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About Hackney: A vibrant and culturally diverse place to live
Until 1965, what we now know as the London Borough of Hackney was three separate metropolitan boroughs - Shoreditch, Stoke Newington and Hackney. Each had distinct histories stretching back to the Middle Ages, but common themes link the three areas: urbanisation, industrial innovation, and ethnic diversity.

Hackney was first recorded in 1198, Shoreditch in 1148, and Stoke Newington in 1274. For 400 years after these dates all three were farming communities in the Middlesex countryside. Each was a parish, centred on a parish church. These survive today as Old St Mary's, Stoke Newington; St Leonard's, Shoreditch (rebuilt in 1740); and St Augustine's Tower in Mare Street, which is the only remains of Hackney's medieval church. The large parish of Hackney contained several other hamlets, such as Homerton, Clapton, Dalston and Shacklewell which still survive as districts in today's Borough.

Hackney's community has always been one of which people of diverse ethnic origin and different political and religious beliefs have been part. In the 17th and 18th centuries, Stoke Newington and Hackney were centres of nonconformist worship and radical politics. People from many parts of Europe came to work in the furniture industry in Shoreditch in the 19th century. Jewish people have been living in Hackney since 1684. The Afro-caribbean community developed fully from the 1950s, but there has been a Black presence in Hackney since at least 1630. Similarly, people from the Indian subcontinent came to Hackney in numbers only after the Second World War, but Asian nurses of British children, visiting Britain with their employers, had been staying in Hackney from 1900. Today Hackney people from Africa and the West Indies, Turkey, Cyprus and the Indian subcontinent contribute to the rich cultural diversity of the London Borough of Hackney.

Taken from the Hackney council website www.hackney.gov.uk

About Stoke Newington
Tucked away in the northwest corner of Hackney, Stoke Newington is a community with a long and varied history of non-conformism and bohemianism. Being a magnet for all manner of refusnik, Stoke Newington has long been a refuge for radicals and dissenters, attracting people from every rung of the social ladder.

Today, this 'frayed at the edges' community continues to reflect its interesting and mixed history, with well to do thespians and city workers sharing the narrow streets with the original poorer inhabitants and immigrant communities. In short, the area is rapidly becoming gentrified, as can be seen from a glance at Stoke Newington Church Street with its pubs, cafes and restaurants serving menus from Thailand, India, the Pacific Rim, China, France, Italy, Turkey and Spain, and the range of boutiques, delis, and specialist, expensive designer outlets.

The 'Church Street effect' is moving outward and the middle classes are moving in, attracted by Stoke Newington's proximity to the financial district and the W1 and its 'community' atmosphere. They are snapping up properties in the increasing numbers of new apartment developments, and the rocketing house and flat prices demonstrate Stoke Newington's popularity. Meanwhile, much of the area remains a relatively poor, typically inner-city neighbourhood.

Food: The Turkish influence
If you are travelling by bus down the Kingsland Road you can catch the 67, 76, 149 or 243 - all of which go to Old Street, Shoreditch or Liverpool Street Station. Starting from the Yucutan (a huge Irish pub with many TV screens showing live football matches constantly) one can't help but feel immediately the massive Turkish influence on the area. Opposite the Yucutan pub is Costcutters (or Dogin Gida Bazaar, sometimes affectionately called 'The Dodgy Geezer'), a Turkish grocery store open 24 hours a day.

A bit further down on the right hand side is the Aziziye Halal Restaurant situated in and below the white-marbled Aziziye Mosque. Turkish, Kurdish, Bangladeshi, Nigerian and British all come to the Aziziye to eat the reasonably priced Turkish grub. From mercîmek çorbasi (lentil soup) to hellîm börek (pasty filled with feta cheese and parsley) for starters, to main dishes such as the ubiquitous Îskender kebap (Adama kebab bedded on a special home-made bread with tomato sauce, yoghurt, parsley and butter on top).

It's delicious stuff and won't hit you too hard in the pocket . Walking a little further down Kingsland Road, you pass more and more Turkish restaurants, some of which advertise their fare completely in the Turkish language - Turkish shop signs, Turkish menus - and this total absence of the English language somehow authenticates these places to the point of extreme exoticism. This is the real deal; Turkish food, made by Turkish people, explicitly for its own Turkish community.

In fact, the London Borough of Hackney is said to house a 50,000-strong Turkish community with a further 250,000 spread throughout the rest of London. Although Hackney has had a Turkish community for a number of years now, it wasn't until the problems in the Middle East erupted in the early 1990s that Dalston's Turkish and Kurdish population really 'exploded' with many persecuted Kurds arriving in Britain seeking political asylum. Also, many Turks had been working away in the Middle East earning, in the main, a good living. When the troubles began however, they fled back home to Turkey, only to find it hard to sustain the standard of living to which they had become accustomed.

And so they moved again; this time to destinations throughout Europe, most notably to Berlin and Hamburg in Germany and of course, to London. And what better way then for a displaced people to feel 'at home', as it closes its collective eyes for a minute to breathe in those familiar smells of the Turkish kitchen. There's something remarkably touching about eating the same food in exile as that which was probably served up by many mothers back home, years ago, possibly in happier times.

Music

The Efe - Express Ticaret shop, run by the warmly-intelligent and laid-back proprietor, Turgay Haqlil, sells nothing but Turkish music. Row upon row of cassettes and CDs line the walls inside the store. From older men with bushy moustaches who, one imagines, play a more traditional kind of music, to the younger generation, all outrageously contorted in a variety of coquettish poses, this gallery of Turkish faces beams down relentlessly in a collective hair-sprayed pose straight out of the 1980s. This is not to demean the music, though. Indeed, such luminaries as Ibrahim Tallises and the mega-star, Tarkan, are known and respected throughout much of the world.

