Sunday 10th May 2026

History is most often recorded as a long list of men and their deeds, with only passing mention of their wives. However, within the history of Sutton House, we have the opportunity to uncover a different story. The house has been a residence for over 500 years; tallying up the records, we find that women held a controlling interest in the property for more than half of its history. This means that the main narrative of Sutton House is actually not the story of men and their wives — it’s the story of women and their goals. Ursula Machell snuck in the backdoor of her own house to hold it against her husband’s creditors in 1598. Sarah Freedman founded a girls school in 1657, which she ran on her own for 43 years. Eliza Temple founded her girls school in 1837, and later stood up to be counted for women’s suffrage — 62 years before women would finally win the vote. Mehetabel Ball sold and developed the land around Sutton House in 1865 to create the footprint of Hackney that we know today, naming both Mehetabel Road and Isabella Road after her daughters. Poring through the archives and research notes currently held in the collection, it became clear that there have been many strong women who have called the oldest building in Hackney home, they just haven’t had their time in the spotlight. Until now.

Modelled on the Château de Chambord by its architect Robert Lewis Roumieu the French Hospital at Victoria Park in Hackney opened its doors in 1865 to house 60 descendants of poor French protestants who had originally fled to England from the terrors in France.  Sarah Vermont is a descendant of two of the original directors of ‘La Providence’ and she has been ferreting around in the Huguenot archives and uncovered some fascinating stories.

In their crystal jars, beetles kick and plunge. Set before a tall window, rests a glass case carefully planted with ferns that swoop and curl against the light. Presiding over the scene is a large green parrot in a cage of elaborate Moorish design. This is Shirley Hibberd’s home in the 1860s. He is one of the first city gardeners but also loves to bring the outdoors indoors. It’s Hibberd’s birds that bring his home to life: he owns thirteen parrots and two Brazilian toucans. Many of them are invited to the breakfast table. Hibberd’s world of birds will be compared with others around East London over time who have their own love affairs with chaffinches, pigeons and budgie.

John Berger, one of Europe’s most influential post-war writers and intellectuals was born at 1 Filey Avenue, Stoke Newington on 5 November 1926. In his late 40s he became close friends with Glenn Thompson, the black American draft-resister & youth worker who founded Centerprise, the pioneering Hackney radical bookshop & community centre in 1971. When Glenn died in 2001, it was Berger who wrote his Guardian obituary. When Glenn left Centerprise in 1974 to establish the Writers & Readers Publishing Co-operative - based on the Hackney project’s experience in promoting young writers through community-based publishing – he asked John Berger, one of Glenn’s keenest supporters, to join him in that venture. In the centenary year of John Berger’s birth, writer Ken Worpole, who was involved in the early days of both projects, will talk about Berger’s life and work, with particular reference to his early life and political attachments.

"The Lee Valley Park was the brainchild of a famous Hackney mayor, Lou Sherman, whose aim was to restore the neglected open spaces of the Lee Valley for public use. This modest vision was transformed when the Lee Valley Park Authority was set up in 1967 and pursued a vision of creating a series of great regional leisure centres with little thought for local people or for open space.
Laurie Elks will describe how a group of local Hackney residents fought back when the Park Authority planned to dig up the Walthamstow Marshes to extract gravel to help pay for these ambitions. The Save the Marshes group vanquished the arrogant Park Authority – saved the Marshes – Hackney’s countryside - and helped make the Park Authority rethink what it should be trying to achieve."

Cities are never still. Shaped by money, power and people, they constantly remake themselves— erasing some histories while layering new ones. Hackney is one such place: farmland turned to concrete, industry to apartments, workshops to nightclubs, families pushed out as wealth flows in. From post-war decline to 21st-century regeneration, prosperity and poverty sit side by side.Drawing on his unique archive of photographs made in Hackney in the 1970s and 1980s and revisiting the same streets fifty years later, this talk explores what has changed, what has been lost, and what endures. It is a visual and social portrait of urban transformation, memory, and the meaning of place over time.

