"I was born to use my eyes / Dream with the sun and skies..."

I went to a speaking and book signing by Iain Sinclair, author of Hackney: That Rose Red Empire last night at the Stoke Newington Bookshop. My first reaction was that my neighbors are, on the whole, utter eccentrics (to put it gently). Coming from a community back home that doesn’t concern itself with its own history, to be in a place where people get up on chairs to argue over the role of Stoke Newington in the borough of Hackney was, after being somewhat terrifying, really quite charming. There is a kind of belief that Stoke Newington is the last bastion of civilization in Hackney, which is shown in the ‘N’ of its postcode, rather than the ‘E’ that graces most of Hackney. In some kind of strange blend of geopolitics and spiritualism, people are very proud to be neighbors with Daniel Defoe, Joseph Conrad and Edgar Allen Poe (who was born it Boston, it must be pointed out) and will argue very passionately that, without Stoke Newington (or, grudgingly, Hackney), they could never have created the works that they did.

My second reaction was to notice how seamlessly the layers of history are interlaid, in Stoke Newington and, to a large extent, in London in general. On Church Street, a breath or two away from my house, the library itself is a First World War memorial, with an entire wall in the entryway devoted to listing the names of Stoke Newington residents who were killed in the war, along with a memorial book, listing the civilian casualties of the Blitz. Over the door leading to the library-proper is a sign that warns: “All Ye Who Pass In Quest Of Happy Hours, Behold The Price At Which Those Hours Were Bought”. Which might take the prize as most Depressing War Memorial Epitaph In Western Europe, but still has the effect, both through its urgency and its placement—directly over the door through which anyone desiring to have any dealings with the library—to physically involve visitors in the history it is commemorating.

Outside, you can still see the advertisement on the building across the way that proclaims that it was, once, the supplier of quality fountain pens to North London. The building itself is now a flower store and a vintage clothing store, but the walls carry that history, a visual memory of all the other customers who walked this street with errands to run and budgets over which to worry and children who would insist on putting their hands and noses on all the shop windows they could conceivably reach. As the vintage clothing store might imply, fashions change, but the people wearing them aren’t so different, underneath it all.

I made myself into an echo of all this by buying an appallingly tacky men’s shirt from the 1960’s—deep emerald green with some sort of modernist-pseudo-paisley pattern all over it—at the vintage shop last weekend. I adore it, not only for its absurd ability to be both hideous and ultra-cool at one and the same time, but because it carries a story with it. Whoever wore it before me no doubt thought that he was quite The Limit in fashion. I wonder if his father had watched the Library being built, or his mother took him for walks in Victoria Park as a child. Maybe he owned a fountain pen. So now the shirt becomes a part of my life and I, in turn, become a part of its. We are travelers together, each in our own ways, as complicated and comfortable in our own histories as Church Street itself.