Upper Street - History

History

The hilltop village of Islington originally consisted of two streets in addition to the High Street: Upper Street and Lower Street, which diverged from the High Street at Islington Green and both date back to at least the 12th century. Henry VIII hunted duck in the ponds off Upper Street, while Walter Raleigh lived in Upper Street and owned a pub in Lower Street. Lower Street has since been renamed Essex Road.

St. Mary's Church, Islington was rebuilt in 1754 and dominates the Islington skyline. It is still in use today, and is a major venue for performances of traditional religious music. The Little Angel Theatre is a children's puppet theatre in a former Temperance hall, behind the church. Directly opposite St. Mary's Church is The King's Head Theatre, founded in 1970 by the late Dan Crawford. It was the first pub theatre in the UK, located in the back room behind the bar at the King's Head pub on Upper Street.

The fields around Upper Street, with their close proximity to the growing city of London, were a major farming area. Islington was the home of the Royal Agricultural Hall, and a number of pubs and shops existed along the street to serve farmers and visitors to the hall.

In the 18th century Upper Street began to be redeveloped from an agricultural to a residential area. Ten houses were built in 1768 (later named Hornsey Row), and a further group built immediately south of Hornsey Row in 1792. William Roxby Beverley, the first mathematician to solve the problem of a "magic knight's tour" (a variant on the knight's tour in which the numbered steps form a magic square) resided in these buildings, now replaced by Islington Town Hall.

In the late nineteenth century, the Upper Street area became notorious for its night-time entertainments. In 1870, Charles Dickens described the area as "amongst the noisiest and most disagreeable thoroughfares in London." and in 1885, it was widely known as "The Devil's Mile" on account of its prostitution, crime and the level of drunkenness.

In recent years it has become extremely fashionable, and contains numerous pubs and restaurants, including the now closed Granita where Tony Blair and Gordon Brown were said to have made their deal on leadership once the Labour Party won power. The southern end of Upper Street is a former tram shed which closed in 1979 and is currently a Jack Willis shop. The building was formally The Mall Antiques Arcade. Its closure reflects the reduction in the number of antique traders in the nearby Camden Passage. A weekend antiques market is still held there.

Upper Street was one of the settings for local resident Douglas Adams's The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series. The London-based sections of the later books are set in and around Upper Street, the home address of "Fenchurch". In addition, the character of Hotblack Desiato is named after a local estate agent.

In 2005 Islington Council launched "Technology Mile", a project to turn Upper Street in a large scale wi-fi hotspot. Using routers mounted on lampposts anyone with a wireless enabled device can connect to Council services and the internet the entire length of Upper Street, although the best signal is found in the Islington Green/St. Mary's church areas.