Abney Park Cemetery - Educational Establishments

Educational Establishments

Besides its religious associations, Abney Park has a strong educational pedigree. For example, its prominent director in the mid-to-late Victorian era, Charles Reed, was also the Chairman of the London School Board and Hackney's first MP. In fact, this part of north London, particularly Newington Green, had a long history of innovative education for boys and young men, known as dissenting academies.

Abney House was the first premises in England to be used exclusively as a Wesleyan training college, from c. 1838. This followed use of temporary, shared facilities in Hackney, and prior to the building of their own spacious colleges and grounds, one in the north of England, and a second at Richmond Hill, to which the college at Abney Park moved in 1843. Abney House was then demolished. The governorship of the seminary was held by Rev. John Farrar, Secretary of the Methodist Conference on fourteen occasions and twice its elected President.

Next to Abney House on Church Street was Fleetwood House, used as the base for Newington Academy for Girls, which was founded in 1824 by, among others, the Quaker scientist and abolitionist William Allen and run in a most enlightened and imaginative way by Susanna Corder, who later emigrated for a while to Boston and emerged as a talented biographer. It lost exclusive use of attractive grounds in the eastern part of Abney Park on formation of the cemetery, leaving only the school house and a small garden for the private use of the students. However, they were welcome to use the new cemetery's educational arboretum and this, along with Abney Park as a whole, was rarely shared with many others in the early years of the new cemetery, except at weekends. The school's innovative approach included transport arrangements; it commissioned the first school bus in the world.