Hackney: An Uncommon History in Five Parts

London is eternally fascinating. Every part has a story to tell, even the suburbs. And we should remind ourselves that Hackney – comprising the former metropolitan boroughs of Shoreditch, Hackney and Stoke Newington – was largely suburban until the latter years of the 19th century. The modern London borough comprises a constellation of once-satellite villages and they are recovered here as they achieve prominence in the life of London over past centuries. This year of the third London Olympics defines the structure, so that the ‘Five Parts’ under review highlight 1612, 1712 and so on, up to the present day.

What changes these villages have seen! Hackney was said in the 1750s to excel ‘all other Villages in the Kingdom, and probably upon Earth, in the Riches and Opulency of its inhabitants’; by the 1980s the London Borough of Hackney was celebrated by its left-leaning council as one of the poorest local authority areas in the nation. In the 1890s Hoxton was said to be ‘the leading criminal quarter of London, and indeed of all England’; now it has become unevenly fashionable as an arts hub and a vibrant centre of London’s cultural industries, though one wonders whether the thousands of council tenants there have entirely bought into the project. If social historians wanted to study a microcosm of change in London over the past century-and-a-bit they could do worse than take Hoxton for their focus. Not only have the villages altered in their class mix. Most of all, of course, migration has transformed the population of the whole of Hackney over the past 60 years or so. Now people from almost every nation whose athletes are competing in the nearby Olympics stadia live together with extraordinary amity in this congested corner of north-east London.

Beautifully illustrated, this is an appealing and popular introduction to the history of Hackney and its inexhaustible capacity to reinvent itself over time.

Jerry White is Professor in History at Birkbeck, University of London.