Isaac Watts is commemorated twice over at Stoke Newington’s Abney Park Cemetery but is not buried there. A statue of the hymnist stands near the war memorial and Watt’s Mound has been preserved.

John Wilkes (17 October 1725 – 26 December 1797) was a British journalist and politician, as well as a magistrate, essayist and soldier. He was also an MP from 1757 to 1790. A noted leader of the Radical wing of the Whigs in Parliament for 20 years, he was instrumental in persuading the government to publish daily accounts of parliamentary debates.

Chevalier d’Eon’s life as a spy and adventurer is now being revisited in the light of recent attempts to rediscover LGBT history.

On International Women’s Day, 2021 thousands of women (and some men) rioted in Mexico City in the latest of several actions against femicide (literally woman killing) and sexual violence which is endemic across Latin America and Mexico in particular (over 900 women were murdered in Mexico in 2020).

Mary Shelley had only one child who survived infancy. Percy Florence Shelley was born in 1819 and named after his father, Percy Bysshe and the Italian city of his birth.

The religious views of Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) have been a subject of considerable scholarly debate.

Newington Green Meeting House is closely associated with two revolutions; the American and the French. These associations are largely through the work of Richard Price, the minister from 1758 to 1783.

We’re excited to introduce our new poetry and flash fiction publication, N-Zine! It is named for the postcode prefix for north London, where the Meeting House is based, but the zine is intended to showcase writing from all over Hackney and Islington.

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 month we learnt a little more about when we might next be able to welcome you all to the Meeting House again. We are now busy planning in the hope that it will be June when we open again for self-guided visits, booked tours, exhibitions, and a chance to try our new audio guides and touch screens!

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.

Hope you are doing okay in these difficult times. We’re very uncertain as to when we will be able to open the doors of the Meeting House again and for our fantastic volunteers to welcome you and take you on a tour of our history.

Until then, we have been making wonderful progress in our community work, education programmes, historical research and events. Here’s an update.