History
The Hackney Brook flowed through the south westerly end of Blackstock Road from its source in Holloway before emptying into the River Lea at Hackney Wick. The book The Ground Water Diaries by Tim Bradford states that the 'Bank of Friendship' pub is so named because the people of Highbury used to wave at the folk of Stoke Newington across the river.
Blackstock Road's original name was Boarded River Lane when it was still a dirt track.
The river that used to run into where Blackstock Road sits now originated near Newington Green, cutting across Highbury Vale, over where Wilberforce Road, Queen's Drive and Finsbury Park Road now are. On the river in the 18th century was a renowned hostelry known as the Eel Pie House, serving pies with eels that had been fished out of the river. The pie houses' location is thought to have been located on the spot where 57 Wilberforce Road now stands (according to the Encyclopedia of London).
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“Every generation rewrites the past. In easy times history is more or less of an ornamental art, but in times of danger we are driven to the written record by a pressing need to find answers to the riddles of today.... In times of change and danger when there is a quicksand of fear under men’s reasoning, a sense of continuity with generations gone before can stretch like a lifeline across the scary present and get us past that idiot delusion of the exceptional Now that blocks good thinking.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)
“The history of the past is but one long struggle upward to equality.”
—Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902)
“Certainly there is not the fight recorded in Concord history, at least, if in the history of America, that will bear a moment’s comparison with this, whether for the numbers engaged in it, or for the patriotism and heroism displayed.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)