Along Hornsey Road, Holloway 1990: More from my walk on Sunday February 25th 1990 which began with Around Finsbury Park – 1990. The previous post on this walk was Houses, a Club, Ghost Sign, Blouses and Baths – 1990.
The Andover Medical Centre is at 270-282 Hornsey Road a short distance north from the Hornsey Road Baths and I made my picture from the corner of Hornsey Road and Newington Barrow Way which leads to the Andover Estate, a large council estate begun in 1938 but greatly enlarged in 1973-9.
The graffiti ‘DON’T BE SCARED OF FREEDOM’ which attracted my attention is of course long gone. So too is the sprawling bush and there are no some car parking spaces in its place.
I continued walking up Hornsey Road for well over a quarter of a mile before making my next picture looking across the road and down Bavaria Road. Here a sign high on the wall at 395 Hornsey Road announces the Alexandra Coffee Tavern and above the modern street sign is the former name of the street, Blenheim Road. Before becoming a temperance tavern this had been a pub, the Blenheim Arms, opened (and built) probably in 1869, but by 1881 it was the Alexandra Coffee Tavern, part of a then growing temperance movement.
The name Alexandra probably came from Princess Alexandra of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg who married the son and heir of Queen Victoria in 1863 and became a popular royal very much involved in charity work as Princess of Wales until 1901 when she became queen.
I was also attracted by the signage for the locksmiths then in the former pub, particualr the four different types of keys shown above the shop at right. The Victorian building had been incorporated into a more modern structure both on Hornsey Road and Bavaria Rd. Since 1990 an extra storey has been added to the building which now houses The Pelvic Academy offering Physiotherapy and Wellness.
I walked a short distance down Bavaria Road to photograph Replica House, built in 1883 as a chapel to seat 450 on what was then Blenheim Road to the designs of architects Lander & Bedells, possibly replacing an earlier chapel here. By 1916 it was known as Blenheim Congregational Mission Hall. According to British History Online it had closed by 1954. The street had become Bavaria Road in 1938.
Replicards Limited who occupied it at the time of my picture had renamed the building Replica House. They were a graphics design studio incorporated in 1967. At the right of their sign are the letters ‘Exhibitic’, perhaps where the end of the sign had been at some time truncated with that ‘c’ really being part of an ‘o’. Had it been moved from a slightly wider building where it had once said ‘Exhibitions’?
Back on Hornsey Road I photographed a long terrace of shops with The Hanley Arms pub at the left, roughly opposite Bavaria Road looking to the south. This Grade II listed pub was apparently in place here by 1827 although the ground floor frontage dates from around 1900. It closed as a pub around 2007 and 440 Hornsey Road is now an Islamic mosque, Masjid-e-Yusuf.
I continued up Hornsey Road to Marlborough Road where I made this picture close to the corner, but I think this building with its flower motifs above the doorway has been demolished.
A little further down is a splendid garage building I think from the 1920s or 30s, Marlborough Service Station, still there and very much in business in 2025.
The building at 165 Marlborough Rd is still there and has been sympathetically remodelled on the ground floor with a extra door and two new windows in what was then a blank area of brick.
Megatron was a company that I had some dealings with, as from 1984 until the company was liquidated in 2010 they made – among many other products – the legendary Weston Master photographic exposure meters. When I broke the very thin glass over the needle on mine I sent it back to Megatron for repair. It wasn’t cheap, and when I broke it again I decided instead to replace the glass with a thin sheet of acrylic, superglued in place.
As well as still photographs, many professional movies were shot with the aid of a Weston light meter in various models since the 1930s. Later models came with a white plastic ‘Invercone‘, an inverted cone which fitted over the metering cell to allow accurate measurement of incident light – the light falling onto a scene – as well as the more normal reflected light measurement. The Weston meters have a large selenium cell which generates an electric current when light falls on it and do not need batteries.
Grenville Road is a turning on the east side of Hornsey Road a short distance north from Marlborough Road, just before the bridge over what is now the Suffragette Line of the Overground, then known as the Gospel Oak to Barking or Goblin line. I’m unsure exactly where on the road Astoria Auto Breakers was, but I liked the skeletal nature of the racked cars and the leafless tree.
More from this walk later on >Re:PHOTO.
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