You see the weird, the wacky and the outright outlandish while walking down Mare Street on a Saturday night nowadays but life in Hackney has never been normal. Here’s some surprising historical factoids about the borough that you may not know…
1. People used to swing pigs for sport
Fun was hard to come by in Hackney during the eighteenth century. Locals went so far as to develop a primitive form of horse racing, where they would dump the gee-gees into bogs and place bets on which would paddle across first.
This was nothing, however, compared to the sport of the day – pig-swinging. As farmers drove the porkers were driven to Smithfield meat market, passers-by would grease their tails and see who could swing them around their heads the fastest.
2. Drunken locals are written into a nursery rhyme
(Image: Mick Quinn, Geograph)
Everybody knows that the “bells of Shoreditch” in ‘Oranges and Lemons’ refers to St. Leonard’s Church, but there’s another unlikely Hackney hotspot which pops up in a nursery rhyme. Drunken punters of The Eagle pub are immortalised in the famous lines: “Up and down the City Road, in and out the Eagle, that’s the way the money goes, pop goes the weasel!”
3. A sex cult built a church in Clapton
The Church of the Good Shepherd near Clapton Common is a building with a peculiar history. It was built by the Agapemonites, a religious sex cult which was mainly made up of wealthy unmarried women. Its founder, Henry James Prince, declared himself to be immortal. After he died in 1899, his replacement John Hugh Smyth-Pigott immediately claimed to be Jesus Christ.
The group also had some, let’s say, ‘unorthodox’ views on marriage. Each leader enjoyed up to eight wives at any one time in strictly ‘spiritual’ relationships, of course.
4. Football matches are played on top of bomb rubble
(Image: Alan Denney, Flickr)
All the debris caused by the Blitz’s devastation had to be moved once the rebuilding process began. Rubble from across the capital was buried beneath the Hackney Marshes. This had the effect of draining the bogs, allowing for wide expanse of grass pitches to grow and the thousands of amateur football matches that take place there all year round.
5. A mysterious beast roams free on Hackney Marshes
In 1981, four boys out on a walk came across a trail of bear-like footprints. They plodded on, intrigued, until they came across a giant hairy figure, which reared on its hind legs, growled and scared them off. Police officers arrived on the scene the next day, accompanied by army marksmen and a helicopter, but they could only find more convincing footprints.
Thirty-four years on and the beast of Hackney Marshes has still not been captured.
6. Taxi drivers carried bales of hay
(Image: James Barrett, Flickr)
We all know ‘Hackney carriages’ take their name from the borough but have you ever heard of black cabs having to carry a bale of hay by law? This comes from the days when taxis were horse-drawn. The 1831 London Hackney Carriage Act made it an offence for drivers to feed their horse unless it was from a bag of corn or with hay from their hands, effectively meaning that many drivers had to carry hay with them at all time.
The law was only repealed in 1976, long after the capital’s streets were cleared of horse muck, but many cabbies still carry a bale in the boot out of tradition.
(Featured Image: Delete, Flickr)
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