Dabbler Country: A Stroll Around Stokey


Inhabitants of the inner city have to take their country pleasures where they find them. So my sons’ going to a supervised birthday in Stoke Newington provided an opportunity for a stroll around the more bucolic parts of the district.

The party was held at Pirates Playhouse, a many-storied soft-play centre with a buccaneering theme housed in what looks like a castle, complete with turrets, battlements and mullioned windows. It’s actually a former pumping station, built in Victorian times to look like a folly. Strange that something so utilitarian – in fact, critical to the contemporary health of London – should have such a playful architecture. A paradoxically useful folly.

Anyway, it’s just up the road from Clissold Park, one of the beautiful parks that blesses the good borough of Hackney. Having walked half way round its fringe, the church that gives Stoke Newington Church Street its name reminded me of the nearby necropolis in Abney Park, a few minutes walk away.

Church Street was much smarter than when I’d last visited a little over ten years ago. I’d spent an evening at the Vortex club, at that time located above a shop and specialists in lesbian jazz. I’d been hushed whilst trying to make conversation over a vegetarian meal; lesbians in Stokey took their jazz seriously, probably along with much else.

The street was gentrifying, in that comfortably eclectic stage where the newly-arrived City lawyer rubs along with the remaining lesbian jazz fan. It’s not so mainstream posh that it’s stopped being interesting: shops sold violins, second-hand books, locally-made clothes and expensively wholesome things for kids.

As I walked past the swanky restaurant-bars that occupied the next block or two, I began to get a bit worried that the cemetery had also been improved. But by the time I’d turned off the street and reached the top of the steps leading into the burial ground I’d been reassured. It was still as decadent as I remembered it from my last visit back in the mid-’90s.

Like the pumping station and park, Abney Park Cemetery is a product of the nineteenth century and, judging by the death dates on gravestones, it doesn’t appear to have been used for about forty years. During this time things have been allowed to run wild.

The ground either side of the path is uneven and buckled, headstone leaning into headstone, as if the graves are being slowly folded into the earth. The stones are weathered and cracked, surmounted by statues with fused stumps instead of limbs. They have a gnarled quality: like a grove of wind-beaten oaks, the sort you find on a mountain side. Though little wind blows here, surrounded as it is by buildings and dense with vegetation – only time is responsible for this slow-motion devastation.

I followed the track, the high street of the ruined necropolis. It contained a memory of gravel but the surface was mostly leaf mould deliquescing into mud, delicately rutted and slippery. I was grateful for my thick-soled shoes. Although it was a bright winter day – the first for a while – in here it was gloomily dark. Clumps of smothering ivy rambled everywhere; clambering over graves and pulling at trees. Its ubiquity suggested the small-holding of an insane but talented ivy farmer.

A couple of minutes walk brought me to the centre. And what better to find there than an abandoned, deconsecrated chapel? An ornamented spire caught the last of the waning sun, its stone pristine (air pollution is one of the few agents of decay not present in this spot). As my eyes moved down, the impression of preservation was belied: sheets of billowing corrugated iron were loosely fastened on some ground-level windows. But this seemed a pointless initiative, given some larger Gothic windows, unglazed and blackly gaping, were only marginally higher. A couple of sturdy Hackney diabolists would soon be in.

I walked on a bit further, noticing that amongst the derelict headstones were a number in much better condition. Some were made of Portland stone, small and neat with gently arched tops. They were new, all memorialising soldiers killed in the First World War. Probably the work of a charitable agency. Other graves had been restored and some sported fresh flowers, colourful signs of concern that sat somewhat incongruously in the shadowed rubble.

The cemetery is wonderfully neglected. But it’s a peculiar sort of neglect – it’s not just the scattering of new headstones and fresh flowers that indicates a living interest: the seemingly uncontrolled vegetation doesn’t spill over onto the paths; there is no litter; mysteriously stranded stones are carefully stacked in rows. Like many wild places it’s the product of a particular form of human intervention.

