Origins

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. Both date back to at least the 12th century.^[1] Near the Green is the parish church, St Mary's. Henry VIII hunted duck in the ponds off Upper Street,^[2] while Walter Raleigh lived in Upper Street and owned a pub in Lower Street.^[3] Lower Street has since been renamed Essex Road.

The fields around Upper Street, with their close proximity to the growing city of London, were a major farming area, mostly for dairying and market gardens. The street itself served as part of the drovers' road, channelling livestock from the Midlands and North of England towards Smithfield Market in the City of London.

From the end of the 16th century, there was a significant inn at the bottom of what is now Islington High Street. It was known as the Angel by 1614^[4] and lends its name to that area. The 1837 Charles Dickens novel Oliver Twist states that the Angel is where "London began in earnest".

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.^[5] A William Beverley (identified with William Roxby Beverley), the first to solve the problem of a "magic knight's tour" in chess (a variant on the knight's tour in which the numbered steps form a magic square) resided in these buildings,^[6][7] now replaced by Islington Town Hall.

Victorian era

By 1825 the Church Missionary Society Training College had moved to Upper Street.^[8] The impressive purpose-built construction provided classrooms and living accommodation for prospective Anglican missionaries and a professional staff.^[9] The new premises was designed to teach around 20 students to pass bishops' ordination examinations, tutoring them in Latin, Greek, English composition, sermon writing, and Divinity.^[10]

In 1837, the year of Queen Victoria's accession, Islington residents decided to create their own "lit & phil". The Islington Literary and Scientific Society included a library, reading room, museum, laboratory, and a lecture theatre seating 500.^[11] The architects were the fashionable partnership of Robert Lewis Roumieu and Alexander Dick Gough. The library was sold off in 1872 and the building was disposed of in 1874, running through various owners and purposes over the following century, before becoming the home of the Almeida Theatre in the 1970s.

In 1860 a Unitarian congregation moved out of the City (from Carter Lane near St Paul's Cathedral) and built a large church in the Dissenting Gothic style on Upper Street. Half a century later its official history recalls:

The district at this time, 1860, still retained somewhat of its rural character; tall elm trees flanked the Upper Street, between the Green and the High Street, at the end of Liverpool Road, where the turnpike still left its traces; in many of the cottages parlours had been converted into shops. A terrace of old houses, upon a raised pavement, reached by some steps, stood between Cross Street and a nursery ground, and beyond this were the Police Station and the Vestry Hall to the north.^[12]

The spire and building were badly damaged in the Blitz, and demolished. Islingon Council purchased the land fronting onto Upper Street and built a fire station. Tucked away behind this, though still with an entry fronting onto the main street, is the 1950s rebuilding.

By the mid 19th century, the growth of London necessitated a bigger venue for agricultural and other shows. In 1862, a group of businessmen associated with the Smithfield Show opened the Royal Agricultural Hall on a large plot between Upper Street and Liverpool Road immediately to the west. Unusually for London, both roads were rebuilt with a high pavement - up to 1 m above the road surface for some of their length - to protect pedestrians from being splashed with mud and ordure created by the large numbers of animals walking along the drover's road to the hall.^[13] A number of pubs and shops existed along Upper Street to serve farmers and visitors to the hall.^[14] In the 1980s the exhibition venue was revamped as the Business Design Centre.

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."^[15] and in 1885, it was widely known as "The Devil's Mile" on account of its prostitution, crime and the level of drunkenness.^[16]

20th century

Between 1936 and 1939, the former Methodist chapel in Providence Place, just off Upper Street, was the home of a drama school, the London Theatre Studio, directed by Michel Saint-Denis, with a conversion of the building designed by Marcel Breuer and F. R. S. Yorke.^[17][18] The students taught there included Peter Ustinov.^[19]