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6
PHYSICAL FEATURES, SOCIAL CONDITIONS AND
VITAL STATISTICS
The Borough of Hackney is one of the twenty eight London Metropolitan
Boroughs and is situate in the north-eastern part of the County of London. It
adjoins the Borough of Tottenham in the north, the Boroughs of Bethnal Green and
Shoreditch in the south, Poplar in the south-east, the Boroughs of Walthamstow
and Leyton in the east, and Islington and Stoke Newington in the west.
The area of the Borough is 3,287 acres, approximately 609 acres being public
open spaces, 10.9 acres of which are maintained by the Borough Council and
598.45 acres by the London County Council.
The Borough is both residential and industrial, and the density of population
is 52.02 persons per acre. The chief industries are the manufacture of
clothing, furniture and footwear.
The Borough varies in elevation between 16 ft, and 112 ft. above ordnance
datum. The north-west portion lies on yellow clay, and there is a considerable
area on a bed of, gravel and sand of varying depths; other portions are on brick
earth, and in the Lea Valley there is a bed of alluvial gravel. Underlying the
whole of the Borough is the London blue clay, which in a few places appears
near the surface.
The number of inhabited dwellings at the 1931 census was estimated to be
34,155. At the end of 1952, rate book records showed the number of inhabited
hereditaments to be 39,728. The estimated rateable value of the Borough at
1st April was £1,435,000: a 1d rate produced £5,840.
The types of dwelling generally throughout the borough vary from the
terraced type of town dwelling of four to five rooms to the larger Victorian or
Edwardian type of basement house.
Development in modern years has provided large blocks of flat dwellings,
and in the years following the war, a number of temporary prefabricated bungalows
and hutments were erected.
The fifteenth census of the population of England and Wales was taken on
the 8th April, 1951, and the preliminary report of the Registrar General gives
the following comparisons of the population of Hackney enumerated at that
census, as compared with the census of 1931:-
Males Females Total
1931 Census 99,794 115,539 215,333
1951 Census 80,902 90,435 171,337
These figures show that the population of the Borough has decreased by 20.4
per cent, in that twenty-year, period. The figures for the administrative County
ofLondonshow a decrease of 1,048,667, being 23.8 per cent, whilst the figures for
England and Wales as a whole show an increase of 3,792, 547 persons, being 9. 5 per cent.
In connection with the census of 1951, an innovation on the part of the
Registrar General was the publication of "One per cent. Sample Tables". These