Today’s brief chat is about the London Borough of Hackney, Stoke Newington in particular, and in very specific particular, the Congregationalist Chapel on Church Street. This post is also about promoting a local service that has helped me find details about this chapel, and it’s all to do with the next Delamere book, currently called ‘Snapshot’ (working title only).
Here’s how one of my ideas soon becomes complicated.
I wanted to find a theme for the next book, and decided on photography. This led me to some interesting research which I’ll talk about another day. However, it also opened up the idea of a mystery story which then became the plot. The inciting event of the story happens, as usual, very near the beginning.
A client comes to the detective agency saying he has just had a great shock and found the body of his late father in a cemetery. So? Well, the body was in a place where the gravedigger was supposed to be digging a grave for an upcoming burial. So? The body they found has only recently been put there. So? It’s his father. Yes, but…? His father died 10 years ago and is interred in the family mausoleum 200 yards away. Ah.
And so it goes on. Just for accuracy, I went to my 1888 maps of London and checked how Abney Park cemetery in Hackney looked at the time, and decided that’s where the body would be found, because I know the park fairly well. (I used to live nearby.)
My map showed me a chapel directly opposite the southern gates, and I made that the headquarters of the vicar who was arranging the forthcoming burial.
Except when I looked further into this chapel, I discovered it was a Congregationalist one, not Church of England or anything I was familiar with. So, that entailed looking into that form of Christianity, so that my ‘vicar’ character spoke the correct terminology.
My vicar soon became a minister, who later became a pastor, as I got to grips with the language of that particular kind of church.
Congregationalism (also Congregationalist churches or Congregational churches) is a Reformed (Calvinist) tradition of Protestant Christianity in which churches practice congregational government. Each congregation independently and autonomously runs its own affairs. [Wiki]
Anyway, the religion isn’t what this story is about, but… For the sake of authenticity, I researched as much as I could about this chapel, only to discover it was bombed in WWII and is no longer there. Could I find its history online? Well, I found some, but not enough, and I became more fascinated. Then, through a variety of search strings, and having found out all kinds of information about the area, the cemetery and so on, I discovered there was a pamphlet.
This was written in 1912 and covered the history of the chapel back to the 17th century, and including the time in which I am setting my stories, 1893. A copy of this pamphlet is held by the Hackney Borough Council Archives Offices, in, unsurprisingly, Hackney, London, and I was welcome to visit during opening hours.
Obviously, I can’t do that because it’s about 4,000 Km, a boat, two flights and far too many Euros away, and I can’t afford that, not for simple background research, so I wrote to ask if they had a digital service. Not as such, but they do have a look-up service and could make me digital copies on request for a small fee. Having worked out the cost, I wrote saying yes please, because by now I was very fascinated, and they wrote back telling me they could do two pages per shot, thus halving the fee, and I said, thank you very much, where do I pay? Payment made, and within a couple of hours, there was my digital file download with the full pamphlet in PDF pages, and how fabulous was that service?
Made more fabulous because it’s only a small team, and all this was achieved within two days.
So, I am singing the praises of the Hackney Archives for anyone who might ever need them. This kind of service, to my mind, goes along with things like libraries and museums, places that collect and store, thus preserve, history.
And that’s how one idea for a story can lead to fascinating in-depth research, all of which makes the story more realistic and believable.
If you are interested in more mystery novels, don’t forget to browse this month’s Mayhem and Motives collection.
This promo is organised by Book Mojo and they have a Readers’ Central department which gives you loads of ideas for reading in all genres. There’s also a free newsletter to sign up to, and I am featured in today’s copy, apparently.
Links of interest
Stoke Newington Then and Now (images and text)