Facts about Shacklewell
Shacklewell History
The village was one of four small villages within the Parish of Hackney, which were all grouped for assessment purposes, together with having only as many houses as the village of Hackney. The village of Shacklewell was settled on the eponymous village green, along Shacklewell Lane. Shacklewell lay a little over 500 yards north of the hamlet of Dalston, which stood on Dalston Lane, with which it was linked by Cecilia Road.
One municipal building still standing is the former Shacklewell Washing Baths. This was a communal bath and washhouse. Simple bathhouses like these were once of great importance. Even into the 1960s, in some working-class areas of London, many dwellings did not have their own bathrooms.
General Info
Shacklewell was a hamlet that developed on Shacklewell Lane in the modern London Borough of Hackney. The settlement core is now often seen as being part of Dalston which was originally a separate hamlet 500 yards to the south and also part of the Ancient Parish of Hackney. Shacklewell took its name from “some springs or wells which were of high repute in former days, but the very site of which is now forgotten.
Shacklewell has never been an administrative unit, and partly for that reason its extent has only ever been nebulously understood. For a brief time, its sphere of influence extended north and north-west beyond its village core but Shacklewell is now mostly forgotten as a place name in everyday use, though the historic street pattern of the original hamlet remains.
