This alleyway doesn’t look it, but it’s one of the oldest paths in Hackney, dating back to when most of the area was still fields.
Running from Morning Lane (originally Money Lane) to Chatham Place, there might be a hint of the lane in John Roque’s map of 1746, but by 1828, it shows up on Greenwood’s map as a clearly defined passage called Providences Place (or maybe Paradise Place, records vary).
Greenwood map 1828
You might notice there’s a chapel at the northern end – this was the Gravel Pit Chapel, opened in 1715 for nonconformist congregations. It took its name from the gravel pit near the bowling green in Mare Street. Like all good religious organisations, there was a schism, and in 1809, a New Gravel Pit Chapel was built nearby for the Unitarians while the Old Gravel Pit Chapel was retained by the Congregationalists.
The old chapel still exists, although it spent most of its later life as a factory, and when Hackney had its weird plans for an upmarket shopping row, the chapel was a short-lived retail outlet for Aquascutum.
Back to the past, and by the 1850s, the area is far more developed, and to serve the growing population, a CofE church was built next to the alley. This church was built in 1872 in the Gothic Revival style on the site of a plant nursery called Paradise Fields, on land given by the local landowner, the governors of St Thomas’s Hospital.
The church, St Lukes Hackney was built to provide a new place of worship within St Barnabas’ parish, which was said to have some 12,000 people, ‘mostly of the poorest class’, in an area described as being ‘wretchedly poor’ in the application for funds from the Incorporated Church Building Society. The builders were Dove Brothers. As was often the case, the completion of the steeple was delayed by a lack of funds, in this case for 10 years until 1882.
OS map 1951
On the other side of the alley is a large school, and although much changed, the site has been a school from the earliest days of urban development around here. Originally called Morning Lane Primary School after the main road nearby, but soon renamed Morningside for some reason.
The alley’s current name, Meeting Field Path, is also curious, appearing around the 1890s with no apparent explanation.
The school, and most of the houses to the south of the alley were badly damaged during WWII. The school was repaired, and the houses replaced with post-war blocks of flats.
That gives the alley its modern appearance at the southern end, of a school on one side and a block of flats on the other.
But walk along a bit, and you come to open air, as the grounds of St. Luke’s church become visible, offering a green respite from the urban surroundings. Look carefully, and you might notice that the stone wall used to have a metal fence, but that was removed, leaving just the stumps in the stone. Probably taken for WWII efforts, as so many metal railings were at the time.
The rest of the alley is totally uninteresting.
But at the northern end, if you look over the road is a white block of flats – the former Lord Nelson pub, which closed in 1990. The blanked off corner was the pub’s entrance.
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