Our history

At this time Newington Green was little more than a cluster of houses and London lay at a distance across green fields. This was a comfortable and pleasant place to live and the dissenters who lived here were well-off and influential – many were connected with the upper levels of Cromwell’s army and government.

Dissenters were those who rejected the Church of England. Because this implied a rejection of the monarchy they were not given full civil rights – they could not take civil office or attend university. They were also forbidden to meet to worship and had to do so secretly and in private. They therefore tended to settle in isolated places, with like-minded people. As dissenters’ rights improved in the late 17th and early 18th century it became possible to worship in public and the Meeting House was built to serve the now well-established Newington Green community.

Ministers of the church who disagreed with the tenets of Anglicanism were debarred from the clergy and consequently many found themselves unemployed. Some of these dissenters became Unitarians, which was one of a number of non-conformist sects. Non-conformists were debarred from attending the universities of Oxford or Cambridge – then the only universities in England and as a result, some dissenters set up their own academies offering a university-level education to people who, like themselves, dissented from the Anglican Church. These academies came to be known as ‘dissenting’ academies but what is so striking about them is that, except for a few exceptions, dissenting academies conformed largely to the academic norms of the period, adhering both to prevailing models of the curriculum and conventional modes of instruction. Whilst the people who founded them and who attended them may have been dissenters, the academies themselves were in most respects, ‘conformers’.

Newington Green was already a centre for non-conformists when Charles Morton opened his ‘Dissenting Academy’‘ on the North side of Newington Green in 1667. Morton’s academy was well respected as a seat of learning at which the level of instruction was on a par with that of the universities of the time. Morton’s Academy educated important figures such as Daniel Defoe, author of ‘Robinson Crusoe’ (1719), Moll Flanders (1722) and the currently topical ‘A Journal of the Plague year’ (1722), and Samuel Wesley, whose son, John Wesley, founded the Methodist movement.

These two ex-students wrote about the syllabus at Morton’s academy: Defoe wrote that the syllabus contained; “Latin but also Greek, Hebrew, Logic, Mathematics and Science” In other words, the subjects taught at university. According to Irene Parker, non-university subjects were also offered, including: “French, Italian, Geography, History”, to which the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB) has added ‘religion’. The ODNB considered Morton’s Academy as “probably the most impressive of the dissenting academies [prior to 1685], enrolling as many as fifty pupils at a time”. It even possessed “a bowling green for recreation”. Samuel Wesley recorded in his notes that experimental work was carried out at the academy using scientific instrument’, suggesting that not all teaching relied on textbooks. The ODNB records that lectures were given in English, not Latin. Defoe praised Morton for using his mother tongue. By changing the language of his lectures from Latin to English, Morton opened up the world of knowledge to scholars who had not been to a grammar school where they would have obtained a grounding in Classics. This linguistic shift not only gave access to University subjects to non-Latin speaking students, but in doing so, challenged the Anglican Church’s overall grip on university education.

Morton left Newington Green in 1685 and settled in New England – where he subsequently became vice-president of Harvard College – although the academy he founded continued to operate until 1706. Perhaps due to the reputation of the Academy he founded, other academies were attracted to the area. For a brief period, Thomas Rowe’s Academy occupied premises in Newington Green (1679-1683). It later moved to Ropemaker’s Alley in Moorfields where Isaac Watts joined as a student in 1690. Watts lived in Stoke Newington for most of his life, writing the hymns that made him famous, (such as “O God our Help in Ages Past”) and books of logic that were widely circulated. He was well-known as a writer of verse for children; Lewis Carol satirised Watts’ poem ‘Against idleness and Mischief’ in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

A third dissenting academy was set up in Newington Green in 1750 by the Reverend James Burgh, author of a book on education entitled ‘The Dignity of Human Nature and Thoughts on Education” (1754).

This book is full of advice on how to ‘improve’ children’s minds, for example, “All methods of education ought in general to be directed to the improvement of some good tendency or the correction of some wrong turn in the mind”.

Fortunately, Burgh preferred persuasion to coercion, believing that children were not naturally bad, as some educationalists of his period seemed to believe. His views on women’s education were somewhat at odds with those of Mary Wollstonecraft, whom his widow helped to find a house to rent on Newington Green for her girl’s school in 1784. He believed that Women should be educated for life at home, rather than for an active life outside the family.

Burgh became involved in the early 1760s with a group called the Honest Whigs, a club that met on alternate Thursday evenings in a coffeehouse. Other members of the group included Richard Price, minister of the Newington Green Unitarian Church and Unitarian supporter Joseph Priestley, who had been educated at a Dissenting Academy in Daventry, Northamptonshire.

For over 150 years – that is until the University of London, which accepted students from all religious backgrounds, was established in 1836 – dissenting Academies provided University level education to non-conformists, including Unitarians, around Newington Green.

On the 7th June, those protesting as part of the Black Lives Matter movement in Bristol pulled down and dumped the statue Edward Colston, a prolific slave trader, into their harbor. A moment which sparked a conversation on the legacy of British colonialism and how slavery is remembered, both in our education system and via the statues that many of us uncritically pass on a daily basis.

This is a debate which has many standpoints, such as those who see the removal of statues as doing nothing to address the racism that underpins them, to some who see no issue in their standing, and those who view the removal of statues as necessary to highlight and combat the racism that still exists in British society. For me these conversations are just as important as the physical removal of the statues that prompted them. We cannot allow the legacy of British slavery to go unnoticed in the mainstream any longer.

Personally it is has been significant to learn how Hackney, a borough I was born in, educated in and lived in, has interacted with its legacy of slavery. Growing up I was always taught the strong links Hackney has with social and political activism, for example the suffragist Mary Wollstonecraft . As well as the many notable people who have been laid to rest in Abney Park Cemetery (N16), significantly the abolitionist Rev. Thomas Burchell, who established schools and churches to aid slaves in the Caribbean, and Josiah Conder who helped found the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society and the world’s first Anti-Slavery Convention, held in London in 1840. In fact the cemetery has a route you can follow, visiting the final resting places of 14 abolitionists who lived and died in Hackney.

When looking at the multifaceted history of slavery and abolition in Hackney it is significant to understand how this complex relationship of opposing views coincided within the same  communities. For example, the Newington Green Unitarian Church, had a congregation of abolitionists and slave owners, which required Rev. Richard Price to circumnavigate between the occupations of some of his church members and his own absolutist views, such as the West India mercantile of the Vaughan’s and the Boddington’s.  The divisive communities of areas such as Newington Green can perhaps be accredited to the attraction the large houses and close proximity to the city had to the merchant and banking classes. So that, as Katie Donington outlines,