Liverpool Road


Liverpool Road is a street in Islington, North London. It covers a distance of between Islington High Street and Holloway Road, running roughly parallel to Upper Street through the area of Barnsbury. It contains several attractive terraces of Georgian houses and Victorian villas, many of which are listed buildings. There are a number of pubs, small businesses and restaurants along its route, as well as some secluded garden squares. The vast majority of the street is residential, with a bustling shopping and business area at the southern, Angel, end.

History

Liverpool Road was formerly named the Back Road, one of a trio of roads with Upper Street and Lower Street meeting at the Angel Inn.
By the late 16th century the Back Road ran mostly through open country from Holloway Road at a point named Ring Cross to the High Street in Islington village. It bypassed Upper Street and connected with lanes across the western part of the parish. The Back Road was primarily a drovers' road where cattle would be rested before the final leg of their journey to Smithfield Livestock Market. Pens and sheds known as layers or lairs were erected along the road to accommodate the animals.
Around 1761, a turnpike tollgate was erected just beyond the Angel Inn at the entrance to Islington village at the end of White Lion Street. It was moved in about 1800 nearer to Liverpool Road, but proving a cause of accidents because of a sharp turn, in 1808 it was moved again to a final position midway between the two sites. In 1766, an Act of Parliament fixed a site for a tollgate at the northern end of Liverpool Road at the junction with Holloway Road.
Suburban development began to the south of Holloway Road around the late 1760s with the construction of Paradise Row at the northern end of Liverpool Road.
During the period after the Napoleonic Wars, a rapid rise in population put a premium on building land contiguous to London. Starting in the 1820s, plots in Barnsbury were sold on building leases and a flood of speculative building followed.
The developments along Liverpool Road were mostly on fields belonging to different owners, leading to a remarkable number of subsidiary names, including:
  • Bride, Anns, Barford, Manchester, Park, Barnsbury, Barnsbury Park, King Edward, Wellington, Strahan, Cloudesley, Elizabeth, Felix, Liverpool and Paradise Terraces
  • Felix, Seymour, Morgans, Park, Chapel and Trinidad Places; Park Place West
  • Albion, Felix, Oldfield and Lowther Cottages
  • Barnsbury and Albion Villas
  • Paradise and Mount Rows
  • Nowells Buildings
The Back Road became known as Liverpool Road in 1826, taking its name from the Tory Prime Minister Robert Jenkinson, 2nd Earl of Liverpool, known for his repressive measures to maintain order after the Peterloo Massacre of 1819. The name change was formalised in 1868 when the Vestry decided that "the Liverpool Road be so called from the Upper Street to Holloway Road and the houses re-numbered alternately". Many of the subsidiary names continued to be used for years afterwards.
The house building developments were originally planned for the "comfortably off", wanting to move from congested central London to the more rural suburb of Islington. However, from the 1850s the new railways tempted suburban dwellers to more distant and still countrified areas. Barnsbury was gradually abandoned by the prosperous, and its houses turned into tenements and flats with absentee landlords. The 1860s saw an influx of clerks, schoolmasters, printers, jewellers, milliners, dressmakers, servants and bricklayers. Censuses show house occupancy changing from single households with a servant, to multiple household occupancy, although Charles Booth's poverty map of c.1890 still shows most Liverpool Road households as "Fairly comfortable. Good ordinary earnings". In the first half of the 20th century the street, as with much of Islington and its population, became impoverished.
Liverpool Road suffered damage from high explosives during the Second World War, including:
  • Nos. 309/311/313 Liverpool Road took a direct hit during a bombing raid on the night of 19 October 1940 and were completely destroyed. The present Wynn Court was later built on the site.
  • St Mary Magdalene school and the surrounding area were destroyed by a bomb on 7/8 October 1940.
  • Granary Square 1940/41
  • London Fever Hospital
  • On 6 December 1944 a V-2 rocket landed close to Liverpool Road at the junction of Mackenzie and Chalfont Roads, on the site of the present Paradise Park. The Prince of Wales pub was devastated, killing 68 and injuring 99 people, in the worst V-2 attack on Islington.
After the Second World War much housing in Islington was chronically neglected and damaged, and was taken into local authority ownership. Many older properties were demolished and replaced with council housing, including in Liverpool Road.
Starting about 1960 middle class and professional householders began returning to Islington, to houses which were once elegant but now, more often than not, were endowed with Victorian plumbing hardly suited for modern living. Journalists, architects, lawyers, accountants, teachers and designers were attracted by the style and size of the Regency and Victorian houses and squares and the opportunity to acquire large, characterful properties at prices they could afford, with easy access to the City of London, Westminster and the West End. Consequently, house values soon soared, a trend which has continued to the present.
Liverpool Road today houses a diverse community of different ethnicities and varying levels of income, occupying a mixture of houses and flats, which are owned or rented, both privately and as social housing.

