The lost world of Dudley Ryder

THE LOST WORLD OF DUDLEY RYDER

Dr Matthew Green & friends at the Round Chapel

An immersive, illustrated talk on a forgotten Hackney diarist who is easily as gripping as Samuel Pepys, with a costumed actor performing readings, evoking in rich, vivid detail the lost world of 18th-century Hackney, and exploring how — over the last couple of decades, with the relentless march of gentrification — the Hackney villages have come full-circle.

Dudley Ryder is the greatest London diarist you’ve never heard of. Splitting his time between Bohemia Place in Hackney (where today’s bus station is) and his student digs in the Middle Temple, he started writing in 1715 at the dawn of the Hanoverian age, as the Thames froze over and the Catholic North rose up in rebellion. But it’s so much more than a chronicle. Ryder used to walk from Hackney through the City into the Strand every day so it affords a portrait of a teeming, flourishing, dangerous city that was spreading its tentacles in all directions, an encroaching upon satellite villages like Hackney, easily rivalling Samuel Pepys’s in its rich evocativeness. Written in secret shorthand, it hot-wires us into the mind of a young Londoner, and there we find his darkest impulses, most repressed desires, and the excoriating insecurity that made him such a master of disguises.

I am the only person on the planet (probably for good reason) who has decoded and read all 2,000 pages of the diary, walking beside him as he drifts from coffeehouse to coffeehouse debating the latest news, ice-skates across the Thames moonlight chinking from his rabbit-bone skates, watches beheadings at the Tower, questions his sexuality and pursues doomed love affairs in Hackney, ‘that Arcadia beyond Moorfields’. Eerily, when I discovered the diary I lived in Dalston a mere 10-minute walk from his old address, and was exactly the same age as when he wrote it. A free-thinking dissenter (he wants to replace marriage with polygamy, for example), the son of a wealthy City linen draper, he was the very quintessence of a Hackney citizen but hopelessly confused about his identity too — a human being trying to find his place in a dauntingly fast-changing and uncertain world.

BIO

Historian and broadcaster Dr Matthew Green has a doctorate in the history of London and is a critically acclaimed author of ‘London: A Travel Guide through Time’ (Penguin) and, most recently, ‘Shadowlands: A Journey through Lost Britain’ (Faber), a Times Top 10 Bestseller, Waterstones Book of the Year and shortlisted for the Wainwright Literary Prize, described by Tom Holland as 'brilliant'.