Angel of the North?

When I was a child in the mid 60s I remember my two elder brothers putting their money together and buying a box of Monopoly. (You can imagine the arguments that caused!) Of course like most annoying younger brothers I wanted to play, and eventually through constant nagging, (I haven’t changed some would say) I got to play at the game; it was my first introduction to many of the famous streets of London.

As I got older I visited most of those streets, as they are fairly central to the capital and I’ve worked there for over 29 years. It was only recently however, that I ended up walking around the Angel, when my job moved to the Angel. So why is the area called the Angel?

Being interested in local history, (as some of you may have guessed from this series), I set out to find the answer, and in the process found that once again an area that has political, industrial and literal connections. First, however let us start where I did; Monopoly arrived in the UK in 1935 when Parker Brothers sent a copy to local games maker Waddingtons. Victor Watson, the head of the company, immediately liked the game but thought, to be a success here, that they would have to replace the American streets and dollars with British roads, stations and pounds. So he sent his secretary, Marjory Phillips, out to collect a list of names. After scouting London for suitable sites the couple met at the Angel’s Lyon Tea House, at One Islington High Street, to discuss the selection.

That tea house is commemorated on the board as The Angel Islington. The tea house was originally an inn near a tollgate on the Great North Road, the original building was rebuilt in 1819 and became a coaching inn; the first staging post outside the City of London. It became a local landmark and was mentioned by Charles Dickens in Oliver Twist: “The coach rattled away and, turning when it reached the Angel at Islington, stopped at length before a neat house in Pentonville”.

A new building, in pale terracotta stone with a corner cupola, replaced the old building in 1899 and from 1921 to 1959 the building was a Lyons Corner House. It is now a Co-operative Bank and stands opposite the Angel Centre. It is said Thomas Paine stayed at the inn after he returned from France in 1790, and it is believed that he wrote passages of the Rights of Man whilst staying there.

More recent famous residents of the Angel area include comic author Douglas Adams, of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy fame, and Joe Orton, who was murdered by his lover, Kenneth Halliwell, just around the corner in Noel Road. Of course the area is mostly harmless, (“In joke” Ed), but does have a couple of other claims to fame for transport enthusiasts.

The modern but otherwise unremarkable, single line tube station opposite the site of the coaching inn does have the longest escalators of any station on the Underground, (with a vertical rise of 27.4m [90ft] and a length of 60m [197ft]).

Another is the longest canal tunnel in London which passes unnoticed beneath. It was from walking along Islington High St and spotting the Blue Insets in the pavement which today mark the tow path, that I found this out. Islington Tunnel is the major engineering work of the Regent’s Canal and is 886 meters, or 960 yards long; it opened in 1820. Dead straight, it certainly deserves its own story.

So once again those simple questions can lead to interesting trivia and give us a feeling of what parts of London were once like. Now metropolitan, perhaps once a country area just outside London where you could break your journey in a old inn, The Angel, (the original "Angel of the North"? - North of London of course) before heading into the City on business.

Laurie Smith

Kennington - common and the church.

There is a famous photo of the Grand Surrey Canal with a vessel in the foreground and St George’s church in the background. I mentioned it in my previous post on the Grand Surrey Canal. Now St George’s is one of a group of churches know collectively as the Waterloo churches. After Waterloo, an Act of Parliament was passed in 1818 to raise a million pounds as a national thank-offering for peace and as a memorial to the soldiers who had fallen. Seven of these churches were built in south London and all but one of them is in our branch area.

St George’s we have seen is in Camberwell. St Matthew with St Jude is the one in the middle of the one way system in Brixton. St John the Evangelist stands at the end of Waterloo Road opposite the IMAX at the bottom of Waterloo Bridge. St Luke’s (the only one not in our branch area) is at the bottom of Knight’s Hill opposite West Norwood cemetery. St Peter’s is just off Walworth Road and St James is just off Jamaica Road in Rotherhithe. Now I’m sure that they all have their own stories to tell, but it is the seventh one, St Mark’s, which stands opposite the Oval tube station in Kennington that I am writing about here. This is the one which I saw most often when, for ten years, I got on and off a bus at the Oval on my journey to and from work at Vauxhall Exchange from the late 70s to late 80s.

St Marks Church stands at the junction of two old Roman Roads, (today’s Brixton and Clapham Roads), and was along with nearby Kennington Park, part of the old Kennington common.

The Common was a favourite place for chariot racing and cricket, and for six months of the year cattle and sheep grazed the common. But it had a more sinister use too; until 1799 this was also the site of a public gallows where, in 1746, twenty-one members of the Jacobite Rebellion, captured at Culloden Moor, were executed.

Another use of the common was as a gathering place for preachers; in 1739 John Wesley preached on the common to an estimated 50,000 people. Fifty years later, an early black preacher, the radical Robert Wedderburn, (born to a West African slave woman in Jamaica), spoke here too. So it is no surprise that when looking for sites for the Waterloo churches, Kennington common was chosen. (A young pawnbroker’s assistant on Kennington Park Road, William Booth, continued this tradition of preaching on Kennington Common in the 1840’s. He and his wife Catherine went on to found the Salvation Army.)

St. Mark’s took two years to build and was opened by the Archbishop of Canterbury on June 30th 1824, the cost of £15,274 was paid as part of the million pounds raised for the purpose.

The great Reform Act of 1831 brought direct representation to Parliament for the first time with Lambeth becoming a parliamentary constituency on 7 June 1832.

Now voting in elections took place on Kennington Common, though only property owning men could vote. The country was seething with political agitation. The Chartists (‘Peace and Order is our Motto’) described themselves as ‘pining in misery, want and starvation’. They held a mass demonstration on the Common on 10 April 1848. Asking for fair wages and other human rights, the heavily policed event passed off peacefully. However, the Establishment, including the then vicar of St Marks, was frightened. The common was enclosed and cricket moved to the Oval.

The new park was run by the ‘Royals’, (the Prince of Wales having given £200 of the £1000 needed for fencing), until it was passed into the hands of what became the London County Council in 1887.

Another person with a connection to the area is Field Marshall Sir Bernard Montgomery of Alamein, his father, historian H.H. Montgomery, was vicar here when Bernard was born in 1887.

The church was restored in 1931 at which time the glass dome was installed. Bombed in September 1940, it was scheduled for demolition. However, Wallace Bird, a man of vision and faith, became vicar in 1947. The building was partially re-opened in 1949 and fully opened on 12th March 1960.

Laurie Smith