page_title: Upper Street
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Upper Street / History
caption_attribution_description: Upper Street, Islington, showing St Mary's Church
context_page_description: Upper Street is the main street of the Islington district of inner north London, and carries the A1 road. It begins at the junction of the A1 and Pentonville Road and City Road, and runs roughly northwards past Angel Underground station, then past the Business Design Centre, then splits at Islington Green, then past the Screen on the Green cinema, the town hall, ending at Highbury & Islington tube station on Highbury corner, where the A1 carries on as Holloway Road. The southernmost 500 metres, from the junction to Islington Green, also carries the historical name of Islington's High Street.
  It contains many fashionable shops, pubs, restaurants and theatres, including the now closed Granita restaurant where Tony Blair and Gordon Brown were said to have made their deal on the future leadership of the Labour Party.
context_section_description: The hilltop village of Islington originally consisted of two streets in addition to the High Street: Upper Street and Lower Street, which diverged from the High Street at Islington Green. Both date back to at least the 12th century. Henry VIII hunted duck in the ponds off Upper Street, while Walter Raleigh lived in Upper Street and owned a pub in Lower Street. Lower Street has since been renamed Essex Road.
  The fields around Upper Street, with their close proximity to the growing city of London, were a major farming area. Islington was the home of the Royal Agricultural Hall, and a number of pubs and shops existed along the street to serve farmers and visitors to the hall.
  In the 18th century Upper Street began to be redeveloped from an agricultural to a residential area. Ten houses were built in 1768 (later named Hornsey Row), and a further group built immediately south of Hornsey Row in 1792. A William Beverley (identified with William Roxby Beverley), the first to solve the problem of a "magic knight's tour" (a variant on the knight's tour in which the numbered steps form a magic square) resided in these buildings, now replaced by Islington Town Hall.
  In the late nineteenth century, the Upper Street area became notorious for its night-time entertainments. In 1870, Charles Dickens described the area as "amongst the noisiest and most disagreeable thoroughfares in London." and in 1885, it was widely known as "The Devil's Mile" on account of its prostitution, crime and the level of drunkenness.
  Upper Street is unusual in being one of the few streets in London to have a "high pavement". This was constructed in the 1860s to protect pedestrians from being splashed by the large numbers of animals using the road to reach the rear of the new Royal Agricultural Hall (repurposed in 1986 as the present Business Design Centre); as a consequence, the pavement is approximately 1 m above the road surface for some of the length of the street. One of the few other London streets with a high pavement, Liverpool Road, is the next road west of Upper Street and also serviced the Royal Agricultural Hall.
caption: Upper Street, with the spire of St Mary's Church
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