St Augustine's Tower has stood here since the thirteenth century. Most people walking past it today are heading to a shop, not a landmark.

Hackney Central

E8 and E9's civic core: a thirteenth-century tower, a 1792 church, a museum, and an outlet trade, all built for one visit at a time.

St Augustine's Tower dates from the thirteenth century and is the oldest building in Hackney Central. The Church of St John-at-Hackney was built in 1792, and the Learning and Technology Centre, opened in 2002, holds the borough's library, archive and Hackney Museum together under one roof. Down on Morning Lane, the Burberry factory outlet is described as Hackney's most visited tourist attraction, though no visitor figure for it has ever been published.

None of that is a shopping street to browse. It's a set of specific destinations - the tower, the church, the museum, the outlet - each with its own reason for a visit, and each pulling people in from outside the immediate area who had one thing in mind before they arrived. Hackney Central station sits in the middle of it, usually the last thing they see before deciding what happens next.

What happens next is a search, on a phone, for whatever isn't the reason they came: coffee, a locksmith, a dentist, a hairdresser with an appointment free that afternoon. Nobody arrives at Hackney Museum already knowing where to eat afterwards. That search goes to whichever business states plainly what it does, where it is relative to the tower, the station or Morning Lane, and whether it's open right now.