ISLINGTON gets such a hard time from right-thinking commentators in the pro-Tory press, you can end up feeling sorry for it. Well, almost.
It’s become a cliché to describe this inner north London district as not so much a location as a state of mind, the epicentre of what the Daily Mail has identified as metropolitan elite “luvvieland”.
Over the decades of Islington’s gentrification, even the sociologists and anthropologists have got in on the act to study, to quote one of them, “the consequences of the manner in which the aspirational middle classes appear to be remaking inner London, displacing in the process traditional working class communities”.
In their seminal 2003 London Calling, academic duo Butler and Robson found that the residents of Barnsbury, one of Islington’s most chichi corners, were mainly graduates and professionals who inclined towards vegetarianism while shunning good old British food.
They tended to avoid car ownership but, if they lapsed, would opt for off-road, gas-guzzling SUVs. Well, you’ve got to get the kids to prep school somehow! Gin was found to be their favourite tipple, and the liberal Guardian their preferred daily read.
There wasn’t much evidence of these bourgeois Islington indigenes as I rounded the corner to The Angel station at the start of the latest lockdown. What greeted me was a contemporary urban tableau familiar to amblers across the capital: a masked guardian of the law remonstrating with a recalcitrant street-sleeper.
The usually bustling Upper Street and Chapel Market were almost deserted. Maybe the well-heeled locals are sheltering in their second homes in Tuscany or the Cotswolds. Or maybe they’re just hunkered down in their Georgian terraces, leaving nanny to run the errands.
Back in the mid-sixties, a first generation of middle-class incomers had only just begun ripping up the lino and sanding the floors in their bargain-priced former slums and ordering up the stripped pine fittings, Conran fabrics and Le Creuset pots with which to furnish them.
Enough fading terraces and squares had been spared by either the council estate builders or the blitz to make Islington a magnet for middle class regeneration.
Most had been built in the area’s 18th-19th century heyday as a rural-urban refuge for a previous elite as traditional market gardens gave way to elegant houses that provided an alternative to the crowded inner city. Musical halls, theatres and pleasure gardens followed. Even into the 20th century Islington attracted a lively literary and artistic set.
But the inter-war years confirmed its steady economic decline as much of the housing in London’s most densely populated borough was turned over to slum landlords and multi-occupation.
Despite the subsequent decades of gentrification, the borough is still a pretty mixed area with a high proportion of social housing, even if it does now have more vegan butchers than eel and pie shops.
The reason perhaps that it is so execrated by Middle England and the media loudmouths of the silent majority is its association with lefty-luvvie politics. Labour’s Tony Blair and Gordon Brown are said to have held a secret tryst at the Granita Restaurant in Upper Street to plot the future course of New Labour.
A decade later, Islington MP and resident Emily Thornberry took some serious flak after she dared to mock a true patriot who’d seen fit to deck the entire front of his house with St George’s flags.
“These metropolitan liberals are allergic to the ideals of patriotism and the self-reliant family,” railed former Islingtonian Harry Mount in the Daily Mail. “Politicians such as Emily Thornberry live a gilded life, utterly segregated from hard-working, working-class voters.”
Not everyone is a champagne socialist, of course. Boris Johnson lived in Islington for a decade until he dumped his £3.75 million Grade II-listed home and divvied up the proceeds with ex-wife Marina.
Tribune of the People Jeremy Corbyn is another local MP, although not known as a champagne quaffer.
The borough’s regeneration generation would have some justification in complaining that they have been reduced to a mere symbol of all the metropolitan hypocrises Middle England loves to hate.
That said, some may also recall that the first incomers were somewhat insenitive to the native proletarians they were displacing.
My favourite Islington story – stay with me here – comes from my time in Buenos Aires in the late 70s. A thrusting young executive had just been parachuted in to manage Reuters’ Latin American HQ and had invited half a dozen of us for an early evening cerveza to get to know “the team”.
Among our number was Ernie, a dimunitive and dapper Londoner who had been the bane of the London management in his role as a militant representative of one of the print unions. The bosses’ response had been to kick him upstairs into personnel, raise his salary and put him on a plane to Argentina.
The young thruster wanted to know about our lives back in Blighty and it came Ernie’s turn to tell him where he lived back home.
“Leytonstone,” says Ernie. “Leytonstone!”, came the disbelieving response. “Isn’t that out in Essex? How the hell do you get to work?”
Management boy interupted Ernie’s mumbled response by singing the praises of his home in Islington – the cosmopolitan artisan shops, the tree-lined squares, and all within walking distance of central London. Did Ernie know Islington?
“I was born and brought up there,” came the terse reply.
“You were born and brought up in Islington and you moved to Leytonstone! I cant believe it! Why?”
Ernie: “Cos cunts like you started movin’ in.”
Idle Thoughts on London Walks 