Back in the 1960s, the artist, critic and long-standing Daily Telegraph columnist Geoffrey Fletcher pioneered the exploration of the “less exalted” parts of London: not the tourist haunts but the ordinary, the back places, the areas he said “characterise the real life of a city and its people”.
In all, Fletcher wrote 18 books with London in the title, including a short collection of walks called Offbeat in London, published in 1966. I have owned an inherited copy for years and recently decided to at last follow Fletcher’s route through what he’d called “Sickert’s Islington” after the leading post-impressionist, a fellow chronicler of the back streets of the city. I started at Camden Passage off Upper Street.
Fletcher was no wallower in nostalgia. He liked old London but was also interested in the constantly changing character of the capital and in Islington in particular, which he called one of the “most intriguing” parts of the city. His route took me via Charlton Place to Duncan Terrace to Vincent Terrace, where in the 1920s Sickert painted his well-known Hanging Gardens of Islington. A view of the Georgian houses of Noel Road from the other side of Regent’s Canal, the painting was named for the washing lines in the gardens as much as for the greenery above the towpath.
By 1966, although Sickert’s scene was still easily recognisable, what some have called the first wave of gentrification was underway: the long-neglected terraces were being rediscovered and restored by the middle-classes. Fletcher described “snazzy brass door-knockers…olive green doors, white Venetian blinds and back yards improved to become patios”, and, in the canalside gardens, “cast iron seats and urns” replacing the washing lines.
He was happy to see the terraces “coming up in the world” and welcomed the wider changes too. “Journalists, artists, television producers and actors” along with what he described, being of his time, as the “coloured population”, had become as “much a part of the landscape as the original North London inhabitants,” he said. I guess he may not have imagined that the Noel Road house where Sickert lodged in 1924 would today be on the market for almost £4 million.
Fletcher here turned back towards the Angel, but I headed east to the City Road basin off the canal, opened in the 1820s. For many years not just a major cargo hub but a centre for industry too – from ironworks and sawmills to chemicals – the basin was in a battle for survival at the time Fletcher was writing, with the British Waterways Board wanting to fill it in for redevelopment.
The plans were dropped after a vigorous campaign led by one of those new Noel Road residents, Crystal Hale. who went on to found the Islington Boat Club, still going strong on the basin today. A council masterplan agreed in 2004 eventually brought consistency to the area’s development, including its two “landmark” towers, the striking 31-storey Canaletto – it is by the canal, I guess – and the 36-storey Chronicle.
On an overcast autumn afternoon the area itself felt somewhat grey and exposed. The Victorian warehouses around the basin hadn’t in the main survived earlier development in the 1970s. It was almost a surprise to turn the corner into Wharf Road, past Canaletto and McDonald’s, and find the mid-19th century former furniture factory which became home to the Victoria Miro gallery (pictured) almost 25 years ago. Rents were quadrupling in Mayfair’s the gallery’s original home, and this part of Islington was becoming a new locus for artists and gallerists. Fletcher would have recognised the trajectory,
If attempting to woo collectors and art lovers from the West End seemed daring at the time, Victoria Miro, with its airy spaces and unexpected garden landscaped around the end of the Wenlock basin in Hoxton, is now firmly established. It can even be seen as something of a survivor. The White Cube gallery, pioneer promoter of the Young British Artists grouping, moved in to the area in the same year, but left in 2012, prompting concerns about “the end of east London’s art scene”. Since then, other galleries have moved on.
There was still a buzz around the Miro though, with visitors queueing for its latest fully-booked Yayoi Kusama show. Inside, there was another queue for the show’s centrepiece, Kusama’s immersive Infinity room, with its flashing lights and mirrored walls creating endlessly multiplying reflections of the viewer.
It’s disconcerting, but also spectacular, a culmination perhaps of the now 95-year-old artist’s vision since she unveiled her first infinity room in 1965. Appropriate too in a place of continuing change, which Fletcher had also embraced. All this, he wrote “is the living city”.
OnLondon.co.uk provides unique coverage of the capital’s politics, development and culture. Support it for just £5 a month or £50 a year and get things for your money other people won’t. Details HERE. Follow Charles Wright on Bluesky and on X/Twitter. Photo courtesy Victoria Miro, London and Venice.