a poet's Hackney

There's a lot of guff going around about some programme I missed on Channel 4, which apparently declared Hackney the worst place to live in Britain. I've seen several ether-arguments on the subject and indeed have refuted someone who seemed to be saying Clissold Park wasn't a crime zone (I know; Clissold Park is wonderful, and we all love it).

It's all got me thinking. Of course I love Hackney. Various of its wards were listed in Domesday; Stoke Newington flourished under Henry VIII and it is rather satisfying to send your children to a school named after a Tudor period businessman who was honoured by the king. Hackney is full of splendid Georgian houses, which mark its next big era of prosperity; in those days the rich merchants used it as a base for their country homes (rather as the Thrales did Streatham). I love looking in the windows of these houses; some of them have amazing extant period panelling in their tiny Georgian rooms.

Clissold Park itself is the estate of a Quaker businessman who got rich and built the house which still stands there for his family. He had two daughters. And I think it might have been he who ordered the creation of the New River, now partially underground and moribund, which we know as that green thing that runs along the deer bit.

St Augustine's Tower, which is the remains of the old parish church down in the Narrow Way, cheered my Saturday morning shopping trips for many years. And St John's Hackney is very beautiful, and houses the Hackney Singers.

It's hard not to love Shoreditch, just for having featured in our nursery rhymes - at least, its bells, which say "When I grow rich."

As for specific poetic associations, Stoke Newington is rich, rich, rich. Edgar Allen Poe was raised here as a schoolboy, by his foster father Mr Allen. He lived in the house where The Fox Reformed now is. That's exciting!

But far more exciting still is Daniel Defoe. His house stood on the corner of Church Street and what is now (of course) Defoe Road; it was torn down by the Victorians and the site is now, alas, occupied by Premier Cars, with whom I have had long-running feuds for being so completely useless. It seems incredible to me that those controllers are sitting in there all day, on the same site where Defoe wrote Robinson Crusoe and they don't care. I could almost imagine I feel his satirical presence wafting about me, as I argue the toss with them. His gravestone used to be on display in a glass case in the foyer of the library, but it isn't there now; maybe it's been moved inside? Or is it in that Hackney Museum down by Town Hall? Apparently there is a bit of wall along the east side of Oldfield Road which is apocryphally his.

Abel Boyer, in Political State, wrote of Defoe (in 1717): "The Beneficence of his Masters, and in particular the E[arl] of O[xford], enabled him to repair and beautify his Habitation at Newington, where he had set up his Forge of Politicks and Scandal, from which, for these Six Years past, he supplies Monthly, often Weekly, the Publishers in and about Pater-noster-Row."

Abney Park Cemetery houses a monument to Isaac Watts, another great heritage I think nobody knows about. A Dissenting preacher who lived in the 17-18th centuries, in other words, contemporaneous with Defoe, he wrote about 600 hymns, many of which I grew up singing. The one I really loved was Joy to the World!, whose wonderful lyric sums up the complete ineffable joy that the Christmas story is about. There's not enough of that around. He also wrote Oh God, Our Help in Ages Past. He was the friend/beneficiary of Sir Thomas Abney, whose great house stood where the cemetery is now, and the pillars of whose front gates are still there in Church Street. He lived in the house for many years; picture him striding along that early incarnation of Church Street (with the old St Mary's church, but not the new one), in his robes and his wig. Watts' hymns have an unsentimental grandeur and a liveliness - springing from his complete engagement with the Bible as a living artefact - which certainly predates the Victorian taste for sop, and which makes me love him.

Moving along, I was amazed, and saddened actually, to discover last year (reading Jon Stallworthy's excellent biography of him) that St Leonard's hospital - that rather nothing place where we get referred for physiotherapy and chiropody - is where Louis MacNeice died, of pneumonia. Hackney, of course, doesn't care about Louis MacNeice, but I do.

None of this has anything to do with what Channel Four was talking about. But, as people are saying, there are plenty of other places where the crime is just as bad. I feel it is something, and not something small, to walk down streets where you can still feel the presence of named people who lived through words, who helped the language to live even through your own mind, and to live among these beautiful buildings and parks left us by people who lived here, just like us, before. Autumn among the chestnut trees of Clissold, or the mist rolling along the willowy hilltops of Springfield, is still magical. I'd choose the evocative chiaroscuro of Hackney over, say, Tottenham or Peckham any day of the week.