Christian Aid Sponsored Walk – London Churches: Soon after we moved to our present address in 1974, Linda took over as Christian Aid organiser for the area, only retiring from this in recent months. Over the years she has gone on a number of sponsored walks for them and some related organisations as well as organising some in our area.
I’ve often walked with her on these, as well as sometimes sponsoring her, largely to keep her company, but sometimes to make sure she didn’t get lost despite the clear maps given to walkers and the large numbers of people following the walks. But also because the routes took you to and past some interesting places and sometimes into churches or areas of them seldom open to the public.
Although I have had a great interest in architecture I’ve never had a great interest in photographing church interiors, partly because they have been so much photographed by others, and the photographs I made on these walks were very much pictures on my days off. Often I carried very little equipment, though Sunday 20 May, 2007 was something of an exception as together with my Nikon D200 I had Nikon wide and telephoto zooms and a fisheye.
On My London Diary you can see over a hundred pictures I made on the walk, some of very well known and much photographed parts of the City of London, others less so. There are captions identifying most on those pages, but here I’ll post them without them – and just a couple of clues to the more difficult.
The plaque marks where Dositey Obradovich, first Serbian Minister of Education lived in London in 1784The bird a pelican, though to me it looked like a swan.
If you can name all these I’ve posted above, you must surely be a certified London Green Badge Guide – and I think anything over half shows a fairly intimate knowledge of the City. I think all the answers are in my post on My London Diary at Christian Aid walk – London churches.
And finally, one I can’t remember where I found it – perhaps someone can tell me in a comment.
Although I had begun this walk on my own, at some point I had joined up with others for a walk around the area organised by GLIAS, the Greater London Industrial Archaeology Society, of which I had long been a member, and some of the others taking part in the walk can be seen in this and some later pictures.
This alley is now an entrance to the Regent Quarter, an estate which “is currently arranged in two blocks and comprises approximately 260,730 sq ft of mixed-use real estate, across 12 office buildings and 20 retail and leisure units” which was purchased by Hong Kong based Endurance Land in 2018 who aim to revitalise the 3.5 acre site.
The name Regent Quarter applies to a larger area, mainly within Islington but also including the ‘Lighthouse’ block in Camden which largely grew up around the railway. Back in 1989 around a third of the buildings in the area were vacant, some derelict and the rest largely in poor condition, partly because of the blighting effect of uncertainly over future major developments in the area, much of which was then expected to be demolished for the Channel Tunnel Rail Link and in which I became interested through the Kings Cross Railway Lands Group in the late 1980s.
Old Forge, Business Centre, Caledonian Rd, Pentonville, Islington, 1989 89-4d-15
This is now a part of the Regent Quarter and I think these particular buildings in the block west of the Caledonian Road reached from the alley above through the opening at the centre of this picture are still present around this internal courtyard. But I can find no mention now of the Old Forge Business Centre name still in the area.
Old Forge, Business Centre, Caledonian Rd, Pentonville, Islington, 1989 89-4e-61
Another picture of the internal courtyard of what was the the Old Forge Business Centre.
We returned to the Caledonian Road and I took this photograph across the road of one end of Keystone Crescent, but our walk conitnued north up the Caledonian Road, though I did photograph Keystone Crescent on other walks in the area.
The group turned west down Caledonia Street stopping to admire the 1906 built frontage of the former Kings Cross Laundry, with the large intertwined KCL insignia. More recent signs included those for Lanitis Fabrics Ltd, and Stella Models, with signs calling for Machinists, Overlockers, Pressers, Finishers and Cutters, though I think the business had closed and the building was vacant. The building is still there, much cleaned up.
York Way, Pentonville, Islington, 1989 89-4e-51
Caledonia Street took us to York Way. I’m not sure but I think this may be one of the few listed buildings in the area at 34B, where the Grade II listing text mentions “The highly unusual roof structure is a notable survival.”
If so, the frontage on York Way is rather more impressive than this side of the building, with a nicely symmetrical frontage around an arched carriage entrance, a warehouse for the adjoining black lead works designed by Thomas Marsh Nelson and William Harvey in 1873.
I think this building was where I showed work and gave a presentation as a part of the The London International Documentary Festival in 2010, I think the first time the festival had included still photography.
Taxi depot, York Way, Pentonville, Islington, 1989 89-4e-53
I think the sign at the upper centre of the image once read COACHWORK DEPT with the later addition of MOTOCOL LTD. The sloping ramp to these first floor works was built for horses and this could possibly have been a converted stables.
Now it was a busy depot for London ‘black cab’ taxis, with the driver of one at right using an air line on a tyre and small group talking by a diesel pump.
Grange Motors, York Way, Pentonville, Islington, 1989 89-4e-55
A second picture shows others on the walk going to look more closely at Crash Repair Specialists Grange Motors, while more taxi drivers are now by the pumps. The alley along the side of Grange Motors led to an enclosed yard surrounded by derelict buildings, but I’ve not digitised the couple of pictures I made there. It was a dead end and we had to come back out onto York Way.
