London Borough of Hackney
The London Borough of Hackney is a London borough in Inner London, England. The historical and administrative heart of Hackney is Mare Street, which lies north-east of Charing Cross. The borough is named after Hackney, its principal district. Southern and eastern parts of the borough are popularly regarded as being part of east London that spans some of the traditional East End of London with the northwest belonging to north London. Its population is estimated to be 281,120.
The London Plan issued by the Greater London Authority assigns whole boroughs to sub-regions for statutory monitoring, engagement and resource allocation purposes. The most recent iteration of this plan assigns Hackney to the 'East' sub-region, while the 2008 and 2004 versions assigned the borough to "North" and "East" sub-regions respectively. The modern borough was formed in 1965 by the merger of the Metropolitan Borough of Hackney with the much smaller Metropolitan Boroughs of Stoke Newington and Shoreditch.
Hackney is bounded by Islington to the west, Haringey to the north, Waltham Forest to the north-east, Newham to the east, Tower Hamlets to the south-east and the City of London to the south-west. Hackney was one of the host boroughs of the London Olympics in 2012, with several of the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park venues falling within its boundaries.
History
Place name origin
In the 13th century the name appears as Hackenaye or Hacquenye, but no certain derivation is advanced. The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Place Names discusses the origin of the name. The first surviving records of the place name are as Hakney and Hakeneye. The "ey" suffix almost certainly refers to an island; the dictionary favours the interpretation that Hackney means "Haka's island", with Haka being a notable local person and the island lying close to the River Lea. This was once a much wilder place than today.The dictionary suggests that the Hack element may also derive from:
- The Old English "Haecc", meaning a hatch – an entrance to a woodland or common.
- Or alternatively from "Haca", meaning a hook, and in this context, a bend of the river.
The place name will have originally referred to just the island or possibly both the island and the manor of the same name based around it. Subsequently, the name Hackney was applied to the whole ancient parish of Hackney.
Iron Age to Anglo-Saxon period
In the Iron Age and probably until after the Roman period, the River Lea was considered to separate the territories of the Catuvellauni to the west of the river from the Trinovantes to the east.The Romans built the Roman road, Ermine Street, which runs through the modern borough under the names Shoreditch High Street and Kingsland Road, among others.
In the Anglo-Saxon period, the River Lea separated the core territories of the East Saxons from the Middle Saxons they often controlled. This continuity of this natural boundary from pre-Roman period may be a result of the differing Saxon groups taking control of pre-defined territories.
After both areas were brought under the control of Alfred the Great, the river became the boundary between the historic counties of Middlesex and Essex.
Later history
In the Tudor period, the lands of religious orders were seized by the Crown and put up for sale. Thus Hackney became a retreat for the nobility around Hackney Central and Homerton. Henry VIII's Palace was by Lea Bridge roundabout, where BSix Sixth Form College stands today. Sutton House, on Homerton High Street, is the oldest surviving dwelling in Hackney, originally built in 1535 as Bryck Place for Sir Ralph Sadleir, a diplomat. The village of Hackney flourished from the Tudor to late Georgian periods as a rural retreat.The first documented "hackney coach"—the forerunner of the more generic "hackney carriage"—operated in London in 1621. Current opinion is that the name "hackney", to refer to a London taxi, is derived from the village name. Construction of the railway in the 1850s ended Hackney's rural reputation by connecting it to other parts of the city and stimulating development.
File:Curtain Theatre.jpg|thumb|right|Curtain Theatre circa 1600 print. Note: some authorities believe this to be a depiction of the Theatre – the other Elizabethan theatre in Shoreditch.
London's first Tudor theatres were built at Shoreditch. The Gunpowder Plot was first exposed nearby in Hoxton.
In 1727 Daniel Defoe said of the villages of Hackney
The parish church of St John-at-Hackney was built in 1792, replacing the nearby former 16th-century parish church dedicated to St Augustine.
Notable residents from the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries included Robert Aske, William Cecil, Samuel Courtauld, Samuel Hoare, Joseph Priestley and Thomas Sutton.
Many grand houses stood in Stoke Newington and Stamford Hill; the latter neighbourhood became a center of Hackney's many Orthodox Jewish residents from the 1930s. Alfred Hitchcock made many of his first films in Hoxton at the Gainsborough Studios in Poole Street.
The interwar era saw the building of social housing by the LCC and the borough council in the area including the Kingsmead Estate, Morningside Estate, Banister House and Nisbet House. The borough also includes housing projects developed by high-profile postwar architects including The Beckers by Sir Frederick Gibberd, Granard House by Colin St John Wilson and Pitcairn House by Eric Lyons. Following extensive post-war development and immigration since the late 20th century, population pressure has increased and the area's many Georgian and Victorian terraces are being gentrified, warehouses are being converted to housing, and new flats are being built.