Famous residents

No. 379 Liverpool Road was the residence of Robert Seymour, known for his caricatures and for his illustrations for The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens. In 1836 he had several disagreements with Dickens over the illustrations for Pickwick, and may also have been depressed about his finances and career. In the early hours of 20 April, he walked out into the summer-house in the garden behind his home and wrote a farewell to his "Best and dearest of wives", blaming only his "own weakness and infirmity". He set up his fowling piece with a string on its trigger, and shot himself dead.
A commemorative plaque at no. 60 Liverpool Road marks a top floor studio where Derek Jarman, English film director, gay rights activist and author lived between 1967 and 1969. It was here he worked on artwork and costumes for Sadler’s Wells Opera’s production of Don Giovanni in 1968.
No. 533 Liverpool Road displays a blue plaque unveiled by the Huguenot Society in 2017, commemorating the British artist Peter Paillou, best known for his paintings of birds. The terrace was built in 1766 as Paradise Row, and Paillou lived in the house between 1776 and 1780.
Other residents have included:
  • Jenny Logan, actress, most familiar as the Shake n' Vac lady, lived at no. 323
  • Anton Rodgers, actor, lived at no. 323
  • Jane Tryphoena Stephens, actress, kept a tobacconist’s shop at no. 39 before taking to the stage in 1840
  • Laurence Edmondson, Formula 1 Journalist, owns a flat, which he uses when not travelling with the F1 grand prix circuit.

    Places of interest

Pubs

Liverpool Road is supplied with several pubs, formerly to refresh cattle drovers and visitors to the Royal Agricultural Hall, more recently for local residents, including:
  • The Pied Bull
  • The Islington Town House, originally the Agricultural Hotel
  • The Angelic, originally the George
  • The Pig and Butcher, originally the White Horse Hotel
  • The Regent, originally the Prince Regent
  • The Foxglove, originally the Windsor Castle
  • The Rainbow
  • King’s Arms
  • The Adelaide Arms
  • Gallagher's, originally the Albion
  • The Duchess of Kent, originally the Fox and Fiddle
  • Adam and Eve
  • The Victoria Tavern

    Chapel Market and Angel Central

At its southern, Angel end, Liverpool Road parts from Islington High Street at the former Pied Bull pub. Moving northwards, the street passes Chapel Market, Angel Central shopping centre, and other shops and supermarkets until reaching Tolpuddle Street.
From there onwards, the remaining 90% of the length of the street is primarily residential, with a few small businesses.

Royal Agricultural Hall

The Royal Agricultural Hall was the primary exhibition site for London until the Second World War and the largest building of its kind, holding up to 50,000 people.
It was built in 1862 by the Smithfield Club on the site of William Dixon's cattle lairs, at a cost of £32,000. The construction was inspired by the Crystal Palace, which had been designed for the Great Exhibition of 1851. The original purpose of the Agricultural Hall and its location were related specifically to its proximity to Smithfield, the great livestock market, and took advantage of Liverpool Road’s function as a cattle route. The hall was 75 ft high and the arched glass roof spanned 125 ft. It was built for the first annual Smithfield Show in December 1862 but was subsequently popular for other purposes, including recitals and the Royal Tournament. The most glamorous event to take place was the Grand Ball held for the Belgian Volunteer regiments during their visit to England in July 1867. Other events at the "Aggie" included military tournaments, walking matches, missionary exhibitions, musical recitals, dairy shows, balls, mule and donkey shows, revivalist meetings, circuses, dog shows, motorcycle and cycle shows, trade fairs, and in 1870 a bullfight. In 1884 the prefix "Royal" was added because of the number of visits by Queen Victoria and members of the Royal Family.
In 1943, after the nearby Mount Pleasant sorting office was bombed, the building was requisitioned for use during World War II and never re-opened to the public. It continued as a sorting office until 1971, then lay empty and deteriorating until eventually the main hall was redeveloped as the Business Design Centre in the 1980s. The remainder of the building was demolished and the main entrance moved from Liverpool Road to the Upper Street side.
The Royal Agricultural Hall features as the location for a Victorian walking match in Peter Lovesey's 1970 novel Wobble to Death, and its BBC Radio's Saturday Night Theatre adaptation.
Liverpool Road is unusual in being one of the few streets in London to have a "high pavement". This was constructed in the 1860s to protect pedestrians from being splashed by the large numbers of animals using the road to reach the then-new Agricultural Hall. As a consequence, the pavement is approximately above the road surface for some lengths of the street.