Describing Clapton as approximating to E5 is useful, but informal and imperfect - postcode areas are not intended to define districts.

The Ancient Parish of Hackney split from Stepney in the Middle Ages and had consistent boundaries from that time on.

[4] In the east of this neighbourhood, terraced housing was demolished by Hackney Council and rebuilt in the 1970s, with a small shopping precinct around Gilpin Square, and is today mostly a low-rise estate.

The King visited the house in April 1535 and on 24 September 1535 he granted his "manor or principal messuage of Hackney" to Thomas Cromwell, his chief minister.

In July 1536, Ralph Sadleir[8] brought Mary I of England to the house to swear the Oath of Supremacy before her father, and Jane Seymour, the Queen.

The name of the house derives from its purchase by Fulke Greville, 1st Baron Brooke, in 1621 — which led to ownership by the family for over 200 years.

5.5 acres (0.02 km2) of Brooke House were purchased by the London County Council in 1944, and further bomb damage occurred that year.

The Agapemonites, who held decidedly unconventional views on marriage and the role of women, relocated to Upper Clapton from their spiritual community in Spaxton, Somerset, and had clearly prospered by this time.

The main doorways sport large carvings of angels and the four evangelists symbolised by a man, an eagle, a bull and a lion.

The two flanking weather vanes show a certain symbolic debt to William Blake's Jerusalem depicting, as they do, a fiery chariot and a sheaf of arrows (presumably of desire), while the main steeple is clearly surmounted by a spear.

[14] The cult had always been surrounded by scandal during its sojourn in Somerset and, after the move to Clapton, this degenerated into sheer farce.

The original leader, Henry James Prince, who claimed to be immortal, died in 1899 and was succeeded by the charming but philandering John Hugh Smyth-Pigott, who wasted no time before declaring himself as the Messiah.

Challenged by a jeering mob to prove his godhood by walking across Clapton Pond, Smyth-Pigott declined and retired to Somerset, where he was said to enjoy the favours of as many as seven "spiritual brides" a week.

It is, however, a faithful replica of an earlier building, the Great St Helen's Synagogue in the City of London, which was designed by John Davies in 1838.

Several highrise LPS constructions erected by the Council in the late 1960s and early 1970s were demolished in the 1990s to make way for lowrise Local Authority housing, e.g. the Clapton Park Estate.