Bishop Wood Almshouses

Just a hop, skip and a jump from my flat are the five beautiful Bishop Wood almshouses, built in 1665.  You can still see a few almshouses in the area -- the Geffrye Museum on Kingsland Road was once almshouses, and the almshouses on Balls Pond Road are now used as sheltered accommodation.  That I know of, there's also almshouses in Stoke Newington, on Northwold Road, and Goldsmith's Row, near London Fields.

The East End is a palimpsest of its past, but I have to say I find these relics of lost centuries quietly reassuring.  Just further down Lower Clapton Road, on Linscott Road, for instance, is the portico of what used to be the London Orphan Asylum, built in the early 1800s.  I remember walking past it in some kind of strange, discombobulated state the day after 9/11 and seeing it for what I'm pretty certain was the first time, the words "Everything Is Going To Be Alright" written across it in white neon lettering, part of an installation by Turner Prize-nominated artist Martin Creed, Work no 203.  Anyway, it's now the City Learning Centre, and while Creed's installation has gone the portico is still there.

It were all fields round here once...  It's fascinating to discover quite how much Hackney's changed.  In the 17th century, Samuel Pepys boarded out in what was then the hamlet of Kingsland.  Returning some years later, he mentions in his diary that "it puts me in mind of my boy's time when I used to shoot with my bow and arrow in these fields.  A very pretty place it is."  You would, of course, be hard pushed to find anything approaching a field in Dalston these days.  Writing in 1842, in his History And Antiquities Of The Parish Of Hackney, Dr William Robinson claimed "many noblemen, gentlemen, and others of the first rank and consequence, had their country seats in this village, on account of its pleasant and healthy situation."  Hackney became increasingly attractive to the gentry after the plague and the Great Fire; those folks who wanted to be close to the city but still enjoy something of the countryside, and could afford it, built large properties in Hackney -- like Sutton House, constructed by Henry VIII's Principal Secretary of State, Sir Ralph Sadleir.  What subsequently happened is a matter of public record, as the East End became London's industrial hub and the idyllic rural landscape Pepys had scampered through as a carefree Yoot was replaced by factories, "the stink industries", the area becoming home to the working poor.

Anyway, the Bishop Wood almshouses were founded under the provision of the will of Thomas Wood, the Hackney-born Bishop of Litchfield and Coventry.  They were restored in 1888 and again in 1930.  There's a tiny chapel you can see in the top picture that was added sometime in the 19th century and has 10 pews, for the resident widows.  In all my years living in Hackney, I've never once seen anyone coming or going from the almshouses.  I would, though, love to see inside the chapel.  Just walking past it again, I notice there's services held there everything Thursday morning at 10am.