London: The Biography

It was in Islington that Sir Walter Raleigh first smoked tobacco; the site of his house later became an inn for the citizens seeking refreshment of another kind. Islington was famous for its hostelries, among them the Three Hats, Copenhagen House, White Conduit House and the Angel itself, which gave its salubrious name to an entire district. Here also were Sadler’s Wells, Islington Spa, the New Wells, the Pantheon in Spa Fields, the English Grotto in Rosoman Street, the London Spa, Merlin’s Cave, Hockley-in-the-Hole, Bagnigge Wells, St. Chad’s Well in Gray’s Inn Road and Penny’s Folly on the Pentonville Road; the entire area was covered by tea gardens, walks and entertainments. Charles Lamb, the great romantic antiquary of London, settled here in 1823 and according to William Hazlitt “took much interest in the antiquity of ‘Merrie Islington’ … the ancient hostelries were also visited, and he smoked his pipe and quaffed his nut brown ale at the Old Queen’s Head.” The air of liberation which Islington induced was still with Lamb two years later, when he remarked that “It was like passing from life into eternity … Now when all is holyday there are no holydays … Pleasuring was for fugitive play days; mine are fugitive only in the sense that life is fugitive. Freedom and life co-existent!” That is why there are so many ballads about Islington, “The Bailiff’s Daughter of Islington” and “Tom, Tom of Islington” among them; for many centuries it remained a haven of carelessness.

But Charles Lamb’s residence, Colebrook Cottage, became attached to other houses; then they became a terrace; then became part of a row of terraces as London crept northward. In the early 1800s houses “of a very small and slight character” were built in the environs of Colebrook Cottage, only to become slums. In the 1830s, the Northampton estate built cheap tenements on its vacant ground, while sixteen years later the Packington Estate constructed a network of wide streets in the area which still bears its name. Soon the entire region was covered with terraces, villas and the general ribbon development which characterised the tentacular stretch of London. An issue of Building News in 1863 named Islington as an area of “trumpery allotments which have been dealt out to builders, and the closely packed streets and terraces which have arisen.” And all those who lived in these new terraces moved daily to the centre of their being. Dickens noticed them in one of his early sketches. “The early clerk population of Somers and Camden Towns, Islington and Pentonville, are fast pouring into the city, or directing their steps towards Chancery Lane and the Inns of Court. Middle-aged men, whose salaries have by no means increased in the same proportion as their families, plod steadily along, apparently with no object in view but the counting-house; knowing by sight almost everybody they meet and overtake, for they have seen them every morning (Sundays excepted) during the last twenty years, but speaking to no one … Small office lads in large hats … milliners’ and staymakers’ apprentices.” All of them can be imagined walking into the city, acquiring a settled anonymity as they steadily approach it. Dickens was very interested in Islington; he placed several of his characters in that vicinity, denominating most of them as clerks. Potters and Smithers and Guppy are all clerks of Islington and Pentonville, for example, as if those areas adjacent to the centres of finance and power had themselves a subsidiary clerkly function.

The more affluent Londoners moved further out to Sydenham or Penge, even as the poor travelled north. So by stages Islington itself became poor. Rows of terraced houses, of two or three or four storeys, can be seen in early photographs; their grimy stucco is matched by the darkness of their brick, and they seem to stretch on interminably. In 1945 Orwell depicted the area as having become one of “vague, brown-coloured slums … He was walking up a cobbled street of little two-storey houses with battered doorways which gave straight on the pavement and which were somehow curiously suggestive of rat-holes. There were puddles of filthy water here and there among the cobbles. In and out of the dark doorways, and down narrow alley-ways that branched off on either side, people swarmed in astonishing numbers … Perhaps a quarter of the windows in the street were broken and boarded up.” This is taken from 1984, a novel of the future, but the details are based directly on Orwell’s observation of the streets beside Essex Road. It is as if the dereliction had entered his soul and he had come to believe that London, somehow, will always be sordid, and grimy, and squalid. Islington will always be Islington.