Islingtongue > Leytonstongue

Bareknuckle Irish boozer with Gaelish signage and brawling on the pavement outside.

Labels: caledonian road, islington

In the days of the Friday pedlars market, the Clock Tower bell tolled at 10am and let the traders in. In its day the Caledonian Market was one of the wonders of London right up till 1939. Stories abounded of punters picking up priceless treasure for a few shillings amongst the old eggcups, odd shoes, false teeth and pieces of rusty iron. A famous racing tipster called Ras Prince Monolulu dished out winners for a price. HV Morton describes the scene in 'The Heart of London' and tells of a friend who picks up an Egyptian Mummy for 10 shillings.
The painter Walter Sickert, who lived nearby, haunted the market and proclaimed that it was his idea of heaven.

Labels: caledonian park, caledonian road, islington, pleasure gardens

"Sex Workers use the park and accost people on Market Road", warns the bulletin put out by The Friends of Caledonian Park. The whores have been pushed north by the development of Kings Cross. It's a different kind of meat market now. Pimps, prostitutes, kerb crawlers, undercover police surveillance twitching in the bushes, men reading their papers on the park benches get approached for business. The girls have the faces of ghosts, the spirit having departed the body for protection. The Gazette carries the gruesome story of a prostitute picked up in Market Road then pushed out of the seven and a half tonne lorry after rowing about the cost of oral sex and crushed to death under its back wheels.
When HV Morton visited the market in 1926 he was offered a skeleton for sale. Down the road a woman's mutilated body was fished out of the Regent's Canal by a group of kids. "Ripper Killing Horror" screams the Islington Gazette. She was a prostitute, probably from the Market Road meat-rack, chopped up in a crack den round the corner on Conistone Way, an area that once housed abattoirs and horse slaughterers. Some believe that Walter Sickert was the real Jack The Ripper, his paintings depicting his victims' anguished faces. The girls I see working the park gates have something of the Victorian about them. Dr Crippin murdered his wife not far away in Hilldrop Crescent and was hung in Pentonville Prison down the road. Is this another case of historic symmetry.

Labels: caledonian park, caledonian road, islington, pleasure gardens

The clocktower is framed by the notorious Market Estate, "hell" to its residents. Collapsed ceilings, exposed wires, boarded-up windows, doors off their hinges. One such heavily reinforced door fell on a 12 year-old boy and killed him. Hands have been washed of the affair at the Town Hall. The housing association has handed it back to the council and now they're knocking the lot down.

The arches of the Clock Tower cast shadows that create a scene like a De Chirico painting. It's deathly quiet and I have the odd sensation of being in an Italian piazza del duomo at lunchtime. The burnt out post box, CCTV and sudden burst of violent language pull me back to the reality of a condemned GLC Housing Scheme. Groups of teens in sportswear with a gangsta rap blaring ghetto blaster stand on a white petal-strewn path. It brings out the romantic in me, the one that ignores the smashed in windows of the Islington Scouts blue minibus.

Labels: caledonian park, caledonian road, islington, pleasure gardens

The park has been marked for regeneration. There's talk of restoring "the historic symmetry of the site", reopening the north-south axis. This was once one of London's most famous pleasure gardens. Opened in the 1620's, city folk escaped out here to the inn of Copenhagen House to take tea in the gardens, play skittles and fives, watch the boxing, shoot a few pigeons. The descriptions of it paint a Constable-like rustic idyll.

It was also a nest of radicalism almost as significant as Clerkenwell Green. The Gordon Rioters passed through on their way to burn the mansion at Ken Wood. One landlord of the inn was a member of The London Corresponding Society and held huge meetings here to put forward their Chartist aims and extol the virtues of The French Revolution. And in 1834 100,000 trade unionists gathered in support of The Tollpuddle Martyrs.

Labels: caledonian park, caledonian road, pleasure gardens

The Metropolitan Cattle Market was moved here from Smithfield in 1855. There were also twelve banking houses that serviced the livestock deals carried out in cash. An Indoor Tennis Centre and Astroturf football pitch are on the site of the old animal lairs. The only remnants I can find are a sundial topped with small metal cows and the rusting metal posts of the cattle shed against a crumbling brick wall in an overgrown ditch that runs up the back of the tennis courts and the football pitch. The only thing agricultural round here now are some of the tackles in the Islington Midweek League.

The historic symmetry of this spot projects throughout the area. Barnsbury Estate has a Copenhagen House which sits on Copenhagen Street not far from the King of Denmark pub. All in honour of the Danish ambassador who took up his plague-time residence on Copenhagen Fields or it may have been some other noble Dane, nobody's quite sure. There's the Pleasure Garden 24 Hour Sauna and Spa on Caledonian Road maintaining the reputation for "questionable houses of entertainment". In Edward Square just off 'the Cally' a poem by the poet laureate Andrew Motion which is carved in concrete talks of Romans facing Boadicea (allegedly at Battle Bridge/Kings Cross), Chartists and freedom. A huge mural adorns the wall next to the Mitre Pub in Copenhagen Street showing the Tollpuddle Martyrs demonstration (painted by Dave) and Islington Police Station sits ironically on Tollpuddle Street. Tony Blair would have had a view of the clock tower from his pre-No.10 home in Richmond Crescent.

Labels: caledonian park, caledonian road, pleasure gardens

White Conduit House, C18th Century Pleasure Garden and once home to the cricket club that became the famous MCC. It's now closed apparently to become a Greek restaurant. The last days as a pub were troubled by brawling. One Monday night I was the solitary punter as the landlady yelled at the Polish barmaid "turn up the music and let's have some fun".
Oliver Goldsmith came here for the hot buttered buns and wrote about it in 'The Citizen of the World'. Peter Ackroyd says there was a maze in the garden and possibly marks the spot of Druidic rituals.

Labels: druids, islington, pleasure gardens

Banksy pays a visit to Dodneys Tea Garden on the corner of Penton Street, now Clockwork - hangout for Carhartt-clad vodka liggers

Labels: islington, penton, pentonville