Which building in London means the most to you?

The Round Chapel in Clapton tells the stories of my family’s many lives

- Miquita Oliver

I've been thinking about the word "history" and what it really means to think about the past. People often refer to history as something that they "failed in school". But really, history is, as Alan Bennett put it so beautifully in his 2004 play The History Boys, "just one f***ing thing after another".

Well, quite. It is simply everything that has happened before us - and to us.

In 1998, Clapton was just a place that my mother and stepfather Garfield were moving to; the year I turned 14 and we had lost everything. Our dastardly neighbour had made his final complaint against my mother and me, causing the housing trust to evict us from the only home I'd known, on Powis Terrace in west London. We didn't have much to lose, but we were managing to keep on keeping on, until suddenly it was all gone. I was to live with my auntie and uncle in Primrose Hill with my five cousins, while Mum and Garf would be taking over a one-bed council flat.

This cataclysmic series of events would ultimately end up changing everything for my parents and me. My sudden new independence in north London would lead me to working in television in under a year - at the age of 16 - as my mother was getting used to a part of London she never thought she'd live in: east. We had not crossed the river yet, but we were in unfamiliar territory. My mum began to look out at the strange structures in her new environment.

How curious to think of a time when a building that has become such a great friend was once a stranger. It was the Round Chapel, a building that, unknown to me, had already threaded through my stepfather's life in countless ways.

Interwoven histories