Hackney Museum

This small museum tracing the history of one of the most ethnically diverse neighbourhoods in the country is particularly stylish, with display boards featuring translucent squares of the same colour and one case showing single mementoes and effects from diverse ethnic communities – Jews, Chinese, Indians etc – behind square panes of glass. Even the 1000-year-old Saxon log boat, discovered on the marshes of Springfield Park in 1987, has been placed in the floor under glass squares. Yet the design is not so flashy as to interfere with what’s on show, from zoetropes and an early-20th-century (and very confusing) locality map to a pie ‘n’ mash shop and a dream kitchen of the 1950s. There’s a copy of the genre-defining London crime novel Yardie, which was published locally, and recorded oral histories can be listened to by picking up phone handsets.