Newington Green is an open space in North London between Islington and Hackney. It gives its name to the surrounding area, roughly bounded by Ball's Pond Road to the south, Petherton Road to the west, Green Lanes and Matthias Road to the north, and Boleyn Road to the east. The Green is in N16 and the area is covered by the N16, N1 and N5 postcodes. Newington Green Meeting House is situated near the park.
Origin The first record of the area is as "Neutone" in the Domesday Survey of 1086, when it still formed part of the demesne of St Paul's Cathedral. In the 13th century, Newton became Newington, whilst the prefix "Stoke" was added in the area to the north, distinguishing it from Newington Barrow or Newington Berners in Islington. Newington Barrow later became known as Highbury, after the manor house built on a hill. There was probably a medieval settlement, and the prevailing activity was agriculture, growing hay and food for the inhabitants of nearby London. By the 15th century, the area had become more prosperous and in 1445 there were a good number of Londoners living in the hamlet. The name Newington Green was first mentioned in 1480. By the 1490s it was fringed by cottages, homesteads and crofts on the three sides in Newington Barrow manor in Islington. The north side was divided between the manors of Stoke Newington and Brownswood in South Hornsey.
Royal visitors and prominent residents
In the 16th century, the area had connections with the court of King Henry VIII (). The king used a house on the south side of the Green as a base for hunting the wild bulls, stags and wild boars that roamed the surrounding forest.
In 1523, a resident of the north side of the Green, the future 6th Earl of Northumberland, Henry Percy (at that time a page of Cardinal Wolsey), became engaged to Anne Boleyn. Lord Percy had not sought permission either from his father or from the king, causing Wolsey to scold him and his father to forbid the marriage. Later, in 1536, the 6th earl found himself a member of the jury that convicted Anne of adultery. His home, Brook House, stood at the northeast corner of the square. It contained a central courtyard and was decorated with gilded and painted wainscotting. It was later demolished, renamed Bishop's Place, and divided into tenements for the poor.
In 1535, Henry VIII's chief minister (the equivalent of today's prime minister), Thomas Cromwell (in office 1534 to 1540), took up residence at Canonbury House to the south of the area, from where he organised the dissolution of the monasteries (1536–1541) and their transfer into Crown ownership. Other Canonbury Tower residents included: in the 16th century, John Dudley, Earl of Warwick and afterwards Duke of Northumberland, general, admiral, and politician in the 17th century, Francis Bacon, one of the fathers of the scientific method, at that time the Attorney General, and Sir Thomas Coventry, afterwards Lord Keeper of the Great Seal in the 18th century, Oliver Goldsmith, the writerHistory of Canonbury Tower , hosted by Canonbury Masonic Research Centre.
Samuel Pepys The 17th-century diarist Samuel Pepys was sent to Newington Green and Kingsland by his mother in order to benefit from the fresh air and open spaces of what was then a rural area.Claire Tomalin, Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self.
Mildmay
Newington Green's history is marked by several streets in the area taking their name from this period, such as King Henry's Walk, Boleyn Road (formerly Ann Boleyn's Walk), Wolsey Road and Queen Elizabeth's Walk. Many other thoroughfares are named after the Mildmay estate, including Mildmay Park, Mildmay Grove North and Mildmay Grove South.
By 1611, what became known as the Mildmay estate was owned by the Halliday, or Holliday, family.'Islington: Other estates', A History of the County of Middlesex: Volume 8, Islington and Stoke Newington Parishes, A P Baggs, Diane K Bolton, Patricia E C Croot, ed. T F T Baker, C R Elrington (London, 1985), see www.british-history.ac.uk In 1673, ownership passed to Henry Mildmay, second son of Sir Henry Mildmay, who in turn was grandson of Sir Walter Mildmay, via the female line of the Halliday family owing to a lack of male heirs.
Sir Walter Mildmay was the Chancellor of the Exchequer under Elizabeth I. He was one of the special commissioners in the trial of Mary, Queen of Scots, and founded Emmanuel College, Cambridge in 1584.
His grandson Sir Henry Mildmay served as MP and was Master of the Jewel House for Charles I. Henry was critical of the king's religious policies, supported Parliament during the civil wars and attended the king's trial. After the Restoration Henry was arrested for his part in the regicide, but granted leniency because he had refused to sign the king's death warrant. Instead of the death penalty he was sent to the Tower of London, stripped of his knighthood and his estates and sentenced to life imprisonment.
Mildmay was the base for a very influential missionary organisation founded by the Reverend William Pennefather, after he became vicar at St Jude's, Mildmay (now St Jude & St Paul's) in 1864."Islington: Undenominational missions", in A History of the County of Middlesex: Volume 8, Islington and Stoke Newington Parishes, A P Baggs, Diane K Bolton, Patricia E C Croot, ed. T F T Baker, C R Elrington (London, 1985), see www.british-history.ac.uk The organisation trained deaconesses for helping the poor, ultimately training 200 at any one time and serving 20 missions throughout the UK, of which 12 were in London. In 1866, inspired by the cholera epidemic of 1866, a nursing branch was started that supported the Mildmay cottage hospital and from 1874 a medical mission in Bethnal Green. In 1869, the organisation had a new conference centre built on land south of Newington Green that could accommodate 2,500-3,000 people. From 1885 nurses lived in numbers 9 and 10, Newington Green and a training home was opened at The Willows, near Clissold Park. Mildmay Mission Hospital was founded in 1892. It was absorbed into the National Health Service (NHS) in 1948, and in the 1980s began pioneering work into the treatment of patients with HIV/AIDS, which it continues. In February 2024, it was announced that the North London line and West London line of the London Overground were to be renamed the "Mildmay line" after the hospital.