"Raised in Hackney, Abram Games was one of 20th century Britain’s most innovative and important graphic designers. With a career spanning sixty years, he produced some of Britain’s most enduring images which are now a fascinating record of social history.

During the Second World War, when he designed 100 posters, he was uniquely appointed ‘Official War Poster Artist’. Post-war, he created posters for Shell, London Transport, Guinness, the Financial Times, the British Overseas Airways Corporation and British Airways. He designed the first animated ident for BBC television, the covers of Penguin Books, the emblems for the 1951 Festival of Britain and the Queen’s Award to Industry. Games also created postage stamps issued in Britain, Jersey, and Israel. Naomi will talk about her father’s personal philosophy of ‘maximum meaning, minimum means’ which gave his works their distinctive conceptual and visual quality. She will relate personal stories, show his designs and progressive sketches, and will explain his working process.

Inspired by David Olusoga’s A House Through Time, Jessica Crowe went searching for the secrets hidden within the walls of her London Fields home. What she found was the story of Hackney itself. Spanning 150 years, this journey takes us from quiet farmlands to bustling urban terraced streets. Meet the residents who lived through it all: from wealthy Freemen and pub landlords to those facing bankruptcy and the shadow of two World Wars. Along the way, Jessica uncovered links to Cecil Rhodes, Marie Stopes and even, indirectly, Jack the Ripper. Join us to rediscover these forgotten lives, learn the “detective work” behind the research, and find out how you can begin uncovering the history of your own home and your neighbours from the past.

Before modern medicine and private bathrooms, public baths developed as a cost effective way to bring hygiene and basic health benefits to Britain’s poor. Using the Eastway Baths in Hackney Wick as a starting point, this talk explores how Hackney’s public baths emerged (and where keen-eyed observers can find the relics that remain), offering hygiene and health at a time when medical care was limited or out of reach. As the NHS arrived and bathrooms moved into the home, bath houses faded from everyday life, replaced by technologies that promised cleaner, easier, disease free living. But that rapid lifestyle change has also brought its own set of new problems, and bathing culture is enjoying a revival as an ancient solution to modern problems. Looking at historical research through a scientific lens, Gabrielle explains how Hackney's public baths help us to understand about humans and their health, and why we should be bringing them back.

When (if) we think of British cinema and where its films were made, it is perhaps most likely that various studios - Elstree, Pinewood, Shepperton etc. - come to mind. If we consider locations, the 'iconic' buildings of Central London will probably dominate. However the wider city has always featured distinctively on screen, and nowhere more so than Hackney. Providing both its actual named identity to a number of fascinating titles, as well as a whole range of 'stand-in' sites for movies set well beyond the borough, Hackney can claim a fascinating portfolio across the whole spectrum of moving image production - from fiction features to artists' films, via documentaries and TV works. Film programmer and producer Gareth Evans sits in the director's chair to investigate.

From the 1880s, Eastern European Jewish immigrants, fleeing poverty and pogroms, settled in London’s East End. Their Yiddish mothertongue could be heard in the streets, restaurants, workplaces, and the packed Yiddish theatre. Scores of Yiddish newspapers and journals included a “feuilleton” sketch which was an oblique or satirical view of daily life. As immigrants took a step out of the East End “ghetto”, many moved to other areas of London. This talk explores three feuilleton writers who lived in Hackney writing ironic and comic sketches offering curious insights into immigrant Jewish life both in the East End and in Stamford Hill, Stoke Newington and Clapton - with also a Yiddish song about Victoria Park. Vivi Lachs is a historian of the Jewish East End, a Yiddish performer, singer, and leads East End tours. Her latest book East End Jews will be available at a discount.

