According to the American Unitarian theologian and preacher William Ellery Channing (1780 – 1842), the aim of Sunday School was to “awaken the soul of the pupil” (329) not to instruct them in the principles of their faith laid down in a catechism. He regarded children as “rational, moral, free beings” who were born with a conscience, and were able to make their own minds up when it came to moral decisions.

Among Newington Green’s radicals, Anna Barbauld remains in the shadow of the much better known Mary Wollstonecraft. However Barbauld’s radicalism was no less passionate and her many contributions to changing the world for the better deserve wider acknowledgement.

The recent controversy over the Mary Wollstonecraft memorial on Newington Green calls to mind another, less controversial, monument erected in London to commemorate a progressively minded woman but, instead of depicting her, the monument featured a partly unclothed fictional woman. The Shepherdess, also known as The Goatherd’s Daughter by Charles Leonard Hartwell was unveiled in 1929 and now stands in Regents Park.

This Christmas I was gifted the book Bloody Brilliant Women authored by Cathy Newman with the goal of giving a voice to ‘the pioneers, revolutionaries and geniuses your history teacher forgot to mention.’ In the first chapter Newman mentions, in a brief few lines, Henrietta ‘Nettie’ Adler and her role as a school board manager and then progressive councilor for Hackney Central in the early 1900s. Immediately I thought of my involvement in the Newington Green Meeting House’s project ‘Revolutionary Ideas Since 1708’ and how an exploration of Adler’s life and role in Hackney’s history would contribute to the project as a whole.

Mary Wollstonecraft is considered a Queer icon in many ways – and this interpretation of Mary is worth considering further as we celebrate LGBTQ+ History Month this February.

John William Polidori was born in 1795, the son of an Italian asylum seeker. He went onto graduate in medicine from Edinburgh University. Lord Byron employed him as his personal physician who some now say that this was a polite euphemism for a person who deals drugs as Byron was an enthusiastic user of laudanum.

From fighting for equal access to education to the right to vote, Hackney’s women battled to ensure the future female generations of East London had access to the opportunities they were not granted. This blog will provide a broad outline of the stories and movements of Hackney’s feminists from the 1600s to the beginning of the 1900s and how their revolutionary ideas and actions have shaped the society we live in today.

During World War Two many Jews began to migrate from the cramped ghettos of the East End and Dockland areas along the Thames, a frequent target zone during the Blitz, to North and North East London. Settling in areas such as Stamford Hill, Dalston and Stoke Newington and as such the Jewish community in Hackney grew, making these communities prime targets during the fascist resurgence after World War Two.

I know about Matilda Sharpe because she was the woman who, along with her sister Emily, founded Channing School in Highgate where I taught for 16 happy years.

The school was originally intended for the daughters of Unitarian ministers but is now open to girls from every religion or none. There were still echoes of Matilda Sharpe around the school when I worked there. For instance, her aspirational motto (also the title of a book of homilies she authored) was engraved over the door to the sixth form Centre: “Never forget life is expecting much of you and me”.

On the 7th June, those protesting as part of the Black Lives Matter movement in Bristol pulled down and dumped the statue Edward Colston, a prolific slave trader, into their harbor . A moment which sparked a conversation on the legacy of British colonialism and how slavery is remembered, both in our education system and via the statues that many of us uncritically pass on a daily basis.

Sophia is little known today. Thanks to the efforts of feminist historians we now know quite a lot about prominent women activists from the past, including of course Mary Wollstonecraft, who is so closely associated with this Meeting House. However, we know much less about other fascinating women who worked mainly ‘behind the scenes’, including Sophia, who also lived in this area of London.

In 1773, long before she arrived at Newington Green, Anna Laetitia Barbauld wrote one of her better known poems; A Mouse’s Petition. Addressed to her friend and fellow Unitarian, the chemist Joseph Priestley, the poem is an appeal for liberation. Part metaphor and part literal it may be seen as an early presentation of support for animal rights (and specifically the anti-vivisection cause).