· · ·
Go to the north-east, and discover mournful Paddington which has always been blasted as a place of transit and of transience. In that it resembles the other gateways into the city. The area around the railway terminus at King’s Cross, for example, has acquired a wandering population which takes advantage of travellers and tourists who venture into the immediate streets. The area around Victoria Station is anonymous and unhappy. But Paddington has a desolation all of its own. It is a place of transit in more than one sense, since one of its main sites was once the gallows of Tyburn. Lord Craven also donated some land, now covered by Craven Gardens, which, if London should once more be touched by pestilence, will be made available as a burial pit. Presumably the current inhabitants of Craven Gardens are not aware of this noble intention. The hospital is beside the station, and the gloomy brown brick exterior of the original institution still exudes in its own way the recognition of transit and mortality. The message of Paddington, in the words of William Blake, which predate the railway and the hospital, “mournful ever-weeping,” seems to be that we are all travellers passing through.
If we travel further north-east, over Cato Street where the conspirators met in 1820, over the then New Road, which is now the Marylebone Road, and the Euston Road, past the broken columns of the old Euston Arch in front of the modern station, past bleak and windy King’s Cross, past Penton Hill where the Druids may once have met, past the tribal trackway which exists beneath the modern layout of the Angel, we will arrive at Islington.
The Romans fought their battles there against Boudicca; there is evidence of a Roman encampment at Barnsbury, and the area of King’s Cross was once known as Battle Bridge. A now forgotten track, Hagbush Lane, exists beneath the Liverpool Road. An ancient British settlement lies to the immediate south-east of Islington Green. The Saxon King Aethelbert granted Islington to the canons of St. Paul’s (hence the name Canonbury), and it appears in the Domesday Book that the ecclesiastical authorities owned approximately five hundred acres of territory. Fitz-Stephen depicts the area as “fields for pasture and open meadows, very pleasant, into which the river waters do flow, and mills are turned about with a delightful noise … beyond them an immense forest extends itself, beautified with woods and groves, and full of the lairs and coverts of wild beasts … and game, stags, bucks, bears and wild bulls.” The theme of the waters here is significant, since it dominated Islington’s subsequent history as a source of health and refreshment. The pursuit of sport and hunting in the area, outside the confines of the city, is again a persistent one so that for some thousand years it was a haven of relaxation and entertainment for those ordinarily trapped within the city. In the time of Henry II (reigned 1154-89) “citizens played ball, exercised on horseback and took delight in birds, such as sparrow hawks, goss hawks, and in dogs for following the sports of the fields of Iseldon.” In the sixteenth century Stow described Islington as a place of “fields commodius for the citizens therein to walke, shoote and otherwise to recreate and refresh their dulled spirits in the sweete and wholesome ayre.” Immediately south of the Angel, fields were set aside for target practice; on eighteenth-century maps almost two hundred “marks” can be discerned, with the most proficient archers being awarded titles such as the “Marquis of Islington,” the “Marquess of Clerkenwell” and the “Earl of Pancridge.”
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.