Upper Street

For the UK boy band, see Upper Street (band).

Upper Street is the main shopping street of the Islington district of inner north London, and carries the A1 road. It runs from the junction of the A1 and Pentonville Road and City Road, and runs roughly northwards past Angel tube station, then past the Business Design Centre, then splits at Islington Green (where Essex Road branches off) past the Screen on the Green cinema, the town hall and finally at Highbury & Islington tube station on Highbury corner, where the A1 carries on as Holloway Road.

It contains many fashionable shops, pubs, restaurants and theatres, especially towards the northern half of the road including the now closed Granita restaurant where Tony Blair and Gordon Brown were said to have made their deal on leadership once the Labour Party won power. A famous antiques market at Camden Passage and Chapel Market near Angel which sells fruit and vegetables, clothes etc. and are worth a few hours of your weekend but be prepared to deal with some crowds.

History

Upper Street, with the spire of St Mary's Church

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 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.

Places of interest

High pavement, Upper Street

Upper Street houses Islington Town Hall, and the adjacent Islington Museum. It also contains the Hope and Anchor, formerly one of the most important venues of the 1970s and 80s punk and new wave scenes, hosting performances by Madness, U2 and Spandau Ballet, among others (and Shakin' Stevens). The Stranglers album Live at the Hope and Anchor was recorded here. The building is still in use as a music venue today.

Upper Street is unusual in being one of the few streets in London (along with adjoining Liverpool Road) to have a "high pavement". This was constructed to protect pedestrians from being splashed by the large numbers of animals using the road to reach the Royal Agricultural Hall; as a consequence, the pavement of the street is approximately 1 m above the road surface for some of the length of the street.

The radical left

In the 1970s and 80s Upper Street was a focal point of the radical left. It was home to Sisterwrite, Britain's first feminist bookshop, as well as the Trotskyist Pioneer Books, the anarchist Rising Free shop (famous for stealing stock from other shops to sell in theirs) and the socialist Red Books. In the 1980s, Upper Street was home to the Islington Action Group for the Unwaged, a major far left campaigning and activist group, and to the squatter-run Molly's Cafe, a focal point for the anarchist and squatting movement. Upper Street made headlines on 23 July 1995, when the Reclaim the Streets movement took over the street, barricaded it to traffic and held a long party in the street.