The Blitz left many families homeless. One solution was the rapid construction of prefabs on open spaces to provide temporary accommodation. It was in one of these that the young Norman Jacobs grew up through the 1950s and 60s. In a lively, detailed and humorous portrait of postwar Hackney, Norman’s talk takes us back to an age of rationing, bomb sites, street traders, colourful characters and Rock ’n’ Roll. As he recalls stodgy school dinners, jumpers for goalposts, Listen with Mother, greyhound racing, pie ’n’ mash and the arrival of the first burger bars, he offers a vivid glimpse of a way of life that has now vanished. Norman’s story is an invitation to step back into the days we thought would never end.

From Punk squats to free parties and raves, an alternative history to Hackney’s anarchist communities making a lot of noise in Thatcher’s wastelands. Told through an in conversation with long term squatter and photographer Tom Hunter, Hackney born and bred, Bedlam Soundsystem founder Steve Bedlam, and DJ and founder of Stay Up forever records and drummer with punk band Hagar the Womb, Chris Liberator. The three speakers reveal the hidden Hackney folklore that built the culture that rose Hackney from the ashes and will take you on a journey from the anarcho-punk squat communities of Hackney in the 1980’s to the free parties and raves in the empty warehouses and factories abandoned in Thatcher’s deindustrialised East London of 1990 and onto Glastonbury and the world stage today.

Anna Barbauld lived in Stoke Newington Church Street from 1802 until her death in 1825 and you can see her tomb in Stoke Newington Churchyard. Her story is “part of the story of Protestant Dissent’s campaign for equal political rights”: William McCarthy, Anna Letitia Barbauld, Voice of the Enlightenment (2008). She was a poet; a teacher; an innovative writer of reading primers for very young children; a controversial (but esteemed) pamphleteer, pro-French Revolution (at first), anti-government, anti-war, anti-slave trade; a respected literary lady and a public intellectual. She was never afraid to speak her mind. The Victorians loved her – “to death” according to McCarthy, making of her “an icon of sentimental saintliness”. In the twentieth century she was largely forgotten. Now, it is time to look again at this woman with the “bright sharp eye” who critiqued misogyny, imperialism, and the woeful state of the world. Norma Clarke Emeritus Professor, Kingston University

It’s 1959 and the slim figure of May Scott travels the short distance from her flat at Arnold Circus to Hoxton Hall. A bunch of keys jangle at her hip as the school-bound children shout: “‘Hello May, are you going to May Scott’s?’!” From 1945 to 1975, Hoxton Hall was May Scott’s in the hearts and minds of many Hoxtonites. Her devotion and drive as Warden would propel the war-torn building into a fixture of the Hoxton landscape. It was a meeting place, a skills centre, an entertainment venue, a dance hall, a social work hub, a place of Quaker friendship, a outward-bound nexus, a community café with warm buns and hot sweet tea, and a space that offered warm welcome to the displaced refugees of the war and the immigrants that arrived with the collapse of Empire. May Scott presided over it all, with a quiet dignity and grace that rivalled her passion. This talk takes you through the highlights of her Wardenship, to explore the social, personal, and professional impact May had on all she welcomed there.

Entering Abney Park Cemetery from Stoke Newington Church Street, one of the most striking memorials you see is a massive, intricately carved, and now Grade II-listed, Celtic Cross. Created in Kilkenny by the Irish monumental sculptor Edward O’Shea, it memorialises two sons of Hackney’s first MP Sir Charles Reed. But this Celtic Cross is much more than just an example of the funerary art popularised by the late nineteenth-century Celtic Revival. O’Shea’s creation and Hackney’s Reed family combine to tell us a story of Ireland from the ninth to the nineteenth century, taking in the Plantation of Ulster, the first New Testament printed in old Irish script (Cló Gaelach), Dissenting Protestant missions to Ireland, and more. Breda Corish is a Hackney-based Irish historian who researches the long history of Ireland in London. irishlondonhistory@gmail.com.

