I was born less than a half-mile from The Angel, in my grandmother's house on Liverpool Road (252 for those who care). She moved to Bath when I was about 13, though I continued to live in London until I was 17.
On almost every visit back to London, I find myself drawn to the area bounded by The Angel at one end, Canonbury at the other, with Liverpool Rd and Essex Rd as the other two boundaries. It wasn't until a few years that I came up with an understanding of why this might be, for it seemed to go above and beyond simple childhood nostalgia.
After I was born, my parents moved to a small village in the Midlands, but we would make the 120 mile journey back to my grandmother's very frequently. Eventually, when I was 10, we moved back to London, and the person who was to become my step-father also close by lived on Essex Rd. Because of all this, I think that this little corner of the world was the place where I first learned something about how cities work. Even, perhaps, about how the world works. There were a lot of early lessons acquired simply by being in this area, the sort of lessons that you often don't even know that you've learned.
I think I go back because I need to double check. I need to dig into the things I learned about the world from Islington, intentional or not, and compare them with what another 50+ years on this spinning globe have revealed. What did I get wrong? What did I get right? How and what did I misunderstand? Or not see?
I live a small village in New Mexico now, but I'll be back in London in a couple of weeks. I can pretty much guarantee that I'll be wandering around the Angel and Upper St. at some point during that visit, looking for how I was enlightened and misled by a childhood in orbit around this place.
Islington and the area southwest of the Angel are extremely interesting. After all, it was not always the gentrified chichi place it is now:
- old London Jewry still had a presence on Rosebery Avenue, in little mom and pop stores. I used to stuff my face on salt beef sandwiches prepared by a lovely old lady near Sadlers Wells.
- down towards Clerkenwell is the Church of the Holy Redeemer, a rare example of the High Anglican Church (aka "bells and smells"). I cant go in here without feeling like someone out of Dickens who just had a nice letter from Cardinal Newman.
- City University is nearby, and although its all polished now, back then it was very much a local education resource for working people. I took Russian at night school here once.
On almost every visit back to London, I find myself drawn to the area bounded by The Angel at one end, Canonbury at the other, with Liverpool Rd and Essex Rd as the other two boundaries. It wasn't until a few years that I came up with an understanding of why this might be, for it seemed to go above and beyond simple childhood nostalgia.
After I was born, my parents moved to a small village in the Midlands, but we would make the 120 mile journey back to my grandmother's very frequently. Eventually, when I was 10, we moved back to London, and the person who was to become my step-father also close by lived on Essex Rd. Because of all this, I think that this little corner of the world was the place where I first learned something about how cities work. Even, perhaps, about how the world works. There were a lot of early lessons acquired simply by being in this area, the sort of lessons that you often don't even know that you've learned.
I think I go back because I need to double check. I need to dig into the things I learned about the world from Islington, intentional or not, and compare them with what another 50+ years on this spinning globe have revealed. What did I get wrong? What did I get right? How and what did I misunderstand? Or not see?
I live a small village in New Mexico now, but I'll be back in London in a couple of weeks. I can pretty much guarantee that I'll be wandering around the Angel and Upper St. at some point during that visit, looking for how I was enlightened and misled by a childhood in orbit around this place.