Chapter VII

THESE long preliminaries over, we may duly start for the North from the General Post Office, coming to Islington by way of Goswell Road. Here, at the “Peacock” or the “Angel,” travellers of a century and a-half ago were one mile from London, or from Hicks’s Hall, which was the same thing. A milestone proclaimed the fact, and its successor, with a different legend, stood until quite recently opposite the Grand Theatre, on Islington Green. Here stood the first toll-gate as you went out of London. Here also was the village pound for strayed horses and cattle. Here again, according to those who do not know anything at all about it, the bailiff’s daughter of Islington might have met her lover; only, unhappily for this Islington, the old ballad refers to quite another Islington, away in Norfolk.

The usual suburban perils awaited wayfarers to Islington at any time during the eighteenth century, and those bound for it from the city were accustomed to wait at the Smithfield end of St. John Street until a number had collected, when they were convoyed outwards by the armed patrol stationed there for that purpose. But the footpads were quite equal to the occasion, and simply waited until those parties dispersed for their several homes, and then, like skilful generals, attacked them in detail. The Islington Vestry were obliged to make a standing offer of £10 to any one who should arrest a robber; but that this failed seems certain, for at a later period we find the inhabitants subscribing a fund for rewards to those who arrested evildoers.

Time has wrought sad havoc with Islington’s once rural aspect, and with its old coaching inns. That grand coaching centre, the “Peacock,” has utterly vanished, and so has the picturesque “Queen’s Head,”—gabled, Elizabethan—wantonly destroyed in 1829; while the “Angel,” pulled down in 1819 and rebuilt, and again rebuilt in 1900, has since retired from business as a public-house, and is now a tea and lunch place, in the hands of a popular firm of caterers. In early days, and well on into the nineteenth century, the Green was really a pleasant spot, with tall elms shading the footpaths, and a very rustic-looking pound for strayed cattle. Near by stood for many years a little hatter’s shop, bearing the legend in large characters, “Old Hats Beavered,” and it is curious to note how, in a long succession of old prints, this shop and its now curiously sounding notice kept their place while all else was changing.

[Picture: Islington Green, 1820]

Islington was once a Cockney paradise, and to it retired, as into the country, the good citizens and shopkeepers of London, setting up miniature parks and pleasances of their own. So favourite a practice was this that the witlings of that period, a hundred and fifty years ago, used to publish absurd notices supposed to have been found displayed at the entrances of these haunts. “The New Paradise,” ran one of them, “Gentlemen with Nails in their Boots not Admitted.” Perhaps also “Serpents Warned Off.” At that time, and long before, Islington was resorted to on account of some alleged mineral waters existing here. “Islington,” according to M. Henri Misson, who travelled in England, and wrote a book about us and our country in 1718, “is a large village, half a league from London, where you drink waters that do you neither good nor harm, provided you don’t take too much of them.” This is decidedly a “palpable hit,” and may be commended to those who take medicinal waters in our own time.

“It is not much flock’d to by People of Quality,” he goes on to observe. Here, at least, he is not out of date. People of Quality do not flock to Islington. The medicinal waters are all gone; and that Islington is, even now, not in any great degree a resort of fashion is an incontrovertible fact.

Between this and Highgate, the road leading to what the poets call the “true and tender North” is by no means happy. Any other of the classic highways of England begins better, and however delightful the Holloway Road may have been in the coaching age, it is in these crowded days a very commonplace thoroughfare indeed. The long reaches of mean streets and sordid bye-roads combine with the unutterably bad road surface to render the exit from London anything but pleasurable.

Sir Walter Scott, on his way down to Abbotsford in 1826, calls the Great North Road “the dullest road in the world, though the most convenient,” and the description, minus the convenience, might well stand for its suburban portion to-day. In Sir Walter’s time, however, these first few miles were only just emerging from a condition in which dulness could have had no part. In fact, it may well be supposed that the travellers, who up to that time went by coach to York, well armed, found the journey a thought too lively. Indeed, the Holloway Road, into which they came, from the last outposts of civilisation, was, as it were the ante-chamber into that direful territory of highwaymen and footpads, the veritable Alsatias of Finchley Common and Whetstone. In fact, a few years earlier still, when there were no houses at Holloway at all, and no district known by that name, what is now called the Holloway Road was a lonely track, full of mud and water, through which the coach route ran, infested all the while by the most villainous characters, compared with whom the gay highwayman in ruffles and lace, and mounted on a mettlesome horse, was a knight indeed—a chevalier without fear or reproach. This stretch of road lay then between high banks, and considerably below the level of the surrounding fields. It was a “hollow” road, as such roads are called wherever they exist in the country—the actual, original Hollow Way from which, in the course of time, a whole residential district has obtained its name. Such roads, worn down through the earth by constant traffic, are always very ancient, and though the story of the Holloway Road at a period from a hundred and fifty to eighty years ago was a disgraceful one, the inhabitants of that part can console themselves by the soothing thought that, although it cannot claim the Roman ancestry of the route by Shoreditch, Waltham Cross and Cheshunt, which was the Ermine Way, the road in question probably dates back to the respectable antiquity of mediæval times.