The new owners of 195, Mare Street, a big late seventeenth-century house (1697 for Abraham Dollins) set back from the street just short of Hackney Town Hall, generously allowed locals to see it before they start work on its restoration. It’s a big project:-

Indoors, it is surprisingly well preserved in spite of – actually maybe because of – being a Working Man’s Club (The New Lansdowne Club) from 1913-2004, when it was sold to a succession of developers who constructed flats in the garden at the back.

This is the entrance hall:-

Many of the rooms show fragmentary evidence of the original decoration:-

The basement is going to be turned into an arts centre.