Felix is a frequent commenter on this blog and an impressive excavator of local history facts. He's also a reader of Diamond Geezer, Guido Fawkes and our very own blogging councillor Luke Akehurst who Felix reckons has the makings of an MP (an observation that might be interpreted in several ways). I've got loads of links and stories from Felix, which I'll make use of at later dates. For now, here's his short history of his life in our borough and an appreciation of its charms.
"My first experience of Hackney was as a Chelmsford schoolboy, travelling with friends from Broad Street to Willesden in search of trains or on Red Rover bus trips. Certainly I caught the former 178 from Clapton Pond to Maryland c.1970, a double decker which scraped under the Great Eastern main Line in Carpenters Road.I lived in Sharon Garden, Victoria Park in 1976/7 in a room owned by a shrewd Italian who worked at Bryant and May in Bow (now the Bow Quarter) My late father gave him a social history lesson about the Match Girls's strike. Shopping then was done religiously at the tiny LCS in Well Street, or the vanished Baltic Stores in Hackney Road, which served an earlier wave of Lithuanian immigrants (a Mr Stanley Vale ran a similar Victorian-style grocers in the now Victoria Park village) owned, I think, by a Mr Juras. The shop was demolished a few years ago. Their church was and still is round the corner in the Oval, home of the Socialist Worker press.
I have lived in Clapton since the end of 2002, married here and our son was born in the borough. For nearly a year I have been a house dad, but the time has come to return to the coal face. It has been a wonderful time, allowing me to walk every street in the borough and visit every playground within three miles. Yes, they are all different. I must report that Waltham Forest has superior facilities to Hackney's.
Ups...Lots of small shops, absence of huge supermarket (how on earth did basically an out of town store get planning permission in the middle of Hackney, producing massive vehicle flows and congestion?); vibrant and diverse community; proximity to open countryside and towpaths; inceasingly well-run council; it combines the advantages of urban and rural living. (e.g. cows and wildlife and 24 hour buses/cafes/diversity etcetera).
Downs...Attractive houses being ruined by unsympathetic 'modernisation'."
More from Felix soon.
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