Hackney Archives is the archives and local studies service for the London Borough of Hackney. We hold a small number of oil paintings in the collections, many of which are of previous mayors or councillors of the various Councils which made up the current London Borough (the Metropolitan Boroughs of Hackney, Shoreditch and Stoke Newington). There is very little information about the provenance of many of the portraits or of the artists: they were probably transferred from other Council departments, and such transfers were not always documented in detail, as they are now. We believe that most of the portraits would have been on display in some of the former Town Halls of Hackney and Shoreditch in particular. We also have a small number of topographical paintings of places in the Borough, which have been donated to the Archives by members of the public over many years, most of which probably date from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.