Your saves are on this device only.
They could be cleared at any time, and you won't see them on other devices. Create a free account or sign in to keep them safe in the cloud.
The most beautiful streets in London: squares, mews and lanes, some of them famous and some that take finding.
Four terraces of steep-gabled Gothic houses round a public garden, by an architect who otherwise built churches.
Squares & yards
The Drapers' Company was left this ground in 1690 - a field called Gosseyfield, given to pay for almshouses across the river in Southwark - and it was still open country in 1818, when it served as a pen for cattle being driven to Smithfield. When the company built on it in the 1830s they used their own surveyor, Richard Cromwell Carpenter. His father, who had held the same post, had drawn pairs of plain classical houses for the site; Carpenter took over on his father's death in 1839 and finished it to his own design instead, in the Gothic he spent the rest of a short career putting into churches. Forty-eight tall houses went up between 1838 and 1845, in yellow-brown brick, each front narrowing to a steep pointed gable, the windows framed in pale stone and the doors arched. At the corners the doors come in threes.
The church-like look seems to have drawn a particular kind of tenant: a third of the people living here in 1851 were in religious orders. The square went the way of most of Islington after that, let out as furnished rooms, and by 1954 it was shabby enough for the Drapers' Company to sell the lot at auction; the houses were bought and repaired one at a time from the 1960s on. The garden in the middle was private, with its own gardener, until Islington Council bought it in 1960 for fifty pounds and opened the gate. Its railings had been taken away during the Second World War and were not put back until 1971. It is half an acre of plane and beech trees, conifers and flower beds, and anyone can walk in.
Submit a correction for this listing.
Data is compiled from public sources including OpenStreetMap, under the ODbL.