Shopping in Stoke Newington

I leave the railway station with a certain amount of caution. I understand that this area of London is known as 'Skank City', due to the high incidence of knife crime. First impressions are not good. Many of the shops near the station are closed, presumably because this is the Sabbath. The ones that are open are tattoo parlours and fast food joints, and one that looks as though it might sell stab-proof vests. Across the road is a row of once-grand houses, five storeys high, with sweeping flights of steps leading up to their front doors. Bessie and Kathy would have seen them in their heyday, occupied by wealthy merchants and professionals, but now they are in varying stages of decrepitude, with gardens filled with weeds and rubbish, stained brickwork, and grubby net curtains flapping at the open windows.

I begin to despair of finding anything I want to buy when I come upon a Polish grocery shop. The two women inside are conducting a highly-charged conversation; I recognise the word 'Nigdy!' repeated several times: 'Never! Never! Never!' Unfortunately, I don't understand the rest. I choose a bar of E Wedel hazelnut chocolate; it's not as good as Cadbury's, but never mind. I say 'Prosze' and 'Dziekuje', and fortunately the shop-keeper does not seem inclined to engage me in further chit-chat, as despite being half-Polish, my conversational abilities do not extend much further than this.

The people thronging the pavements on this sunny Bank Holiday Saturday are multi ethnic; I don't feel conspicuous or particularly vulnerable. Apart from a few ladies in burquas, most are wearing light summer clothing that doesn't look as though it conceals stab-proof vests.

Further along the High Street there is a boutiquey shop called Androulla, with some pretty summer dresses in the window. The interior of Rouge glows with oriental lacquered furniture and ornaments. There is an independent bookshop and a wet fishmongers. In fact, in some ways it's better than Saffron Walden.

What would Bessie and Kathy have been buying? Embroidery silks and haberdashery, maybe - they did a lot of sewing. Perhaps some stays. I'm not quite sure what stays were, but I think they were the sort of thing that ladies wore in 1912. Definitely some stationery - they were always writing letters. You could post a letter in the morning, confident that it would be delivered to the recipient on the other side of London in the afternoon. I go into a newsagent and buy a little hard-backed notebook with a picture of a cartoon cat on the front, as I realise I need to jot down my thoughts and impressions before I forget them.

As I wait to cross the road, a woman wheeling a bicycle stops beside me. She addresses the child in the passenger basket in a ringing middle-class voice: 'Would you like to push the button, darling? Oh, well done! Brilliant! Now, let's watch for the green man...' and I remember we are just a short step away from Islington. Round the corner by the bus stop I spot that haven of aspirational education, a Montessori nursery school.

Stoke Newington, I have misjudged you. I'm not saying I would actually want to live within your environs, but you weren't as bad as I was expecting. And I didn't get knifed.