The talk will trace the history of Central Hackney’s historic shopping street from Georgian times to the 1970s. There have been many changes but also continuity. Linen drapers evolved into department stores, Italian warehouses into supermarkets, tallow chandlers into electric showrooms, and calico glaziers into dry cleaners. But then coffee houses have become coffee shops, second hand clothes are rebranded vintage, and corn dealers’ stock is now health food. Looking above shopfronts reveals little has changed in the streetscape since the 1850s after road widening works and the railway took their toll on Georgian structures. The theatre of retail, however, has played on.

Youth clubs have been an important part of Hackney life for over a hundred years. Now, youth clubs are back on the national and local agenda. Suzannah Hall, Archive Heritage Project Manager at Hoxton Hall and Emma Warren, author of 'Up the Youth Club', a cultural history spanning the UK and NI, will be talking about the role of youth clubs in local life, past, present and future. These include public school settlement houses like Eton House in Hackney Wick or the role of youth clubs in local music culture. This talk will also discuss the ways that youth clubs show up in the archives of Hoxton Hall – or May's as it's still known to some – and the youth work that still goes on within the Hall.

The mosaic project creates large mosaics in and around Hackney with a diverse group of volunteers . Tessa Hunkin, who leads the Project, will tell the story of its origins as a 6 month initiative to celebrate the London Olympics in 2012, and reveal how it has developed over the last 14 years, despite the vicissitudes of scarce funding and threatened premises. She will highlight some of the lessons learned along the way as well as showing the rich variety of the work that the Project has created.

To celebrate 150 years since the completion of Allen's Estate and Gardens, Stoke Newington this talk aims to answer a question - Can a study of Allen’s Estate and Gardens demonstrate there was a Mannerist Revival in the Victorian era that has since been overlooked? The talk will be given by Darren Silk, Architectural Assistant and 3x great grand-nephew of Matthew Allen, the estate's designer and builder. Over the talk there will be an examination of the estate and gardens through the lens of Mannerism with a particular focus on new research regarding the gardens and its structures.

In 1917, during WW1, after much lobbying, the British government agreed to the raising of a specifically Jewish unit to fight in the Army against the Turks in Israel.It was a momentous moment in Jewish history as it would be only the second time since the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in 70 AD and the loss of Jewish statehood, that an independent Jewish fighting unit anywhere, had been formed, with its own banner and its own cap badge.The force, to be part of the Royal Fusiliers, were given the battalion numbers 38th to 42nd. The 38th was raised in the UK, and many recruits came from Tower Hamlets and Hackney .To show the flag, half of them were to march through the East End and City of London before embarking. This is the little known story of that day.

Roadkill explores the financial, social, ethical, and environmental impacts of our obsession with, and dependency on, cars. The panel will discuss the issues raised and the implications for boroughs like Hackney.

A moment of storytelling, creating a bridge between communities in Hackney of today with peoples of Harlem during the Renaissance. Weaving legacy and history into current cultural movements and eventual mores. A moment, together in community, straddling time. 2026 marks the 100th Anniversary of the Savoy Ballroom, Harlem, New York. More than just a ballroom, it was a community centre in the heart of Harlem amidst government sanctioned apartheid laws. The area surrounding the formidable building was a melting pot of culture. Much like Hackney in the 70s/80s, in which Angela was raised, who then, some years later, was mentored by dance artists of the Harlem Renaissance. Hackney is going through changes reminiscent of those in Harlem at that time. What can be learnt from the actors of the Harlem Renaissance. What stories cross timelines. Are we on the cusp of a Hackney Renaissance? This isn't a black and white movie. Can we view Hackney in technicolor?

The Drax family are unique as they still own the colonial sugar plantation in Barbados where their ancestors enslaved people for over 200 years. James Drax arrived on the uninhabited island in 1627 and was the first plantation owner in the British Empire to commercially produce sugar and made a fortune. In troubled times he sent wife Meliora and his children back to London where they settled in Hackney. He may have owned the famous but lost ‘Drakes’ garden of Hackney. James senior joined the family in the 1650s and remained in London until his death in 1661. His oldest son who inherited his baronetcy and Drax Hall was known as Sir James of Hackney. He married the well-to do Essex Lake.