Essex Road, Islington

In the 1970s, Essex Road was a gritty, bustling arterial thoroughfare running through an Islington in the throes of transition, long before uniform gentrification took hold. Beneath blackened Victorian and Georgian facades, the street hummed with unpretentious working-class commerce: greasy spoons, pawnbrokers, traditional butchers, and second-hand furniture shops jostling alongside smoky public houses like The Old Queen’s Head and the Green Man. The former ABC Carlton Cinema had shuttered and reopened as a Mecca Bingo hall, while diesel fumes from red double-decker buses hung over the pavements alongside steam from launderettes. Yet behind this weathered, industrial grime lay a fierce countercultural energy: cheap, often dilapidated housing made the surrounding terraces a hotbed for student squats, political collectives, and community radicalism, giving 1970s Essex Road a distinctive atmosphere that was at once stubbornly old-fashioned, rough around the edges, and politically electric.

Appears in

• Me Neither - A Memoir
  1970s first shoots of the gig economy.