1/25 Start on the west side of Newington Green, facing Nos 52-55, built in 1658. No 54 was home to Newington Green Chapel Minister Dr Richard Price for 25 years from1758. Blue Plaque unveiled 23/2/23 by Huw Edwards. There Price introduced Mary Wollstonecraft to her publisher Joseph Johnson and entertained future US Presidents Thomas Jefferson and John Adams. This, south and east sides of the Green are in Islington.
2/25 Turn to face the Green. To your left, on the north side, now in Hackney, is the oldest place of non-conformist worship still in use in London, dating from 1708. Because of its rural seclusion, though not too far from London, Newington Green attracted a community of dissenters. They were Protestants who, because they would not conform to the Church of England re-established with the king in 1660, were ejected from their jobs, denied public office and persecuted for worshipping together.
3/25 This community established the Green as an ‘enlightenment hothouse’. It attracted Mary Wollstonecraft to set up a girls’ school on the east side in 1784. The pew she used can be seen in the Chapel. Maggis Hambling’s Mary Wollstonecraft Sculpture is on the Green. On the south side of the Green, on the site of Hathersage Court, were premises of the Mildmay Mission founded in response to a cholera epidemic in east London in 1866. Its outreach work in Bethnal Green developed into today’s Mildmay Mission Hospital. Head to the south-east corner; cross by pedestrian crossings to the ‘Lady Mildmay’ in Mildmay Rd.
4/25 Appropriately, this pub was once named ‘The Dissenters’ Academy’. A few of the streets around here bear the name Mildmay; a family who inherited land locally in the 1640s. For being one of the judges of King Charles I, after the restoration of the monarchy, Sir Henry Mildmay was imprisoned in the Tower of London, sentenced to be drawn every year on the anniversary of the king’s beheading upon a sledge through the streets to Tyburn (today’s Marble Arch), with a rope about his neck and back to the Tower.
5/25 Continue down Mildmay Road to take first right into Wolsey Rd. The 65 acre Mildmay estate was developed into these streets from the late c1850s.The next few roads bear names connected with the Tudor monarchs. Tradition has it Henry VIII kept a hunting lodge at the north-east corner of Newington Green. This road is named after Cardinal Wolsey, once the king’s right hand man. Take first left and walk to the end of Queen Margaret’s Grove to King Henry’s Walk.
6/25 Margaret was Henry VIII’s sister who married the king of Scotland. To your right is what is now a school again (Children’s House School), part of a complex including a vicarage and St Jude’s Church designed, amidst open ground from 1855 by Alexander Dick Gough. He also designed the Islington Literary and Scientific Society, now housing the Almeida Theatre. William Pennefather came to St Jude’s as vicar in 1864 bringing with him his missionary work which took on the name Mildmay.
7/25 Cross the pedestrian’s crossing to The Railway Tavern so named due to its proximity to today’s North London Line, just to the south: the first railway line, constructed in 1850, to cross the area. Continue down St Jude’s Street. A short diversion first right down Kingsbury Road will take you on to the first cemetery of the West London Synagogue of British Jews, used from 1843 to 1951: resting place of various prominent members of British Jewry. Return to St. Jude’s Street to walk to its end to meet Boleyn Rd.
8/25 Look across Boleyn Road to your left to note what could be an Oxbridge college façade, with projecting first floor bay window, stone mullions and trefoil tracery; built as Cholmley Boys Club in 1898 for St Mark’s Church, Dalston. St Mark’s had close links then with Highgate School, founded by Sir Roger Cholmeley in 1565. Originally used as a Sunday School, mission hall then working men’s club and soup kitchen.
9/25 Take a right down Boleyn Road – yet another Tudor associated name. Cross the bridge over the railway line to a widening in the road. To your left note a large black top hat outside the Dalston Hat apartments, a redevelopment of what was from at least 1957 to 1982 premises of Marmel and Grossmith Hat Co. Hackney Archives has a 1964 photo of the shop being the backdrop of a meeting addressed by the British fascist leader Oswald Mosley.
10/25 Continue ahead into Kingsland Green, no longer an open space but a road. Hackney enjoys over 50 green open spaces, but this is one that got away. Despite attempts to buy it to be a public space, the green, the site of a fair in 1854, with a strip of water on its east side, was built over in 1882. This part of Hackney, bordering Islington, is called Kingsland: it being an area where King Henry VIII reputedly hunted.
11/25 At the end of Kingsland Green, turn left into Kingsland Passage to Kingsland High Street. This is part of a long road leading south (Kingsland Rd, Shoreditch High St, Bishopsgate) to London Bridge and north out of London (Stoke Newington Rd and High St, Stamford Hill, Tottenham High Rd) to York. It was laid out by the Romans about 2000 years ago; known as Ermine Street historically, named after a tribe of ancient Britons once living in today’s Hertfordshire. Cross the road along Dalston Lane, crossing Ashwin St, to the large mural on your left.
12/25 This mural commemorates the 1985 Hackney Peace Carnival, designed by Ray Walker. It is one of two surviving murals commissioned by the GLC; a relic of the Cold War era, portraying Hackney as a nuclear free zone. The musicians depict local people living in Hackney at the time. Beside it is the Eastern Curve Garden, so named as here the North London Line curved south to form a branch line to the City at Broad Street Station in 1865.
