CLISSOLD PARK Clissold, or Stoke Newington Park, is one of the parks which has the advantage of having been the grounds of a private house, and enjoys all the benefits of a well-planted suburban demesne. The old trees at once give it a certain cachet that even County Council railings, notice-boards, and bird-cages cannot destroy. It has the additional charm of the New River passing through the heart of it, and, furthermore, the ground is undulating.
One of the approaches to the Park still has a semi-rural aspect and associations attached to it. This is Queen Elizabeth's Walk, with a row of fine elm trees, under which the Queen may have passed as a girl while staying in seclusion at the manor-house, then in the possession of the Dudley family, relations to the Earl of Leicester. Stoke Newington, until lately, was not so overrun with small houses as most of the suburbs. In 1855 it was described as "one of the few rural villages in the immediate environs [of London]. Though, as the crow flies, but three miles from the General Post Office, it is still rich in parks, gardens, and old trees." The last fifty years have quite transformed its appearance. "Green Lanes," which skirts the west of the Park, though with such a rural-sounding name, is a busy thoroughfare, with rushing trams; and, but for Clissold Park and Abney Park Cemetery, but little of its former attractions would remain. The Cemetery is on the grounds of the old Manor House, where Sir Thomas Abney lived, and "the late excellent Dr. Isaac Watts was treated for thirty-six years with all the kindness that friendship could prompt, and all the attention that respect could dictate." The manor was sold by direction of Sir Thomas's daughter's will, and the proceeds devoted to charitable purposes. The old church, with its thin spire, and the new large, handsome Gothic church, built to meet the needs of the growing population, stand close together at one corner of the Park, at the end of Queen Elizabeth's Walk, and on all sides the towers among the trees form pretty and conspicuous objects. The house in the Park, for the most part disused, stands above the bend of the New River, which makes a loop through the grounds. It is a white Georgian house with columns, and looks well with wide steps and slope to the water's edge, now alas! disfigured by high iron railings. The place belonged to the Crawshay family, by whom it was sold. The daughter of one of the owners had a romantic attachment to a curate, the Rev. Augustus Clissold, but the father would not allow the marriage, and kept his daughter more or less a prisoner. After her father's death, however, she married her lover, and succeeded to the estate, and changed its name from Crawshay Farm to Clissold Place. This title has stuck to it, although it reverted to the Crawshays, and in 1886 was sold by them.
