ABSTRACT
There is a place some miles to the 'north and east' of a still existing Saint Pancras Station called Stoke Newington. In this area the terraced houses have a yard or two of space between their doors and the street. Stoke Newington is fairly typical of many inner-city areas in which a white working-class coexists with a diversity of minority groups and an incoming middle class, and it is seeing changes which are familiar to other such areas as well. Thus an increasingly preservational emphasis has established itself in this area over recent years – an emphasis which is more contemporary and ambitious than the one rather tired blue plaque which was put up in 1932 to 'indicate' the spot where Daniel Defoe once lived and wrote Robinson Crusoe. The houses which the planners of the nineteen sixties so loudly decried as slums are being refitted in more senses than one.