13/25 On the other side of the road is Dalston Square, laid out in 2007 on the site of the original Dalston Junction Station. Beside it is CLR James Dalston Library named for Caribbean journalist, political activist and historian to celebrate Hackney’s Afro-Caribbean community. It was built on the site of the Four Aces Club, one of the UK’s first venues playing black music. Desmond Dekker and Bob Marley performed here. In the early ‘90s it became The Labrynth, home to early indoor rave scene where The Prodigy launched their career.
14/25 Continue down Dalston Lane, an old roadway first mentioned in 1553. It leads eastwards to the centre of Hackney via the settlement of Dalston, recorded in 1294 as Derleston: ‘tun’, meaning settlement, of Dedrlaf. Note older houses on the other side of the road. In 1807 the Rhodes family started leasing their land for building along this northern boundary of their Lamb Farm Estate.
15/25 Cape House hostel on the left was Dalston Police Station, built 1914 by Metropolitan Police architect J D Butler. It closed in 1991. Pass the former premises of joiners, J S Gould; enjoy the aroma of Allpress Roastery as you get to the 5 ways junction. Once known by locals as Lebon’s Corner, named for a coal merchant’s, later Donaldson’s estate agents.
16/25 At the junction on your left is what was the vicarage of St Bartholomew’s church, built in 1885 unusually as one building: church and vicarage. The church part was demolished in the 1970s for a garage (never built) and the site was developed for housing in 1995. See opposite, at the end of Graham Road, a large Red Cross sign. In 1919 the Red Cross opened a clinic here providing electric and massage treatment for WW1 veterans.
17/25 Cross diagonally right to Parkholme Rd, one of the first streets laid out in 1823 across the fields of the Rhodes family’s 140 acre estate. Note ‘Dr Barlow’ above the door of No 88. Doctors often lived in corner houses with their surgeries accessed from around the corner. Walk down the road to the Prince George Pub. The original 1820s houses on your right were demolished in the late 1800s to be replaced by what you see.
18/25 Pubs, built in a grander style on a corner site, were often the first buildings to go up in a development, as in this case, built in the 1850s with Park Villas the houses this side of the road. Turn left to follow Wilton Way, along the course of what was the Pigwell or Pikewell stream which intermittently flowed from Kingsland Green into the Hackney Brook. It marked the boundary between Rhodes land and Graham land to the north.
19/25 On the wall of no. 23 see the plaque noting the foundation stone laid in 1930 of a warehouse, with a (demolished) factory next door, of J Whitby & Co, box manufacturers. By 1971 the site was premises of Brody’s Bakers, whose aromas wafted over the area. Opposite, Wilton Rd School was built in 1886, replacing houses. Later part of Hackney Free and Parochial School (now Urswick) it was turned into flats in the mid 1990s.
20/25 Further on is Violet’s, started as a stall in Broadway Market and supplier of Harry and Meghan’s wedding cake in 2018. Opposite it the Wilton Estate was completed in 1950 replacing a block of 1860s houses destroyed by a WWII V1 flying bomb. The Spurstowe Arms, another corner pub, dates from 1862. Built on land used to endow Dr William Spurstowe’s 6 almshouses for widows founded further east in Sylvester Path in 1666.
21/25 Just down the next road on the right (Navarino) on the left survive Dr. Spurstowe’s almshouses in their third rebuild since 1666. Returning to Wilton Way, this stretch, now a mixture of cafes, shops and restaurants serving the current local demographics, still has shop fronts echoing the street it was in the past. Passing no. 50 take care not to trip over a boundary stone marking Spurstowe land.
22/25 Continue straight, under the bridge of the Great Eastern Railway line, the third train line to cross Hackney in1872. At the corner on your right is Christopher Addison House, appropriately named HQ for Hackney Housing. A Hoxton GP and later MP, Dr. Addison, as the UK’s first Minister for Health, oversaw following the 1919 Housing Act an expansion of council housing after WW1 increasing public funding to local authority housing schemes.
23/25 On the other side of the road are The Colonnades, formerly a textile factory (now flats) and art nouveau style Sylvester House built as flats in 1910. Wilton Way ends at the green fly tower of Hackney Empire. To the left is Sylvester Path, part of a track mentioned in 1616 from Clapton. Its route south to the City can be picked up the other side of the Town Hall which blocked it when built in 1937, replacing houses lining the pathway.
24/25 Turn right into Town Hall Square. Be welcomed by Thomas J Prices’s 9ft statues Warm Shores unveiled Windrush Day 2022 to celebrate the Windrush generayion’s contribution to the UK. No building here dates from before the 20thcentury: 2158 seater Hackney Empire, opened 1901 with 7 ticket prices each with its own entrance; the Picturehouse, occupying the Methodist Mission Hall (1924) and, on the corner, Hackney’s first public Library (1907); the Town Hall, Hackney’s third, replacing what had been where the gardens are now, fronting onto Mare St.
25/25 The square’s most recent building, on the south side, went up in 2002 under the then government’s Private Finance Initiative (PFI): providing funds for major capital investments where private firms contracted to complete and manage public projects. Designed by Hodder Associates, who also built the Clissold Leisure Centre, it was initially called the ‘Technology and Learning Centre’ to house the local education authority, the Central Library and the award-winning Hackney Museum – a must to visit and where you can pick up the Hackney Central Footways map (closed Sunday and Monday).