Place Name
Name change originally Broughton Road. Anna Letitia Barbauld (June 20, 1743 – March 9, 1825) was prominent member of the Blue Stockings Society and a “woman of letters” who lived in Newington Green. A celebrated beauty of her day, her work included poetry, hymn writing, and campaigning against slavery. Britain’s History and Memory of Transatlantic Slavery gives a good account of her work: “In 1791 Anna Laeritia Barbauld, whose husband Rochemont Barbauld was a minister at Newington Green, published an Epistle to William Wilberforce Esq. On the Rejection of the Bill for Abolishing the Slave Trade. On it she warned of the moral disintegration of the nation should it persist in the inhumane practice of slave trading. Anna’s brother, John Aiken, was another Hackney resident who supported abolition. In a letter to his sister in 1791 he proclaimed, ‘I am at length become a practical anti-saccharist. I could not continue to be the only person in the family who used a luxury which grows less and less sweet from the suffering mingled with it.’ He also revealed some fascinating details about the involvement of young people in the sugar boycotts of the early 1790s. He remarked on ‘the young people and even children who have entirely on their own accord resined an indulgence important to them, I triumph and admire! Nothing to vibe despaired of if many of the rising generation are capable of such conduct.'” She and her husband moved into 113 Church Street when he became the Minister at the Chapel at Newington Green from 1802, a post he held until his death in 1808, when he drowned in the New River. She is buried in Stoke Newington churchyard, and a memorial to her was erected on the walls of Newington Green Chapel.
