Clapton Square

Its Conservation Area designated in 1969 – extended in 1991 and 2000 – takes in a larger green space separated by a stretch of open road: St John's Gardens.

Many buildings around the square are five-storey houses with leaded fanlights, pilasters and upper cornices (white ledges) and porticos.

[1] It has central gardens containing a finely restored drinking fountain donated to Hackney residents by Howard Morley in 1894.

Russian revolutionary Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (Lenin) visited, around 1905, his friend Theodore Rothstein who resided in the square.

The east side of the square was destroyed in the London Blitz of World War II and rebuilt, to emulate as it was, at the start of the next century.

Resident and eminent scientist Joseph Priestley, a fellow of the Royal Society wrote: On the whole I spent my life more happily at Hackney than I had ever done beforeHe lived at the house (demolished in 1880) on the corner of the Passage and Lower Clapton Road, in the 1790s.

In a cottage behind Priestley's house, in the closing years of the 18th century, lived a Huguenot widow, Louisa Perina Courtauld, a designer of gold plate who married a silversmith.

The continuous bypass of the Lower Clapton Road which, open, forms the south side of the square (a hundred metres east turning into Mare Street, a pedestrianised shopping precinct leading to the nearest station) makes the greens, separate elongated and diversely of amenity value — to mid-rise apartments, Victorian villas, and grand classical homes on the north side of Hackney Central as well as Lower Clapton many of which have been subdivided into luxurious apartments.

Daniel Defoe, who lived in the border-village of Stoke Newington, described Hackney in the 1720s as comprising "twelve hamlets" and "having so many rich citizens that it contained nearly a hundred coaches".