Stoke Newington is today a district of Hackney after having been a borough in its own right until 1968. Stoke Newington literally means 'new town in the woods', a name referring back to the agricultural, forestry and aquiferous past of the district, a past that is still visible in the density of trees and parks the district boasts. 

 

Church Street forms the beating heart of 'Stokie' as it is fondly known by locals, a shopping street  with provincial charm you find hard to believe barely one hour on foot from the City. Daniel Defoe was born in the street, and Edgar Poe studied here around 1820; two Anglican churches, around which the historic village grew, are also located here as is the entrance to the district's two main green lungs. The street has plenty of shops, especially many secondhand shops, book stores, secondhand furniture dealers and cheap clothes retailers.

 

To the northwest, Clissold Park is a quintessential Anglo-Saxon urban park. Large neatly mowed lawns just waiting for football to played on them attract families from the surroundings every Sunday; an animal enclosure is home to a herd of deer and there is also an aviary. The park Mansion House has been converted into a gracious and welcoming cafe.

 

Duality is one of the distinctive features of the district, at once a paradise for families which like its comfortable lifestyle and peaceful (at least during the daytime) streets, and a rather 'bohemian bourgeois' festive Mecca once dusk falls, with many pubs and jazzy bars.

 

On Church Street itself, the Vortex was long an institution on the London night scene. This legendary jazz bar, today transferred further east to Dalston Street, has become a militant squat devoted to preserving the local lifestyle and evoking the sulphurous past of the district, a centre of extreme left agitation in the 1960s. Console yourself for this disappearance by patronising the nearby Stage B where the Sunday night jazz concerts have become a must.

 

Families will prefer a more traditional district pub, like the Fox Reformed, again on Church Street, which also proposes a more than decent wine list, or one of the trendy tearooms, such as the  Spence Bakery or the Petit Coin, for an Earl Grey and cinnamon-flavoured cakes. Church Street remains the district's backbone (it now boasts a Whole Foods proving its gentrification), but Stokie is more than just these streets: further east, Stoke Newington High Street is a good example of the area's multicutural vibrancy.