In the 1980s and beyond, Hackney was described as the poorest borough in Britain - although it has been questioned whether this may have in fact been Glasgow, at the time. The council used the phrase 'Britain's Poorest Borough' in official materials. It was described in this way as late as 2001 and in Parliament in 2010. This picture has now changed: the 2019 Indices of Multiple Deprivation found that Hackney was the 22nd most deprived borough in England, down from 11th in 2015 and 2nd in 2010, whilst Hackney has also featured prominently in discussions of gentrification.
It was ranked as inner London's "greenest borough" and London Transport's "best bike borough 2006", with 62 parks and open spaces, covering. Seven Hackney parks have now achieved Green Flag status. One, Abney Park, became scheduled in 2009 as one of Britain's historic parks and garden at risk from neglect and decay. Hackney Marshes play host to the largest collection of football pitches in Europe. Part of it was used as a site for events of the 2012 Summer Olympics.
In 2021, the addition of 3 illegal art pieces,the anarchist charity Antepavillion was given an ordinance to remove their most recent illegal art piece "Sharks!" This brought the Metropolitan Police to raid Antepavillion's main warehouse and illegal Potemkin Theatre to stop the addition of the piece. After its placement was banned in the protected canal area, the Islington Boat Club put it on display in their private area.
Listed buildings and conservation areas
There are 1,300 listed buildings in Hackney, including the Hackney Empire, Tudor Sutton House, and the Grade I medieval St Augustine's Tower, the borough's oldest building. The borough contains 25 conservation areas including Clapton Square and urban open-spaces including Clapton Common and Clissold Park. Conservation areas also protect large areas of Georgian and Victorian housing, and areas of industrial heritage.Administrative history
The area of the modern borough broadly corresponds to the three ancient parishes of Hackney, Shoreditch and Stoke Newington, which had all historically been part of the Ossulstone hundred of the county of Middlesex. For some administrative functions, Ossulstone was divided into four divisions. Stoke Newington was part of the Finsbury division. Hackney and Shoreditch were both part of the Tower division, which was noteworthy in that the men of the area owed military service to the Tower of London.File:st augustines tower.jpg|thumb|upright|left|St Augustine's Tower, Hackney. A former property of the Knights of St John dating from the 13th century, St Augustine's Tower is Hackney's oldest building. The tower is all that remains of the medieval parish church, which was demolished in 1798.
The ancient parishes provided a framework for both civil and ecclesiastical functions, but during the 19th century there was a divergence into distinct civil and ecclesiastical parish systems. The ecclesiastical parishes were gradually sub-divided to better serve the needs of a growing population, while the civil parishes continued to be based on the same ancient parish areas.
From 1856 the area was governed by the Metropolitan Board of Works, which was established to provide services across the metropolis of London. In 1889 the Metropolitan Board of Works' area was made the County of London. From 1856 until 1900 the lower tier of local government within the metropolis comprised various parish vestries and district boards. Shoreditch was governed by its vestry, whilst Hackney and Stoke Newington were initially grouped into the Hackney District with a single board covering the two parishes. This proved unpopular, especially in more affluent Stoke Newington. After four unsuccessful attempts, the Hackney District was dissolved in 1894 under the Metropolis Management Act 1893, and its two parishes were then each governed separately by their own vestries.
In 1900 the lower tier was reorganised into metropolitan boroughs. In this area the three parishes each became a borough: Hackney, Shoreditch and Stoke Newington. There were some rationalisations to boundaries, notably that Shoreditch absorbed part of the tiny Liberty of Norton Folgate.
Stoke Newington was smaller than the desired size for the new boroughs, and there were proposals to re-merge Stoke Newington and Hackney, or to detach the northern part of Hackney and join it with Stoke Newington. These proposals were rejected due to the experience of "intolerable and interminable feuds" between the districts when they were previously "forced together". The First Lord of the Treasury, Arthur Balfour recognised that there was "great ill-feeling and mutual ill-will... between the inhabitants of the two districts". It was therefore decided to merge the South Hornsey exclaves of Hornsey, with a population about 20,000, with Stoke Newington. While this still created a borough of only about 50,000 inhabitants, and thus "the smallest borough in London, the anomaly would be a gradually diminishing one, because the population in this district was rapidly increasing. When dividing London up into boroughs they could not avoid creating some anomalies as to size."
The modern London Borough of Hackney was created in 1965 under the London Government Act 1963. It covered the combined area of the three metropolitan boroughs of Hackney, Shoreditch and Stoke Newington.