the turn of the century, evidence suggests the area was quite well-to-do and smart, with a piano shop and a home where women went to give birth.

Victoria Park Lido opened on the edge of Grove Road in 1932, at around the same time as its cousin in London Fields. It had space for over a thousand bathers and symmetrical wings of changing rooms, and was designed so that no shadow was ever cast onto the water. What’s more, you could get in for free three days a week!

The lido, badly damaged during the Second World War, reopened in 1952 after extensive repairs. On one occasion during the scorching summer of 1976, the doors were closed due to overcrowding but the queuing crowd simply smashed their way in – causing so much damage that the pool was closed for two days for repairs.

Linden Monck, who moved to the area in 1977 and runs the Sublime boutique and gift clothes shop on Victoria Park Road, remembers the lido being an important part of her life when she was bringing up her children, and was sad when it closed in 1986: “Everyone was a bit fed up about it.”

Linden recalled the shops that have come and gone on Victoria Park Road – the “tall blonde twins” ran the greengrocers and Marinos, the 1930s-style cafe with its tiled and chrome interior and polished fascia. The little old-fashioned grocers where the gallery is, and the bakery on the corner, Shepherds – now Loafing cake shop.

According to Linden, Victoria Park has always kept its village feel. “That’s what’s unique about this area. It’s very unusual in London,” she said. “That’s the reason a lot of people are attracted to this area. They call it the Village. It never used to be the village. It used to be called the roundabout.”

Caroline Bousfield Gregory also moved to the area in the 1970s and remembers sending her two daughters on their first lone shopping trips to AH Davis, the hardware store on the corner of Victoria Park Road where Sovereign Estates is today. “It was only ten yards away so they could go by themselves. It was a lovely shop,” said Caroline, who lives on Lauriston Road. “Everything got dusted as it was taken off the shelf, and he had a huge trapdoor down to the cellar,” she remembered.

“There didn’t seem to be any proper stairs to the cellar. He’d lift up the trap door and go down the steps and bring up dusty things with 1/6 written on them, things like the seals for old storage jars,” she said, remembering its owner, the last Davis, who ran the shop until the 1980s when he finally retired. “He had everything in stock.”

Today, the interior of Davis’s as it was in the 1930s can be seen at the Age Exchange in Blackheath, where it was transported to be used to assist reminiscence workshops.

Caroline remembers the curiosity – and at times disapproval – of her new neighbours when she converted one of the four stables around the old tram turn into a pottery workshop. “One chap stopped Gordon and said he thought it would be much better as a fishing tackle shop,” she laughed.

Caroline’s pottery had been an electrical repair shop since the 1920s, run by a man who was in his 80s when he handed it over. “He only really worked on valve radios and the odd light bulb. He was a delightful chap,” she said. “He lived round on Guinness Estate. He’d left me his till from 1920 with an old silver sixpence nailed to the inside of the drawer to bring me luck – and I still use it.”

But, unsurprisingly for an inner-city hub, Victoria Park also saw some less rosy times. Linden remembers the area was something of an overspill from the Kray brothers’ organised crime network, which brought turf wars to the streets of South Hackney. She remembers hearing about a gang shooting in one of the pubs, and that The Alex was a “drug pub” for a time.

And where now sits the more upmarket restaurant Empress of India there was at one point “a real dodgy dive”, remembers Linden. “There were all sorts of goings-on in there,” she said. “You wouldn’t have wanted to go on there on your own as a woman, I tell you.”

During these less savoury times, many families – if they had the money – moved further east to areas such as Romford and Harold Hill with the hope of getting their children into better schools. One by one, the regular food shops began to close.

Early this century residents took matters into their own hands and formed the Victoria Park Traders Association which helped bring back the full range of shops, including a greengrocer and a deli. Many of today’s businesses are owner-run, with their owners living above their shops or close by, which contributes to the community atmosphere. Developments at the nearby Canary Wharf and improved bus routes have meant the area has attracted more prosperous new residents once again.

Linden describes the Victoria Park of 2010 as ‘chichi’, and seems happy with the way things have panned out for the hamlet at the junction of Grove Street and the Hackney Wick footpath – the only downfall being that her offspring cannot afford to buy property there themselves.

Roundabout 1950, beaing the sign,'this is a road safety device'. Photo courtesy of Hackney Archives

Caroline Bousfield Gregory won second prize for Best Community Project, Hackney in Bloom 2010. Photo: Gary Manhine

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.