The Angel stands at one end of the City Road the other end is at Old Street, just round the corner from where I did my early training courses with Post Office Telecoms at Paul Street, a massive, then modern institution clad in glass and steel. One oddity I remember was that erected in the basement were short telegraph poles for the “Over Head” courses. Opposite the training school was another massive building, this time Victorian, from the architectural school of dark satanic mills, occupied by the firm of Blades and Blades East, a printing firm where Grandfather once worked, but that’s incidental. All have now gone and are just a memory.
The area is rich in history much beyond memory, in the 17th century the Fortune Theatre and the Red Lion Theatre provided theatre goers with entertainment outside the control of the City of London. The 1680s saw the new fad of drinking spring water. One of the springs was at Thomas
Sadler’s music house. My mother and her sisters remember playing on this derelict site as children. They had no knowledge of the history of the their play ground until the well was rediscovered during redevelopment of the site, which is now occupied by Sadler’s Wells Theatre.For the less discerning there was Stokes’s Amphitheatre offering bull and bear baiting, sword fighting and women’s wrestling. The New Red Lion offered cock-fighting. Slowly, however, the authorities exerted control and the area began to become gentrified, as can still be seen in the existing Georgian streets and squares, though the grim grip of London was not far away. In the 1740s the area had London’s first smallpox hospital before it moved further out of London, in 1794, to sunnier climes; the current site of King’s Cross Station. Then came industrialization, the Regents Canal and the Railways, followed by poor housing, slums and growing poverty. The local vestries, predecessors to the Borough Councils, were reluctant to use their enforcement powers against the slums, as often they were the landlords. Conditions were chronic and required political solutions – the formation of the borough councils and the London County Council.
The Regent’s Canal is still a notable feature of the area although much quieter than it once was. Once one of its great basins cut across the City Road, no doubt full of water borne traffic. Which recalls another memory associated with the City Road – the children’s poem:
Up and down the City Road,in and out the Eagle.
That’s the way the money goes,
pop goes the weasel.
I can certainly remember a pub in the City Road named the Eagle, perhaps it’s still there, perhaps it’s the one referred to in the poem. I don’t know for sure, but the story is that, at one time the Landlord of the Eagle ran a pawn brokers business on the side. Those short of money would go to the pub to pawn their possessions and no doubt drink the proceeds. The weasel was an iron. Well that’s the way the story goes, according to my memory. Is it memory, an oral tradition handed down through generations as a cautionary tale against exacerbating poverty, or is it history – what do you reckon?
John Clark
