Rectory Road, the principal railway station, lies 4.3 miles (6.9 km) northeast of Charing Cross.

Newington was first recorded in the 1200s and was traditionally one of four Hackney hamlets (together with Dalston, Kingsland and Shacklewell) which were together rated as having, for taxation purposes, the same number of houses as the main 'Hackney Village'.

[1] The increasing population of the area saw it gain a chapel of ease in 1814, the church of St. James, designed by Robert Smirke in the Greek Doric style.

The German Army airship LZ 38 had begun the first assault on the capital by a foreign power since 1066.

Jack ‘the Hat’ McVitie was killed at Evering Road by gangsters Ronnie and Reggie Kray.

Hackney was an administrative unit with consistent boundaries from the early Middle Ages to the creation of the larger modern borough in 1965.

Under the London Government Act 1899, Hackney became a Metropolitan Borough, with the same boundaries as the pre-existing Civil Parish, with minor rationalisations in places to reflect modern street patterns rather than historic field boundaries and other features.

Despite these uses, it has never been an administrative unit in its own right, so lacks formal definition, except in that it has always taken Hackney's western boundary, the originally Roman A10 (in this area named Stoke Newington Road and Stoke Newington High Street - originally High Street, until a name change in 1937[11]) as its own western boundary.