There's no parade around Hackney Downs to be found from. Every customer decision here starts on a screen.

Hackney Downs

Sixteen hectares of preserved common, a station on the edge, and no shopping parade at all.

Hackney Downs is sixteen hectares of former common land, kept as public open space from the 1860s after pressure from the Commons Preservation Society. It holds a play area, basketball courts, football pitches and a bowling green, and won a Green Flag award in July 2008. The streets around it, including the Nightingale Estate, were largely rebuilt in the 1930s and 1960s, and the old school site on Downs Park Road became Mossbourne Community Academy in 2004, built at a cost of £19 million.

No retail street was found here, and this page doesn't invent one. What genuinely trades around Hackney Downs is trades, not shops: the builders, roofers and decorators maintaining the estates and the rebuilt terraces, the coaches and personal trainers using the pitches and the open space, and the home-based practitioners whose business address is a residential street rather than a parade.

None of them get passing trade from a park. Every customer decision here happens on a screen first, which is why real photographs of finished work, plain service pages and a phone number somebody actually answers do the whole job a shopfront would do somewhere else.