When I tell people I live in Islington, they tell me I’m lucky to live in such a ‘cool’ and ‘trendy’ place. When I say that, no, Islington is not cool or trendy but bland and boring, they don’t believe me.
I plead with them: you don’t understand what has happened to my beloved Islington! Back in the 1960s, it had character. Style. Funky shops. Funky people. Bohemians. Eccentrics. Writers. It had working men’s cafés that offered such delights as bread and dripping.
And what does Islington have now? Rich people and a thousand and one shops selling the same artisan coffee, specialist pasta and esoteric cheeses. Back then, we only had one posh restaurant, owned by Robert Carrier, and now it’s one of the most restaurant-dense areas in the UK. No wonder estate agents call Islington a ‘foodies’ paradise’.
My family moved there in 1964 from the USA. Back then, Islington was known as fashionable but slightly sordid. They were part of that first wave of middle- class creative people moving into what was a solidly working-class area.
You had journalists such as Patrick Marnham of Private Eye, men of letters such as John Mander of Encounter magazine, and the pop singer Paul Jones of Manfred Mann. They all lived on my street. Later, we had the writer Peter Ackroyd and Michael Young – who coined the term ‘meritocracy’ – living either side of us. The Old Etonian
poet Hugo Williams bought his dilapidated Georgian house in 1966 for £5,000.
Islington was the perfect neighbourhood for people on their way up or on their way down.
I remember the regular appearance of a rag-and-bone man right out of Steptoe and Son, complete with his horse and cart. During the summer of love in ’67, there were stoned hippies in the local park and scary skinheads on the streets.
Every day, I went to the local primary school down Noel Road, where the playwright Joe Orton was yet to be murdered by his companion Kenneth Halliwell.
And had you been there in the sixties, you might have seen a loud, crazy American couple looking like ageing hippies – yes, that was my parents, Jay and Fran Landesman, both writers.
If you’d been there in the late seventies, you might have seen another odd couple I called Dracula and his bride: it was the lead singer of the Damned and his wife. Islington lost its character when it lost its characters.
Today, walking near my home is a wistful trip down memory lane. The newsagent is still there, but the pot- smoking jazz-loving mod who owned it is long gone. So too is the local leather-clad rocker with his loud Triumph motorbike.
And now all I see are affluent men and women; hedge-fund managers, bankers, City types reeking of success and self- satisfaction. You can always spot the really rich ones by just how scruffy they are.
My parents’ house on Duncan Terrace was Islington’s Boho central. Spandau Ballet co-founder Gary Kemp said in his autobiography that going to the Landesmans’ was his first encounter with the bohemian way of life.
Excuse me while I shamelessly name-drop. My parents brought to Islington the likes of Norman Mailer and Tom Waits.
In the seventies, at one of their parties, Johnny Rotten shared the social spotlight with the critic William Empson. And neighbours never got over the night that Barbra Streisand turned up in a limousine nearly as long as the street.
Creatives can be a pain in the arse when too drunk or too stoned, as they often were. But they had a fundamental belief in books, culture and good conversation. Today, money talks, but it has nothing interesting to say. We hear much about the snobbish North London elite who, according to Islingtonian Dominic Cummings, have dinner parties where people discuss the works of the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan.
If only that were true! Instead, they still grumble about Brexit, and boast about their brilliant children.
What happened to Islington? In the 1990s came a new wave of gentrification, with people such as Tony and Cherie Blair and Emily Thornberry MP moving in. This is when Islington became associated with champagne socialists living in their £3m homes. It’s an image that persists today. In 2021, Boris called Keir Starmer a ‘lefty Islington lawyer’ – Boris should know, as he lived there too. In fact, Keir Starmer lives in nearby Kentish Town.
That wave of gentrifiers was, from 2000, replaced by what Loretta Lees, professor of geography, calls a new breed of ‘super-gentrifiers’, better known as the global elite. And the gap between the rich and poor of Islington has never been so great.
Of course, times change and so do neighbourhoods. Gentrification is a fact of urban life – so there’s no point in being nostalgic. But I still miss the Islington of old – especially when people tell me it’s such a cool place to live.
Cosmo Landesman is author of Jack and Me: How NOT to Live After Loss
