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In 2025, Abney Park Trust is celebrating radical writing with a year-long festival of book launches and author talks in the historic Abney Park Chapel and the brand-new Harriet Delph room.
Laid to rest in Abney Park are prominent Abolitionists and trailblazing feminists as well as political campaigners and agitators, performers who pushed creative bounds, pioneering educationalists and many more. It’s in honour of their legacies that this festival takes place.
We’ll be joined by scribes from across an array of genres, disciplines and backgrounds. And we’ll be thinking about radicalism in many senses – old, new, cultural, political, social and beyond.
Events are happening across the year, and tickets for each event will become available around six weeks in advance. Sign up to our newsletter here to get alerts when tickets are released. Check out the current line up below – and keep an eye out for new additions to come.
If you’re interested in joining the line up, get in touch for a discussion.
Abney Park Trust is a small, volunteer-led charity seeking donations and funding to continue programming events like these. If you’re interested in helping us plan for the future, please contact us. Any surplus from these events will be re-invested directly in our charitable work promoting the park’s heritage, ecology and community life.
We offer huge thanks to our partners at Hackney Council’s Venues team, the Parks and Green Spaces team and Abney Park Cafe by Sabel for all their support.
Explore the speakers and events – and book tickets
IAIN SINCLAIR AND CHRIS MCCABE, Thursday 27th March 2025, 7.30pm, Abney Park Chapel
A Park In Our Dreams: an evening of live poetry and conversation
Tickets now on sale (from £12.50 to £20): book here
Join us at Abney Park Chapel for an evening of live poetry, conversation and literary dreaming with two contemporary writers and long-term collaborators for whom this cemetery has been both special and deeply provocative.
This event will formally launch multidisciplinary poet and writer Chris McCabe’s new book, “Dreamt by Ghosts” (published by Tenement Press). This book is an “autobiographical digression” and a “singular, personal anthology”, with Chris’ journal at its heart. Using radical literary techniques and traditions from hauntology to the collation of ephemera, it looks at isolation, cityscapes, family, fraternity and more through the lens of dreaming and internal life. Among Chris’ previous works is “Buried Garden: Lockdown with the Lost Poets of Abney Park Cemetery”, a book for which Abney Park Trust proudly provided staff and volunteer support.
Iain Sinclair has spent a Hackney life on foot, conducting dérives – or experimental and largely unplanned journeys – through urban landscapes both in recognisable London cityscapes and on the edgelands. He not only presents and documents the marginalia and semiotics encountered in urban life, but also faces up to the psychic experiences triggered by and lived out in London and beyond – fantasy, perception, spectral hauntings of the past, and much more. Iain, who is a James Tait Black Memorial Prize winner, is known for books like “London Orbital” (a psychogeographical exploration of the M25) and “Lights Out For The Territory” (which features Abney Park).
Both Iain and Chris will read from their works and explore the inspiration they’ve drawn from the cemetery.
DIANE ABBOTT MP, Sunday 11th May 2025, 4pm, Abney Park Chapel
Diane Abbott In Conversation: launching the paperback version of her autobiography “A Woman Like Me”, with audience Q&A
Tickets on sale from mid-March. Sign up to get email alerts here
Diane Abbott has been the Member of Parliament for Hackney North and Stoke Newington since 1987. But she is known for being a national trailblazer: she was the first black woman elected to parliament, the longest-serving black MP and now the “Mother of the House” – the serving MP with the longest uninterrupted service in the House of Commons.
Diane will be launching the paperback version of her celebrated autobiography “A Woman Like Me” at Abney Park’s newly-restored chapel, which is located at the heart of her diverse constituency. Diane will speak about her memoir and the stories contained within, and there will be an opportunity for members of the audience to ask questions. The book will also be available for sale.
“A Woman Like Me” was described by The Guardian as a “rich and complex record of resilience”. It tells the story of Diane’s childhood in London during the Sixties as the child of working-class parents from Jamaica. It goes on to explore her life as a student at Cambridge followed by the stories of her election and multiple re-elections to parliament, as well as an insight into her personal life outside of politics.
BRUNO LEIPOLD, Sunday 18th May 2025, 1.30pm, Harriet Delph room and Bronterre O’Brien grave
Bronterre O'Brien Memorial Commemoration 2025
Free tickets available from early April. Sign up to get email alerts here
Bruno Leipold is a Fellow in Political Theory at the London School of Economics and Political Science, where he will also take up an Assistant Professor position in September 2025. He is the author of “Citizen Marx: Republicanism and the Formation of Karl Marx's Social and Political Thought” (Princeton University Press, 2024) and works on the thought of Karl Marx, republicanism and democratic theory.
