Gillian Lawrence wrote a piece about our collaboration with NANA and the Islington History & Architecture Group on her blog, Up Your Street. She has kindly allowed us to publish it here. We hope you enjoy.
Years ago there was a public toilet down Chatsworth Road on
the way to Chats Palace. Now it’s The Convenience, a scrubbed up and scrubbed
out homely café where NANAs
grandmas cook away plating up nourishing feasts, and in the evening a chef does Hanoi Nights.
That’s busy enough amidst the gleaming tiles and inventive
menu cards.
The Buildings Exploratory for seniors in Hackney and now
Islington has teamed up with NANAs so that seniors can come along, sit ,chat,
go for a guided walk, share information all about the history of Clapton and
have a nice cup of tea. People from our Hackney community get to meet and
learn. There are daughters of the Windrush generation, residents who have lived in their Hackney homes
since birth having managed to
escape the dreaded doodlebugs and rent-rise evictions, sons of labourers who
have travelled along the Thames living and working by the Lea, those who live in flats where the stench
from the Stratford tanneries in days of yore choked their mouths and followed
them on their way to work at Lesney’s.
We can’t talk fast enough to get our stories out and shared
whilst our facilitator eggs us on with grey photos gleaned from The Hackney
Archives.
The meet-ups are every fortnight at 10.30 am for a couple of
hours which leaves ample time to stroll along Chatsworth Road and see the old
kitchen utensils in a local vintage shop or smell the crepes from The Creperie.
Change is daily and that’s why it’s good to sit in The
Convenience and take a breather,
cherish what we know, and make each other laugh about how things were and
will be. And it’s good to come together from all sorts of backgrounds and
reinforce neighbourliness. That’s what it’s really all about.
Visit Gillian's blog, 'Up Your Street' here: http://ww.upyourstreet.wordpress.com/
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