Just-planted Tree Pit

Newly-planted Tree Pit on Newington Green

With time, these plants will grow and others will be added to them to fill out the tree pit. If you would like to donate some suitable plants for our local tree pits, and perhaps also help to plant them, that would be much appreciated - do use the contact form to let us know.

Suffragette Colours and Feminist Thinkers

NGAG has chosen the colours of the suffragette movement, purple, green and white for the pits around the Green, These symbolic colours link in with the long history of early feminist thinkers and writers who lived in Newington Green, such as Anna Laetitia Barbauld (1743 - 1825) and in particular, Mary Wollstonecraft (1759 - 1797). 

Interestingly, one of the earliest supporters of women's rights was a man, the writer Daniel Defoe (1660 - 1731) who studied at Charles Morton's Dissenting Academy on the Green and married a local woman Mary Tuffley. Defoe published an essay ' The Education of Women ' in 1719, the year in which he wrote the world's first novel, 'Robinson Crusoe'.  Defoe's essay was an appeal to men to 'be wise enough to mend things' and allow women to be educated in the same way as men. He begins the essay:

'I have often thought of it as one of the most barbarous customs in the world, considering us as a civilized and a Christian country, that we deny the advantages of learning to women.....'

Thankfully, women in the UK now have almost the same education and opportunities as men, although this is still not the case in some other areas of the world.

June 2010