It struck me that this sort of intervention – a tended decadence – could only be found in a disused graveyard (at least in expensive and densely-populated London). Where we continue to believe in the sentiments expressed on the ruined gravestones, it’s done quietly and with no fuss; and although this place retains a powerful trace of religiosity it would seem somehow embarrassing to maintain it in a close-to perfect condition, as if nothing had changed or could change. The odd mourner may still feel that it’s as inviolable a place as it was when it was in full use. But for the rest of us an impecunious, desultory sort of maintenance seems about right.

It’s now a nature reserve: a rationalisation of delinquency after the fact. The creation of such an extraordinary environment – for man and nature – is some species of cultural accident.

Debouching back out onto Church Street marked an abrupt transition: I felt I’d travelled further than I had. By the time I got back to the pirates’ castle, with its over-excited garrison of five-year olds, I felt remarkably refreshed.

Share This Post

About Author Profile: Bill

13 thoughts on “Dabbler Country: A Stroll Around Stokey

  1. wormstir@gmail.com'
    January 11, 2011 at 09:00

    …and I feel refreshed having read about your ramble, Nige. I once lived in a squat on church st. for a few weeks until the bailiffs came but alas at the time I wasn’t particularly interested in old graveyards.

  2. Gaw
    January 11, 2011 at 09:06

    To be mistaken for Nige is quite a compliment!

  3. Brit
    January 11, 2011 at 11:54

    Marvellous – rather than Nige, with the ‘lesbian jazz’ and ‘insane but talented ivy farmer’ I detected a Frank Key influence…

  4. wormstir@gmail.com'
    January 11, 2011 at 12:16

    oh…you’re not a Nige! I must say I thought the lesbian jazz was fairly outré!

  5. Gaw
    January 11, 2011 at 12:46

    Brit, now you mention it, there was something Hootingly familiar about Abney Park…

    Worm, I wouldn’t like to speculate on Nige’s relationship with the outre. Who knows?

  6. hooting.yard@googlemail.com'
    January 11, 2011 at 16:03

    About ten years ago I used to take a daily walk around Abney Park Cemetery. This piece has made me resolve to pay a return visit.

  7. Gaw
    January 11, 2011 at 16:24

    Glad to be of service, Frank. I look forward to anything that might emanate from such a visit.

  8. sophieking@btinternet.com'
    Sophie King
    January 11, 2011 at 17:17

    We moved out of Stoke Newington nearly nine years ago. Doesn’t sound like much has changed except for your surprisingly peaceful walk round Abney Park Cemetery. Last time I tried it in 2002, our daughter was just beginning to toddle. After making fairly slow progress along various dappled sunlit paths we came across a number of gentlemen who seemed to have lost their trousers and were less than pleased to see us. We never went back.

  9. nigeandrew@gmail.com'
    January 11, 2011 at 17:46

    Me and lesbian jazz, we go way back – but that’s another story… I enjoyed reading about Abney Park – I do love overgrown burial grounds, used to be a regular in the old wild parts of Highgate cemetery when they were really wild. Even Carshalton churchyard had its wild years – decades actually – when it was a splendidly overgrown, faintly macabre playground for us local children. It’s tidy now, but still has some very fine old trees and plenty of ivy. And the gravestone with that wonderful epitaph that I posted on Nigeness…

  10. Gaw
    January 12, 2011 at 10:05

    Sophie: there did seem to be a disproportionate number of single men around. I’d assumed they were also doing things like taking a break from a children’s party to pursue an interest in local history and unusual places. I may have been wrong then?

    Nige: I remember it well. ‘Drifts of violets’ is an unusually beautiful phrase.

    Frank: Remarkable stuff. What a salesman! I hope his heirs benefitted.

  11. nigeandrew@gmail.com'
    January 13, 2011 at 18:06

    A classic, Frank!

Comments are closed.