He will deliver this year’s Bronterre O’Brien Memorial Commemoration. James 'Bronterre' O'Brien fought, as a Chartist, for a free, untaxed press, universal suffrage and parliamentary reform in the 19th century. O’Brien’s radical politics brought him to the attention of the authorities and in 1840 he was charged with sedition and jailed for 18 months. A life of poverty and ill health followed and, though friends raised money to help a man who’d sacrificed so much for the causes they shared, he spent the last years of his life bedridden. He eventually died in 1864 and was buried in a modest ceremony – as he would have wanted – in Abney Park Cemetery. O'Brien's campaign for banks of credit accessible to all classes and his efforts to bring education to all through his Eclectic Institute, in Denmark Street, Soho, reveal a man with enormous foresight, energy and ideas, worthy of celebration in our difficult times.
In recognition of his lasting legacy, an annual graveside address organised by the Connolly Association had been given for many years, by speakers such as Tony Benn, Arthur Scargill and A. J. P. Taylor interpreting O'Brien's views on politics, radical action and journalism. After a break when the tradition had lapsed, it was revived in 2015. Find out more, and see a list of past speakers, here.
DANIEL JOHNSON, Thursday 26th June 2025, 7pm, Harriet Delph room
The Radical Hymns of Isaac Watts
Tickets on sale from early May. Sign up to get email alerts here
Isaac Watts (1674-1748) is remembered as one of Abney Park’s most famous connections, for his hymns – which are still sung to this day. In his lifetime, Watts’ hymns were highly controversial, marking a transition away from the practice of psalm-singing. Coupled with his theological views, which brought widespread criticism, Watts can rightly be seen as a radical.
Dr Daniel Johnson is one of the country’s foremost Isaac Watts scholars. He completed his PhD in 2024 from the University of Leicester, and works as a lecturer and researcher at a number of universities. He recently appeared on BBC’s Songs of Praise, filmed in Abney Park, to share some of his knowledge on Watts.
SARAH STEIN LUBRANO, Friday 4th July 2025, 7pm, Harriet Delph room
Living (and Reading) Our Way through the Apocalypse
Tickets on sale from mid-May. Sign up to get email alerts here
We're all living through a metacrisis of apocalyptic proportions: climate breakdown, a rise in authoritarianism, looming war. What would it mean to live through this period of human history wisely? What do we need to do to hold true to radical values and not lose our minds?
In this interactive talk writer, researcher, and political theorist Sarah Stein Lubrano, author of the new book “Don't Talk about Politics: Changing 21st Century Minds”, will combine insights from history, politics, and literature to point to some less-commonly-understood things about the reality of the end of (this) world. She'll argue that some books mislead us when it comes to thinking about our current moment, while others can help. We learn from history, for example, that the apocalypse has already happened many times. There are historical elders to learn from.
And while some books mislead us into thinking that surviving an apocalypse is solitary, dramatic, and largely fearful, it is actually social, interdependent, and a chance for us to cultivate a new state of mind as we face the world: what the writer James Baldwin called passionate detachment.
This interactive talk will include moments of discussion and, of course, a reading list.
RICHARD YEBOAH, date to be announced, Harriet Delph room
Tickets on sale later this year. Sign up to get email alerts here
Richard Yeboah is a writer, public servant and historian from Hackney, East London with a strong interest in public policy, local history and urbanism. Richard has written on a variety of political and social issues over the last ten years, and is currently writing a part-history, part-memoir on the dramatic transformation and gentrification of the London Borough of Hackney called “From Hackney, With Love”, which is due to be released in 2025. Richard and Abney Park Trust are busy working on a Radical Writers talk to take place later in 2025 – watch this space!
SHARON WRIGHT, date and location to be announced
Tickets on sale later this year. Sign up to get email alerts here
Sharon Wright is a long-term collaborator of Abney Park Trust. Sharon and the Trust worked together in 2022 to raise funds to commission a memorial to trailblazing balloonist and Abney Park resident Margaret Graham, the first British woman to fly solo. Together we raised around £5,000 for the memorial, which now stands proudly in the park. Sharon is the author of “The Lost History of the Lady Aeronauts”, which captures Mrs. Graham’s fascinating story. At the time, Sharon said: “It’s taken 158 years to get Mrs Graham a gravestone, but it’s never too late to celebrate women who make history.” Sharon and Abney Park Trust are busy working on a Radical Writers talk to take place later in 2025 – watch this space!