Hackney History Festival
Saturday Festival Pass Tickets Here
The Running Order
10:00 AM - 10:50 AM
Breda Corish
1851 Census: Who were the Irish in Hackney & Stoke Newington?
The census of 1851 was the first to record place of birth, marital status and occupation for people living in Britain. The census that year also recorded a jump in London’s Irish-born population from 75,000 in 1841 to 109,000 in 1851, reflecting mass migration caused by An Gorta Mór, Ireland’s Great Famine of 1847-1852. While London’s Irish population had long been concentrated in poor central districts like Whitechapel and St Giles in the Fields, a small minority lived in Hackney and Stoke Newington. And their census records - as workers, wives, clergy and institutional inmates - illuminate less familiar aspects of the Irish presence in Victorian London.
11:00 AM - 11:50 AM
Nigel Smith
Tales from Hackney’s Memory Palaces
Since films first flickered on London screens in 1896 Hackney has been home to more than 60 cinemas ranging from grand architectural marvels to neighbourhood fleapits. Having delved into the archives, cinema historian and tour guide Nigel Smith tells the story of more than 100 years of cinema-going in the borough. Nigel Smith is a lifelong movie nerd. He’s part of the team producing BBC Radio 4’s film and TV programme Screenshot, co-founded the long-running Tufnell Park Film Club and leads guided walking tours exploring London’s old cinemas. His website Memory Palaces aims to tell stories associated with 100 buildings in the capital that are or have been cinemas. Follow him on Instagram @nigelsmithwalks and find out more about his tours at memorypalaces.co.uk.
12:00 PM - 12:50 PM
Andrew Whitehead
We Shall Fight, We Will Win: "the British New Left""
In 1956, a new political movement emerged, explicitly socialist but rejecting both Soviet-style Communism and Labour's cautious embrace of social democracy. The New Left was concerned with ideas and culture. Those involved worked mainly outside political parties and electoral politics. In the 1960s, it helped shape the peace movement, student radicalism, the counterculture, opposition to the Vietnam war and the emerging Women's and Gay Liberation movements. It championed direct action and new forms of political communication, from agitprop poetry to silkscreen posters. Andrew Whitehead - who is working on an oral history of the New Left - traces the story of the New Left and its legacy and explores the role of Hackney politicos such as Sheila Rowbotham, David Widgery and the Grosvenor Avenue commune.
1:00 PM - 1:50 PM
Richard Yeboah
From Hackney With Love: An Intimate History of Regeneration, Gentrification and Belonging
From Hackney, With Love: An Intimate History of Regeneration, Gentrification and Belonging is an insider exploration of the dramatic social, cultural and economic transformation of one of the most iconic places in Britain – my home, the London Borough of Hackney. My talk will explore the borough's history over the last three hundred years, and its transition from a middle class suburb to one of the poorest areas of Britain. But it will also examine through several social themes how Hackney has once again become a home for the middle classes in recent decades, which has been driven by the effects of regeneration, neoliberalism and gentrification - particularly since the 2012 Olympics, and has displaced existing working class communities in the process.
2:00 PM - 2:50 PM
Amir Dotan
Look up, look down: Spotting local history everywhere
Our surroundings are filled with relics and remnants of the past, often hidden in plain sight. As we go about our daily lives, we rarely take the time to look up or down, missing the fascinating traces of history embedded in our environment. From disused coal hole covers and old boundary markers to servants’ doorbells, boot scrapers, and faded street signs, these overlooked artefacts tell the story of how people once lived and worked. Stoke Newington historian Amir Dotan will share intriguing examples of these historical treasures he has discovered while exploring Stoke Newington’s urban landscape, offering a new perspective on the rich history that surrounds us every day.
3:00 PM - 3:50 PM
Sheela Banerjee and Lucy Fulford
From Hooghly to Hackney: Hidden Histories of Empire, Race and Migration
Journey through centuries and continents, and back to present-day Hackney, as authors Sheela Banerjee and Lucy Fulford share personal stories of migration to Britain, which reveal even bigger histories of empire and race. In What's in a Name? Friendship, Identity and History in Modern Multicultural Britain, Sheela – who has lived in Hackney for over 20 years – unravels the personal histories of friends and family through their names, including her own ancestors, who once lived by the banks of India’s Hooghly River. In The Exiled: Empire, Immigration and the Ugandan Asian Exodus, Lucy explores how the Ugandan Asian expulsion of the 1970s continues to impact the UK to this day..
4:00 PM - 4:50 PM
Jerry White
Radicals and Loyalists: Hackney in a Revolutionary City, 1789-1815
The outbreak of the French Revolution in the summer of 1789 was at first broadly welcomed in London, especially among the many radicals and dissenters of Stoke Newington and Hackney. But as the events in France became more bloodthirsty, and as apparently dangerous democratic agitations began to trouble the streets of London, an opposing view developed, especially among the property-owning classes of the suburbs, Hackney among them. In early 1793 France declared war on Britain and Holland and the London supporters of revolution quickly came to be seen as potentially treasonable allies of the enemy across the Channel. This led to an organised expression of loyalism, often taking a military tone, which faced outwards (to protect England from invasion) and inwards (to protect London from radical insurgents). Hackney was caught in the middle of this struggle, active radicals and blue-coated loyalists competing for the future of the parish, and of London.
5:00 PM - 5:50 PM
Tony Travers
Hackney Council at 60
Tony will talk about Hackney in the 60 years since it was created as one of today's London boroughs in 1965. He will consider the borough's extraordinary contemporary history, including both the high and low points. Few boroughs have changed as much in recent decades, with remarkable demographic and social differences affecting all parts of the borough. And what is likely to change in the years ahead? What might Hackney look like if and when it reaches its 100th birthday in 2065?
6:00 PM - 6:50 PM
Dr Matthew Green & friends
The lost world of Dudley Ryder
An immersive, illustrated talk on a forgotten Hackney diarist who is easily as gripping as Samuel Pepys, with a costumed actor performing readings, evoking in rich, vivid detail the lost world of 18th-century Hackney, and exploring how — over the last couple of decades, with the relentless march of gentrification — the Hackney villages have come full-circle.