Mildmay Park, located on the street of the same name, was a station on the North London Railway. Opened in 1880, it closed in 1934. The station building was demolished in 1987, but remnants of the platforms can still be seen at track level.
The Mildmay Club, formerly the Mildmay Radical Club, is a working men's club and member of the Club and Institute Union. It was founded in 1888 and is located at 33-34 Newington Green. The prominent building, which was completed in 1905, hosts community events and an original snooker hall, being one of the largest such clubs in London.
Nonconformists and the Dissenting Academies The area became the home of English Dissenters during the 17th century. Following the religious upheavals after the Restoration, some Protestants chose to remain in England and maintain their faith openly, but they had to live with the restrictions the state placed upon them. They moved to places tolerant of them; often they set up educational establishments, known in general as dissenting academies, which were intellectually and morally more rigorous than the universities.Thorncroft p. 5. One such place was Newington Green, then still an agricultural village, but conveniently near London.Allardyce, pp. 22–23.) Oliver Cromwell's family had links there: his great-granddaughter Mary was born at the Green on 11 April 1691.
A critical mass of "dissident intellectuals, pedagogues with reforming ideas and Dissenters" and "the well-to-do edge of radical Protestantism" clustered around Newington Green, and other villages nearby such as Stoke Newington and Hackney."Spaces of Dissent and the Public Sphere" by Ana M. Acosta inEighteenth-Century Life 2003 27(1):1–27; Not all of these free-thinkers were Unitarians: other notables include the Quaker physician John Coakley Lettsome and the Anglican pacifist Vicesimus Knox.
One such academy was set up on north of the Green, run by Charles Morton. One of the academy's students was Daniel Defoe, the writer, journalist and spy famous for his novel Robinson Crusoe. Another pupil was the controversial poet Samuel Wesley, father of John Wesley, the great religious leader. A later schoolmaster was the Rev. James Burgh, author of The Dignity of Human Nature and Thoughts on Education, who opened his Dissenting Academy on the green in 1750 and sent his pupils to the church there.
Unitarian Church, Price and Wollstonecraft
In 1708, the Newington Green Unitarian Church (NGUC) was built on the north, Hackney side of the Green. That congregation continues today as New Unity. The minister whose name is still remembered centuries later is Dr Richard Price, a libertarian and republican who cemented the village's "reputation as a centre for radical thinkers and social reformers".Allardyce, p. 18. He arrived in 1758 with his wife Sarah, and took up residence in No. 54 the Green, in the middle of a terrace even then a hundred years old (The building still survives as London's oldest brick terrace, dated 1658). Many important politicians, thinkers, reformers, and writers visited him at Newington Green, including Founding Fathers of the United States, British politicians such as Lord Lyttleton, the Earl of Shelburne, Earl Stanhope (known as "Citizen Stanhope"), and even the Prime Minister William Pitt; philosophers David Hume and Adam Smith; agitators such as prison reformer John Howard, gadfly John Horne Tooke and husband and wife John and Ann Jebb. Price was fortunate in forming close friendships among his neighbours and congregants. One was Thomas Rogers, father of poet and banker Samuel Rogers, a merchant turned banker who had married into a long-established Dissenting family and lived at No. 56 the Green. p. 15. Another was the Rev. James Burgh, author of The Dignity of Human Nature and Thoughts on Education, who opened his Dissenting Academy on the green in 1750 and sent his pupils to Price's sermons.Gordon, p. 42. Price, Rogers, and Burgh formed a dining club, eating at each other's houses in rotation.Allardyce, p. 23. When Joseph Priestley's support of dissent led to the riots named after him, he fled Birmingham and headed for the sanctuary of Newington Green, where Rogers took him in.
One of the most important residents of the Green was the early feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, who moved her fledgling school for girls from Islington to Newington Green in 1784.Gordon, p. 40. It was Mrs Burgh, widow of the educationalist, who used her influence to find the young schoolmistress a house to rent and 20 students to fill it. The flavour of the village and the approach of these Rational Dissenters appealed to Wollstonecraft: they were hard-working, humane, critical but uncynical, and respectful towards women. p. 51. The ideas Wollstonecraft ingested from the sermons at NGUC pushed her towards a political awakening.Gordon, p. 51 passim. A couple of years after she left Newington Green, these seeds germinated into A Vindication of the Rights of Men, a response to Burke's denunciation of the French Revolution and attack on Price. In 1792, she published the work for which she is best remembered, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, in the spirit of rationalism extending Price's arguments about equality to women.Tomalin, p. 61. Newington Green had made its mark on Mary, and through this founding work of feminist philosophy, on the world. A Sculpture for Mary Wollstonecraft was unveiled in Newington Green on 10 November 2020.
The New River