In and out The Eagle

Laurie thanks for reviving the memory – sticky fingers. I am referring of course to cakes and your last article and the Lyons Tea House at the Angel. Lots of sticky cakes, when I was a child my father was chef at Lyons at the Angel, and Gran lived round the corner but that’s incidental.


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

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