This year Abney Park Trust are unable to run their usual International Women's Day walking tour. However, we are very lucky to have our regular hosts Romany Reagan and Sam Perrin offer a virtual tour of the park followed by a Q&A session. The theme for this year's International Women's Day is ‘Choose to Challenge’. There are a whole host of amazing women connected with Abney Park Cemetery who went against the expectations and restrictions imposed upon them by society.
Cemeteries are our outdoor archives. Tangible time capsules. Accessible fragments of our collective heritage and individual tales of love and loss. Join Romany and Sam as they pay homage to the fearless women interred in Abney Park Cemetery – pioneers who ripped up the rule books and whose stories are inspiring, surprising, and poignant.
The nurse whose two-fingered salute to bureaucracy invoked the wrath (and later respect) of Florence Nightingale; the Suffragette incarcerated and force-fed in Holloway Prison; and the aeronaut who risked life and limb navigating her hot air balloon above England’s skyline: these women both suffered and soared in making their marks in their landscapes and ours. Abney Park has its performers and humanitarians too, including the famed ‘Wizard Queen and Mesmerist’.
Biographies:
Romany Reagan
Romany Reagan received her PhD from Royal Holloway, University of London in performing heritage in 2018. Her practice-based research project ‘Abney Rambles’ is comprised of four audio walks, which are offered as pieces of creative public engagement with heritage space that she researched, wrote, and recorded from 2014 to 2017 within Abney Park cemetery, located in the north London community of Stoke Newington. Researching the layers of heritage that make up Abney Park led to a study of the occult literary heritage of Stoke Newington, ‘earth mystery’ psychogeography, and folklore. Since completion of her PhD, Romany has expanded her folklore research scope to encompass legends and lore from the British Isles, which she is documenting on her blog Blackthorn & Stone.
Twitter/Instagram: @msromany
Website: https://blackthornandstone.com/
Sam Perrin
Sam is a cemetery guide and researcher since 2003 who is completing an MA in Victorian Studies through Birkbeck, University of London. She is researching Victorian & Edwardian women in museums, social, boxing and magic history. As well as this, Sam is working on a biography on silent screen actress Lilian Hall-Davis. Sam has previously delivered talks to The National Archives, Camden History Society, Museum of London and The Dickens Fellowship.
Twitter: @misssamperrin
Related content: Women From Hackney’s History
If you enjoy the sound of this event, we would also like to promote the release of a new book: Women From Hackney's History.
Many people know about Hackney’s connections to Mary Wollstonecraft and Marie Lloyd but a new book from two local charities introduces some Hackney women who may not be so familiar.
This new publication from the Hackney Society and Hackney History offers readers brief illustrated biographies of these women and of over 100 others who lived or worked, were born or buried in today’s borough. Written and designed by Hackney women of today, the book features women from widely differing backgrounds from the ladies with court connections who lived in Hackney’s grand Tudor houses to the radical artists who helped shape the borough we know today. Their stories cover five centuries and show us how times have changed for women and for Hackney. The borough has not only been home to many performers, writers and suffrage campaigners but also to the pioneering businesswomen, England’s first female racing driver and more than one child murderer.
Women from Hackney’s History is being launched on International Women’s Day with a special introductory offer of £10 + P&P from hackneysociety.org or £12 in local bookshops and can be pre-ordered.
Biographies
Romany Reagan:
Romany Reagan received her PhD from Royal Holloway, University of London in performing heritage in 2018. Her practice-based research project ‘Abney Rambles’ is comprised of four audio walks, which are offered as pieces of creative public engagement with heritage space that she researched, wrote, and recorded from 2014 to 2017 within Abney Park cemetery, located in the north London community of Stoke Newington. Researching the layers of heritage that make up Abney Park led to a study of the occult literary heritage of Stoke Newington, ‘earth mystery’ psychogeography, and folklore. Since completion of her PhD, Romany has expanded her folklore research scope to encompass legends and lore from the British Isles, which she is documenting on her blog Blackthorn & Stone.
Twitter/Instagram: @msromany
Website: https://blackthornandstone.com/
Sam Perrin:
Sam is a cemetery guide and researcher since 2003 who is completing an MA in Victorian Studies through Birkbeck, University of London. She is researching Victorian & Edwardian women in museums, social, boxing and magic history. As well as this, Sam is working on a biography on silent screen actress Lilian Hall-Davis. Sam has previously delivered talks to The National Archives, Camden History Society, Museum of London and The Dickens Fellowship.
Twitter: @misssamperrin
Book:
If you enjoy the sound of this event, we would also like to promote the release of a new book Women From Hackney's History.
Many people know about Hackney’s connections to Mary Wollstonecraft and Marie Lloyd but a new book from two local charities introduces some Hackney women who may not be so familiar.
This new publication from the Hackney Society and Hackney History offers readers brief illustrated biographies of these women and of over 100 others who lived or worked, were born or buried in today’s borough. Written and designed by Hackney women of today, the book features women from widely differing backgrounds from the ladies with court connections who lived in Hackney’s grand Tudor houses to the radical artists who helped shape the borough we know today. Their stories cover five centuries and show us how times have changed for women and for Hackney. The borough has not only been home to many performers, writers and suffrage campaigners but also to the pioneering businesswomen, England’s first female racing driver and more than one child murderer.
Women from Hackney’s History is being launched on International Women’s Day with a special introductory offer of £10 + P&P from hackneysociety.org or £12 in local bookshops and can be pre-ordered.