Stamford Hill

Stamford Hill is an area in Inner London, England, about 5.5 miles north-east of Charing Cross. The neighbourhood is a sub-district of Hackney, the major component of the London Borough of Hackney, and is known for its Hasidic community, the largest concentration of Hasidic Jews in Europe.

The district takes its name from the eponymous hill, which reaches a height of 33m AOD, and the originally Roman A10 also takes the name "Stamford Hill", as it makes its way through the area.

The hill is believed to be named after the ford where the A10 crossed the Hackney Brook on the southern edge of the hill. Sanford and Saundfordhill are referred to in documents from the 1200s, and mean "sand Ford". Roque's map of 1745 shows a bridge, which replaced the ford, referred to as "Stamford Bridge".

The hill rises gently from the former course of the Hackney Brook to the south, and its steeper northern slope provided a natural boundary for the traditional (parish and borough) extent of Hackney, and now does so for the wider modern borough.

History

Stamford Hill lies on the old Roman road of Ermine Street, on the high ground where it meets the Clapton Road, which runs from central Hackney. By the 18th century, the Roman road (now numbered as the A10) was subject to heavy traffic, including goods wagons pulled by six or more horses, and this caused the surface of the road to deteriorate. The local parishes appealed to Parliament in 1713 for the right to set up a Turnpike Trust, to pay for repairs and maintenance. Gates were installed at Kingsland and Stamford Hill, to collect the tolls.

Roque's map of 1745 shows a handful of buildings around the Turnpike, and by 1795, the A10 was lined with the large homes and extensive grounds of wealthy financiers and merchants attracted, in part, by the elevated position.The London Encyclopaedia, Weinreb and Hibbert, 1983

Stamford Hill had a gibbet, that was used to display the remains of criminals, executed at Tyburn in the 1740s. In 1765, a map of the area showed the Gibbet Field south of the road from Clapton Common, behind Cedar House."Hackney: Newington and Stamford Hill." A History of the County of Middlesex: Volume 10, Hackney. Ed. T F T Baker. London: Victoria County History, 1995. 38-44. British History Online. Web. 15 December 2018. http://www.british-history.ac.uk/vch/middx/vol10/pp38-44.

The area remained essentially rural in character, and little more was built until the arrival of the railway in 1872, and the tram system at about the same time. Stamford Hill was the point where the tram line coming north from the City met the Hackney tram line, and so, it became a busy interchange, with a depot opening in 1873. Electrification commenced in 1902 and by 1924 a service was commenced between Stamford Hill and Camden Town along Amhurst Park..

The growth of London, and the corresponding population growth led to further amenities being required. A Jesuit college and church were built nearby in 1894-96, at the foot of the hill, on High Road, Tottenham. The present Romanesque church building opened in 1903.

Stamford Hill had many eminent Jewish residents, including the Montefiore family. Italian-born Moses Vita Montefiore (died 1789) was living there in 1763. His son Joseph (died 1804) married Rachel Mocatta, and his grandson Abraham Montefiore (died 1824) married Henrietta, whose father, the financier Nathan Meyer Rothschild, lived near the modern Colberg Place from 1818 to 1835. The Montefiores' property a little further south was to be transformed by Abraham's grandson, Claude Montefiore, into Montefiore House school. With the increased development of the area, many distinguished families moved away: In 1842, there were few remaining of the wealthy Jews who had once settled in Hackney.'Hackney: Judaism', A History of the County of Middlesex: Volume 10: Hackney (1995), pp. 145-48
Date accessed: 31 October 2006. The philanthropist and abolitionist MP Samuel Morley had a residence here from about 1860. The gardening writer and cottage gardener Margery Fish was born Margery Townshend in Stamford Hill in 1892.

From the 1880s, a new influx of Jews arrived from Stepney in the East End, and, in 1915, the New Synagogue was transferred to Stamford Hill to serve this growing population. In 1926, the Union of Orthodox Hebrew Congregations was established in Stamford Hill, and this became a magnet for other strictly observant Jews, many fleeing Nazi persecution in the years before the Second World War. Also, many Jewish families came to the area from other areas of London, refugees in their own way from bombing and post-war clearances for new housing. One of the early Hasidic leaders in Stamford Hill was the Shotzer Rebbe. The Hungarian uprising also led to an influx of Haredi Jews fleeing hardship under Soviet rule. Another notable Jewish resident, from 1955 until his death in 2000, was the spiritual head of the Union of Orthodox Hebrew Congregations, Rabbi Chanoch Dov Padwa.

