In 1972 the north side of Allen Road in Stoke Newington was photographed in colour in its entirety. The slides were taken on one afternoon in three complete sweeps, and shown at various art and history conferences at the time, and then boxed up and forgotten.
Their owner, the architect and a founder-member of Rough Trade Records, Richard Scott – who lived near Allen Road at the time - came across them again while sorting through old papers and files, and realised just how evocative they were of this place and time, and quite unique.
Since then, Richard has been getting them cleaned, scanned, and stitched together digitally, in order to produce a complete panorama of the street. Talks are now underway with Hackney Museum, the Museum of London, Hackney Building Exploratory, and others, as to how to raise funds to mount a full-scale exhibition of this extraordinary work.
Was there something special about Allen Road? There was for those who lived in the area at the time. Poor though the surrounding streets appeared, Allen Road had nearly forty shops and three pubs. In many ways it was a rival to Stoke Newington Church Street for chemists, doctors’ surgery, grocery shops, bookmakers, wireless repair shops, butchers, tailors, wool shop, newsagents, dry cleaners, café, hairdressers, scrap metal merchants, second-hand furniture shops and various other small traders. Today hardly any shops survive, and just the one pub, The Shakespeare. Then it was a district shopping centre in its own right, and a popular street for all kinds of goods. It even had –unusually then and now - a wet and dry fish shop, selling fresh fish on one counter and fried fish and chips on another, cooked over a wood-burning stove.
But Allen Road was even more special than that, notably due to one pub, The Allen Arms. This was on the south side of the street and has now gone, converted into housing years ago. This was one of the first pubs in the area to welcome all newcomers. In the 1950s and 1960s many families from the Caribbean settled in Stoke Newington, often buying their own homes. A terrace house in Dynevor, Oldfield or Kynaston roads, would cost no more than £4000 in the late 1960s, and wages in the NHS and London Transport – in which many newcomers worked - were relatively good, and jobs secure. Even so, well into the 1970s most pubs in Hackney (and certainly beyond), operated a discreet ‘colour bar’. Some pubs made black people unwelcome, and so were avoided. Others allowed black people to drink and mix in the public bar, but not in the saloon.
The Allen Arms welcomed everybody, and it also had a terrific jukebox, consisting of black jazz, soul and jive, from the 1940s onwards, with records by Miles Davis, Dakota Staton, Nat King Cole, Sarah Vaughan, Ella Fitzgerald, James Brown, and the latest Tamla Motown artists. It also had an extensive back catalogue of Irish music. The pub was a bit of a gathering place for political activists, and many lost causes.
There was for several years a Milton Grove community festival, as Allen Road and its many shops seemed to pull people together. Looking at these evocative photographs more than thirty years later, the poverty and poor state of repair of many of the building seems shocking. But the colours are fascinating, a kind of muddy Kodachrome. Yet the strong sense of having so many local shops serving just a few streets, islanded between Stoke Newington High Street, Green Lanes and Dalston, is a reminder of just how localised life was in terms of neighbourhood shopping, and the variety of services offered, particularly repairs.
The world of the 1972 Allen Road Panorama has gone, and for the better, many would say. The biggest difference between then and now, represented by the photographs, is the loss of so many small shops and services, along with fewer cars in the streets. Pubs, too. For poor though the street was then, it managed to hold its own as a lively street by day and night, a pioneer of Hackney’s growing multi-racial community.
If you have memories of Allen Road from the 1960s and 1970s are willing to share them, contact N16, who will pass them on to Richard and Ken. We will keep you in touch with details of the Allen Road Panorama, as work on the exhibition proceeds.
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