I’ve been thinking about the word “history” and what it really means to think about the past. People often refer to history as something that they “failed in school”. But really, history is, as Alan Bennett put it so beautifully in his 2004 play The History Boys, “just one f***ing thing after another”. Well, quite. It is simply everything that has happened before us — and to us.
In 1998, Clapton was just a place that my mother and stepfather Garfield were moving to; the year I turned 14 and we had lost everything. Our dastardly neighbour had made his final complaint against my mother and me, causing the housing trust to evict us from the only home I’d known, on Powis Terrace in west London. We didn’t have much to lose, but we were managing to keep on keeping on, until suddenly it was all gone. I was to live with my auntie and uncle in Primrose Hill with my five cousins, while Mum and Garf would be taking over a one-bed council flat.
This cataclysmic series of events would ultimately end up changing everything for my parents and me. My sudden new independence in north London would lead me to working in television in under a year — at the age of 16 — as my mother was getting used to a part of London she never thought she’d live in: east. We had not crossed the river yet, but we were in unfamiliar territory. My mum began to look out at the strange structures in her new environment. How curious to think of a time when a building that has become such a great friend was once a stranger. It was the Round Chapel, a building that, unknown to me, had already threaded through my stepfather’s life in countless ways.
Interwoven histories
This was a building I barely noticed at the time, but one which has continued to present itself in my life again and again. I think that’s something that London does to you, how it gets its hooks into you, reminding us that our individual histories are interwoven within the cities we live, every day.
My stepfather’s childhood had been filled with celebrations that spilled out of the Round Chapel at the weekends. This was where his grandparents danced with each other, where his family said goodbye to the people they loved — it was where they were safe.
In 2017 I went to a photography exhibition with Garfield and his late, much-loved mother, Lynette. The Round Chapel was filled with photographs of the people of Hackney: the aunties, the card players and the life that had been lived in this part of London. The part of the city where they had all gathered, and shared their lives with one another. This was the world Lynette had built for herself since arriving from Jamaica in 1957. She would go on to spend her life looking after her children — Garfield, Judah, Michael and Sonya — as well as many others who were not her own.
And that day, in the building she had built her life around — both physically and emotionally, as Garfield’s childhood home was behind it — she could see everything that she had given.
It wasn’t by chance that the Round Chapel played such a central role in her life, my stepfather’s life, and even my own. It has been an essential site in Clapton for hundreds of years and writing about this building reminds me that our stories are layered and sit on top of the stories of other Londoners.
Cultivating magic
Our building today began as The Gravel Pits chapel in nearby Homerton. In the early 1800s, Hackney was moving from a small, modest village set in meadows — housing kings, courtiers and aristocrats — into a desirable new offering, whose population was about to quadruple, a foreshadowing of the mass gentrification pilgrimage that was to come in 2010. But this was the 19th century, also a time of upheaval. A time when non-conformists and dissenting academics were building churches. In 1871 they decided to build the Round Chapel. It was a place to consort, to inspire, and ultimately to unite together in power.
The foundation hosted people from all parts of the city of London — religious objectors and free thinkers — and was the setting for the development of something radically important: democracy. This was where the rebels came! Through their debate and the freedom to believe in another thought, change began to take place.
In my earlier life, I knew nothing of the roots of this revolutionary, unifying building, but it still had its effect on me, and I began to ask more questions. Curiosity really can lead you closer to the magic of London.
An idea I had in 2018 took me back to that familiar place. I hadn’t worked on anything I had cared about in years, and I could feel the weight of my mid-thirties looming. I decided that it was to be a new idea for a TV show that would change everything. I wanted to bring musicians together under one roof to collaborate and play with each other, to dance in the land of creativity and cultivate magic. I also knew exactly where I wanted to film it.
I started to walk from my neighbouring village of London Fields to the village of Clapton up on the hill, on most days. Sometimes I wouldn’t even go inside, I’d just look at it, wondering why they had committed to this odd cylindrical shape? But then you do go inside, and you can almost hear it.
The sound of speech and debate, the sound of shelter and safety, accompanied by the organ at the back end of the main hall, filling the room with the echoes of time.
I don’t think we really conceive of the things that have taken place before us, and certainly not that they will be the things to guide us. But as an adult I moved to a part of London that had birthed the idea of change — this idea of having another thought and deciding to live by it. It was the same place my stepfather had come to, and his mother too, and they had felt the same thing.
The story of the Round Chapel shows us how spirit lives and can adopt new meaning if we only just look.
Miquita Oliver is a broadcaster and presents the Miss Me? podcast with Lily Allen