Football

In the same way that most of Britain's social activity is centred around the pub, Turkish men while away many hours in any number of small cafés and 'members only' (men only) clubs spread throughout the borough. Often these clubs will be affiliated to a football club back home, such as FC Fenerbahce, FC Galatasaray and FC Besiktas, and as you walk by and peer in you'll most likely see men smoking cigarettes, sat around tables sipping tea or coffee from little glasses, playing cards. Often a solitary TV in the corner will show Turkish programmes; soap operas, news bulletins and of course, football matches. All in all these places must hold a peculiarly Turkish appeal, being in the main thoroughly spartan and very 'male'.

Continuing the walk down Kingsland Road, you pass various chemists, a dentist's surgery, a taxi car service, a small solicitor's office, a primary school with new Adidas-sponsored basket ball hoops, Turkish laundry services, flower shops and photographic studios where they'll re-touch your features to take years off what's evidently been a hard life so far. You see, Dalston's poor but it's somehow not desperate. True, it's a bit scruffy, a bit tatty in places, and if you sniff the air hard enough you'll make out the faint tang of criminality (the odd burnt-out shell of a car off a side road which the council refuse to remove). But trouble begets trouble, and if you keep your nose clean and be 'aware', you'll be fine... touch wood. Dalston is an incredible mix of races, and on the surface at least, it really seems to work.

The African influence
Go past the marvellous little one-screen Rio cinema on your right and almost imperceptibly the vibe gets less Turkish and more African and Afro-Carribean. The Akwaaba supermarket, 'a Carribean Food Shop in Association with the living Gospel International Ministry' according to the shop front, is a pokey wee store selling corn maize, smoked fish heads, maize husks, gari flour, cassava, puna yams, ken key made from corn - a bit like dumplings, bottles of Zomi oil from palm trees, bags of stinking dried shrimps, hot pepper sauce made from the African shietu pepper, and great hunks of African soap wrapped in paper. Most of these products are imported from Ghana.

Ridley Road Market

Ridley Road market is a truly great place to walk around. To meander in and out of its stalls and to absorb the noise and the vibe, well... it's a joy; something akin to seeing one's notion of the very essence of life itself made real before your eyes. And this is not mere hyperbole; it bustles, it jostles, it smells, it's noisy, it tests your patience, it tires you out, it's completely fascinating, at turns its comic and then somehow seems poignant. In short, it's alive. It goes without saying that nobody knows 'what life is', but perhaps to liken life to the market place, the market square, is not such a crass metaphor.

And Ridley Road market is a damn fine example. The mixture of races rubbing shoulders with each other is incredible: Indian, Chinese, Jamaican, old time Londoners (ie, pre-yuppy), Turkish, African - they're all here, buying provisions, chatting away in all manner of languages and dialects. And the food on sale is amazing: dates, custard apples, big fat avocados, pomegranites, sharon fruit, mangos, pumpkins, sweet potatoes, puna yams, bags of garlic, thousands of chillis, a whole array of scary blackened smoked fish heads, and even rolls of dried, cured cow skin. One stall sells nothing but fresh eggs of every grade imaginable and the various fishmongers sell between them fresh tuna, coley fillets, live crabs, squid, octopus, salmon, cod, tilapia, skate, red snappers and psychadelic parrot fish. Often reggae sounds blasting out of somebody's portable stereo will provide the soundtrack to your market experience; that and the continual patter from the market traders - 'Come on, now. Have a look!', 'Here we go! Ten lemons, fifty. Fifty pence for yer lemons'.

It's not just food that's on sale, but loads of stalls sell cheap clothes; little coloured ragga-muffin string vests for all young Bob Marley juniors, cheap denim, t-shirts and bargain-priced trainers. There are also stalls selling Indian, African and Turkish fabrics (one stall is the beautifully named 'Fabrik Afrique'). Then you have pots and pans, rolls of wallpaper and imported Jamaican health remedies. There is even a stall selling bibles and religious tapes and videos. Above the stall holder is the sign that reads:

Is your life blessed or cursed? Let God change your curse into a blessing. God will make a way when there seems to be no way.

It would be all too predictable and patronizing for the occasional visitor to imbue the scene and those folk before him with a sense of exoticism born out of his own fancy, made possible by the fact that he's just visiting, and can leave. After all, those that work the stalls every day and those that always shop the markets probably know what it's like to struggle a bit for money (Dalston's Ridley Road market is most definitely not the King's Road2). The folk you find down the market (and in Dalston in general) probably know what it's like to have a hard life, to be out of work at times, to know a thing or two about racial discrimination; whose lives might well be genuinely hard. But that's not to say they're happy or unhappy; who can tell that?

But you take as you find, speak of what you see, and after many years of walking down Kingsland Road, ending up at Ridley Road market, one can never tire of the amazing vibe of the place, its myriad faces and languages all competing with the sound of the market traders shouting back at you, selling they're bits and bobs, rubbing they're hands together to get the warmth back in, sipping hot steaming cups of tea. Ridley Road market, and by extension, Dalston itself, is a great place; busy, colourful, unpretentious, noisy, real and alive. If you can see beyond its scruffiness, you might well find yourself falling hopelessly in love with the place.