Haggerston
Haggerston is a place in the London Borough of Hackney. It is bounded by Hackney Road on the south, Kingsland Road on the west, Middleton Road on the north with London Fields and Broadway Market on the east. In the 1990s a number of the area's more rundown housing estates were refurbished and some disused public buildings were privately converted as gated communities.
Haggerston
Origin
Haggerston, is first recorded in the Domesday Book as Hergotestane, possibly of Viking origin, as an outlying hamlet of Shoreditch. By Rocque's 1745 map of Hackney, the village is shown as Agostone,[1] by the 19th century it had become a part of the urban sprawl with streets of workers' cottages, and factories lining the canal.
Today
The proximity to Hoxton and Shoreditch has made the area popular with students, media and artworld types as other areas became more expensive. In recent years, as escalating property prices have driven commercial art galleries further into East London, Haggerston has begun to be described as 'the New Hoxton' or 'Nosho'- it could be considered as extending the eastern Hoxton boundary to Cambridge Heath Road.
A shortage of secondary school places has made the area less attractive to families but this is likely to change with the building of a City Academy on Laburnum Street which runs between Kingsland and Queensbridge Road.
Many Vietnamese, Cambodian and Laotian people have formed communities in Haggerston and nearby Shoreditch. Outside the area, the most visible sign of this is the profusion of Southeast Asian restaurants on nearby Kingsland Road in Shoreditch and on Mare Street in Hackney. There is also a notable Russian community focused on bars and cafés along Kingsland Road.
Amenities
Besides the Regents Canal, Haggerston Park, on the site of a demolished gasworks on Hackney Road, provides much-needed open space in the area. It is also the home of the Hackney City Farm.
Haggerston Pool, was closed in 2000, with an uncertain future. An active campaign to save the pool resulted in (Feb 2006) the council commissioning a report[2] into options for its re-opening. The pool's future remains undecided, but looks brighter than it has done for some time.
Haggerston Girls School is a Grade II listed building, designed by modernist architect Erno Goldfinger, in 1964-5.
The Clowns Gallery and Museum is a unique museum, founded in 1960, to house a display of pictures and artefacts relating to clowning and its history from earliest times. Now it has expanded to include props, costumes and a plethora of clown related items plus a literary Archive. It houses a collection of painted eggs that record the facial make up of individual clowns, thus being the primary registry of the designs in Britain. It is now housed in the All Saints Centre, in Haggerston Road.
References and notes
- ^ 'The northern suburbs: Haggerston and Hackney', Old and New London: Volume 5 (1878), pp. 505-24 accessed: 06 December 2006
- ^ Pool Campaign newsletter, summarising options for renewal accessed: 06 December 2006
Notable residents
- Edmund Halley, astronomer, was born here in 1656.
- Iain Sinclair, writer
Trivia
- The London Natural History Society began in 1858 as the Haggerston Entomological Society, whose members met in a pub, smoked clay pipes and, when they could afford, bought natural history books.
- In 1976, The Prince's Trust was founded, and one of its first grants was to a young woman to run a social centre for the Haggerston Housing Estate.
Education
- For details of education in Haggerston see the Hackney article
Transport
Nearest places
Railway Stations
- Cambridge Heath railway station
- Haggerston railway station (opens June 2010)
Walking and cycling
The Regents Canal towpath is easily accessible to pedestrians and cyclists. Travelling east, provides access to Victoria Park, and to the west, Islington.
External links
- Haggerston Community Centre
- Opening Haggerston Pool 1904
- Hackney City Farm
- The Clowns' Gallery, Museum and Archive
- London Natural History Society website "one of the largest societies of its kind anywhere in the world"
- Terrence Mahoney's Wartime memories of Haggerston
