Distance 1.9 miles/3.1km
Typical duration 40 minutes
Start and finishing Stoke Newington rail station
Start postcode N16 6YA

It’s a matter of life and death, this walk. On the west, one of the finest playgrounds in the capital; on the east, one of the most stylishly decadent cemeteries. Here are two great centres of early life and late residency, each set in public spaces, Clissold and Abney parks, big enough to make you lose sight of N16’s essentially urban nature.

Meanwhile, slung between cradle and grave, Manor Road to the north and Stoke Newington Church Street (London’s longest road name) to the south go about their very different businesses. Add in the West and East reservoirs just north of our own circuit and it’s a square mile in which wildlife and leisure, creation and recreation are up there with some of London’s leafiest boroughs.

I started at Stoke Newington station on the line out of Liverpool Street. Almost everyone in the carriage was wearing blue, on their way to the Spurs/Sunderland game. This stop has fallen behind the relentlessly upward community it serves. Now that the overground network has so raised its game, with shiny new interchanges at Dalston and Islington, these old commuter limbs look wrinkly. So does the mouth of Manor Road, its boarded shops looked down on by the brutally dated sentinel block of Hugh Gaitskell House.

Here, another group of similarly garbed people were coming along the road, and then another, joined by others from the side streets. Men only, all in black barring the white shirts, moving fast and purposefully. Long sombre coats, ringlets hanging all the way down their cheeks and, this being Shabbat, heads crowned with shtreimels, the precious hats that perch in huge circles of fur. This is the southern boundary of the Stamford Hill area, home to a 20,000-strong Hasidic Jewish community.

Over Queen Elizabeth’s Walk and into Clissold Park, named after the Rev Augustus Clissold, who married into the family of the estate’s owners in the early 19th century. Something new has sprung up here in the past six months, replacing the old, squatted-in, gamekeeper’s cottage – the little two-storey clubhouse for the eight public tennis courts. Though the weather was bitingly cold, all eight of these were occupied. Floodlit in the dark afternoon, they looked a little unreal; a low sliver of high summer, players in white shorts, the “pung” of ball on racket and, in the background, the tall spire of St Mary’s in Church Street rising above the trees as if this were anywhere but the London borough of Hackney.

Not long ago a community group complained that junkies and beggars were becoming a blight for homeowners in this increasingly fashionable enclave. But there was no sign of the “loud music coming from the historic Abney park cemetery, with copulation on the gravestones and orgies around the once-sacred chapel”, of which the chairman of the group warned. Of “vagrants, druggies and thieves” relieving themselves against the back wall of Foxtons estate agents, ditto.

Of prosperity and variety there was huge evidence: big old London pubs gone comfortably gastro, the Petit Coin (great coffee) next to the Rose & Crown; 5 Star dry cleaners; windows full of personal trainer ads, baby boutiques, missing cats and mindfulness, three-bed flats pushing a million; Kontakt hair salon, Ryan’s Bar, Haikksun Chinese restaurant, John’s Garden Centre, The Parlour tea room, Gujarat House gated development; on and on towards the High Street.

But first a sharp left into Abney park. If Stokey (as they call it here) is a triumph of the metropolitan, then these packed, solemn but horticulturally undead acres are a necropolitan counterpart. A few steps and you are deep into Betjemania. This is one of the great London burial grounds, dubbed the Magnificent Seven by the architectural historian Hugh Meller, established through a parliamentary bill in 1832 to relieve overcrowding through the establishment of private cemeteries.

The fact that Abney was originally laid out as an arboretum means it contains several thousand plant species as well as a profusion of memorials. Next to the humbler tablets for the many dissenters and non-conformists who have been granted headstone space stand ornate dynastic mini-temples. Not to mention the grave of the great William Booth, founder of the Salvation Army, duly promoted to glory. Hard to imagine what he would have thought of everything going on around him now.

Get there

Trains from London Liverpool Street run to Stoke Newington station. Bus routes 67, 73, 76, 106, 149, 243 and 393 stop outside Abney Park.