Governance

Stamford Hill has never been an administrative area in its own right; it has always been an area of Hackney. Hackney was an administrative unit with consistent boundaries from the early Middle Ages to the creation of the larger modern borough in 1965. Hackney was based for many centuries on the Ancient Parish of Hackney.

Parishes in Middlesex were grouped into Hundreds, with Hackney part of Ossulstone Hundred. Rapid Population growth around London saw the Hundred split into several "Divisions" during the 1600s, with Hackney part of the Tower Division (aka Tower Hamlets). The Tower Division was noteworthy in that the men of the area owed military service to the Tower of London - and had done even before the creation of the Division.

The Ancient Parishes provided a framework for both civil (administrative) and ecclesiastical (church) functions, but during the nineteenth century, there was a divergence into distinct civil and ecclesiastical parish systems. In London, the Ecclesiastical Parishes sub-divided to better serve the needs of a growing population, while the Civil Parishes continued to be based on the same Ancient Parish areas.

The London Government Act 1899 converted the parishes into Metropolitan Boroughs based on the same boundaries, sometimes with minor rationalisations.
In 1965, Hackney merged with Shoreditch and Stoke Newington to form the new London Borough of Hackney.

Boundaries

The area's usual definition is based on the physical feature of the hill and the neighbourhood's location within the Ancient Parish and subsequent (with almost identical boundaries) Metropolitan Borough of Hackney. It also reflects the fact that what was originally the Roman A10 also takes the name 'Stamford Hill' as goes over the hill between the brook and the borough boundary.

Northern boundary with Tottenham: Takes the northern boundary of the AP\ MB of Hackney. This corresponds to the current boundary between the modern borough of Hackney and Haringey.

Western boundary with Stoke Newington: Takes part of the AP\ MB of Hackney's boundary with the AP\ MB of Stoke Newington along Bethune Road and down to the A10.

Southern Boundary with West Hackney: The east–west course of the Hackney Brook, which may have been as wide as 22m at this point, provided a natural southern boundary for the district, however the river was culverted and it is now difficult to discern its former course on the ground. This has led to very ambiguous boundary, along its former course, in the Cazenove\Northwold Road area.

East and south-east boundary with Upper Clapton: Upper Clapton is also part of Hackney and shares much of the eastern side of the hill. There is little tradition of a particular border. The post code boundary is sometimes used but this is arbitrary: post code areas are not intended to define districts.

Demography

The high fertility of the Haredi community contributes to the area having one of highest birthrates in the UK, with a crude birth rate of more than 25 per 1,000 of the population, twice the UK average.

The data table shows ONS Census data for the wards around Stamford Hill, where respondents indicated a religion:

:''The London Borough of Hackney has expressed its concern that Haredi Jewish residents are seriously under-counted in the Census data, as the religion question is voluntary.''

Haredi Jewish community

Stamford Hill is at the centre of an Ashkenazi strictly-Orthodox Jewish, and predominantly Hasidic, community estimated to be some 15,000 strong, and growing at a rate of around 5% each year. It is the largest Hasidic community in Europe, and referred to as a ''square mile of piety'', reflecting the many Jewish men seen walking in their distinctive clothes on their way to and from worship. The congregations often represent historical links with particular areas of Eastern Europe in their dress and their worship. Many also retain links with congregations around the world. The largest of these congregations is the Satmar dynasty, which has five directly associated synagogues; Belz is another large community, with four synagogues. As well as Stamford Hill's own Jewish population, there are also many observant Jews in neighbouring Upper Clapton, West Hackney, Stoke Newington, and Tottenham; there may be as many as 80 synagogues in this wider area.

A volunteer emergency response first-aid service called Hatzola (the Hebrew word for rescue) and a volunteer community watch group called Shomrim (the Hebrew word for watchmen) are run by, and largely for, the Jewish community.

The strictly Orthodox Jewish community relies mostly on private education for schooling, with almost all Jewish children attending private, single-sex Jewish schools. In 2005, the Stamford Hill Yesodey Hatorah Senior Girls' School achieved voluntary-aided status. In 2014, the Oxford, Cambridge, and RSA (OCR) Exam board, having conducted an investigation into alleged exam malpractice, concluded that the school had redacted questions involving the evolution of species on GCSE science exam questions. Ofqual subsequently ruled that blocking out exam questions is malpractice, and, accordingly, not permissible. The same year, it was reported by the BBC
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