| Book Reviews
History of a Village
By John Flowers
One of Stoke Newington's attractions is that a wander down Church Street reminds you that 200 years ago this was a village surrounded by open country.
Fifty or so years later, the invention of the camera came as the railway and the tram turned the village, Pooterishly, into a dormitory suburb for city clerks. An explosion of speculative building, accompanied by schools, libraries, churches, theatres, pools, and municipal offices, gave birth to a flood of villas, avenues, streets, terraces and estates. Only the vagaries of ecclesiastic law and Victorian philanthropy preserved Clissold Park as a reminder of what was once fields and common land.
A new book charts this change, and the continuities that remain, in a series of historical sketches, prints and photos, mainly the latter. The images give a fascinating picture of, say, Newington Green. They shift from the Unitarian chapel of 1702 forward to 1824, when meadows surrounded the green (though buildings around its periphery still exist today), to the horse tram in the 1870s and the fencing-off of the green, on to 1928 and the neo-Gothic shopping parade with passing electric trams. Idiosyncratically, the series ends in a quaint group photo of the girls of the Stoke Newington Life Saving Troop in their uniforms in 1934. From Ball's Pond Road up to Manor House, the streets and buildings that we can see today are here recorded in black and white, together with their inhabitants, as they were 50 or 100 years ago.
At the very end of 2006's prolonged Indian summer, while walking in Clissold Park on a sunny afternoon, an architect friend pointed out the features of the lodge at the bottom of the park on Green Lanes. Pictured here (Insert Pic 2) exactly 100 years ago, the lodge was then just a few years old, despite the ivy and greenery. The lodge building is a little treasure full of faux detail reminiscent of William Morris, of mock timbering, useless dormers and elaborate tiling – only somewhat poorly kept in repair.
The book also has views of the 1796 banker's mansion in the middle of the park by what remains of the New River, a building that is literally a perfect Grade II Georgian villa. We trust to the park's users group and to our caring council that they will look after the impressive precious piece of our local heritage, but hope also they will take good care of the more humble edifice built to house the uniformed guardian of the newly opened people's amenity.
Stoke Newington, by Gavin Smith, costs £5.99 at www.nonsuch-publishing.com, and is on sale at the Stoke Newington Bookshop.
Journey By Jae Watson
Review by Anne Beech
Legend Press – our very own native N16 publisher – may have hit on a new wheeze with its latest offering.
With chick-lit and lad-lit so very last year, and the aga-saga now consigned to the remainder bins in your local Tesco, the brave young sparks at Legend seem to have identified a gaping gap-lit hole in the market. Send impressionable young-‘uns off on what now seems to be a compulsory gap-year, terrorizing the locals and sending misleading emails back home to frighten the grown-ups and their horses – and let them read about themselves, in novels drawing on precisely that demographic. It worked for The Beach – why not try it again? Must be a winner. Books, after all, don’t just furnish a room. They fit very neatly into backpacks.
And so it is with Jae Watson’s just-published Journey, in which our intrepid young heroine, Marianne, is on the Indian leg of her travels with the mysterious Sara – an apparently accidental friend with whom she has joined forces. The two are tetchy and irritable and seemingly ill-matched, and the unstable cocktail of their friendship is tested by India’s dust, heat and otherness. They squabble, make up, go awol, reconcile, take unsuitable drugs – so far, so normal – until the day that Sara’s body is found floating in the Ganges, and Marianne’s journey becomes one of self-discovery rather than geography, as she tries to uncover the truth about her friend’s death. In the process, however, she also uncovers the truth about her friend’s life – and her own.
In a whirlpool of plot turns, none of which I’m prepared to give away without payment, Marianne discovers the poignant backdrop to Sara’s death, and the tragic realities of Sara’s miserable childhood. In the process, she also recovers the possibility of happiness and fulfillment in her own muddled life. Struggling with the intransigent bureaucracy of the Indian police investigators, the utter weirdness of Sara’s mother, and a congenial East End private dick, Dave, Marianne works through wild speculations and some frankly psychotic imaginings, to reach the sad and almost prosaic facts behind Sara’s end. Magically, almost, she also retrieves a lost love and the possibility of a more fulfilled future.
Good endings. Don’cha love em?
Legend Press, 2007, 978-0-9551032-4-7, £7.99. From all good bookshops, including the Stoke Newington bookshop. |
