Islington, North London

Before the Famine: The Canal and Railway Navvies

Islington's Irish community is older than the Famine, and this historical depth gives it a character that distinguishes it from the west London Irish communities centred on Kilburn and Hammersmith. The first significant Irish arrivals in Islington came not from the catastrophe of 1845 but from the earlier infrastructure projects that transformed London in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The construction of the Regent's Canal — begun in 1812 and completed in 1820 — brought Irish navvies to the northern approaches of the city in large numbers, and many did not leave when the work was done.

The word "navvy" derives from "navigator," the men who navigated or cut the canals that formed Britain's first national infrastructure network. Irish navvies had been central to the canal-building era from its earliest decades: they were recruited in Ireland, transported to England, and deployed on the hardest and most physically demanding work — digging through clay and rock with picks and shovels, moving enormous quantities of earth by hand. The Regent's Canal passed through the northern edge of Islington at the New River Head, and the men who built it settled in the courts and alleys of the parish when the work on the water was done, finding new employment in the building works that were consuming North London in the early Victorian period.

By the 1840s, when the Famine refugees arrived, Islington already had an established Irish Catholic community — men and women who had been in London for twenty or thirty years, who had acquired the English they needed to navigate the city, and who had built the small institutional structures — the Catholic mission, the informal mutual aid networks — that would receive the Famine arrivals. The new arrivals were poorer and more desperate than those who had preceded them, but they were not arriving in a vacuum. They were arriving in a place that already knew them.

The Courts and Alleys: Victorian Irish Islington

The dense working-class Irish settlement of mid-Victorian Islington occupied a particular kind of urban geography — the courts and alleys that threaded behind the main streets of the parish, where multiple families occupied single rooms in subdivided houses, where water came from a single standpipe in the court, and where the mortality rate from cholera, typhus, and the ordinary diseases of poverty was appalling by any measure. These were among the most overcrowded urban spaces in Victorian England, and the Irish were disproportionately represented in them, both because they were among the poorest arrivals and because their Catholicism made them unwelcome in many of the better lodging houses and tenements.

The evidence for the scale of this Irish settlement in Victorian Islington is preserved in the burial records of St Mary's Church on Upper Street — the ancient parish church of Islington — and in the registers of the Catholic mission that would eventually become a parish in its own right. The Irish surnames in these records tell their own story: Murphy, Sullivan, O'Brien, McCarthy, Connelly, Ryan, Walsh — the surname distribution of southern and western Ireland, concentrated in a few hundred yards of North London courts. Census records from 1851 and 1861 show the Irish-born population of Islington at several thousand, with a much larger Irish-descent population not recorded as such.

The Victorian Irish of Islington were not simply suffering passively. They built their own social world in the courts and alleys: the informal credit networks that sustained families through bad weeks, the informal labour exchanges that found men work, the Catholic sodalities and confraternities that provided structure and community in a life with very little of either. The Church was the central institution, but around it clustered a network of lay organisations — the temperance societies, the Irish associations, the mutual aid clubs — that constituted a civil society of the poor.

The Caledonian Road and the Irish Market Traders

The Caledonian Road, which runs north from the Angel at Islington through the borough toward the old Caledonian Market, was a significant site of Irish commercial life from the mid-Victorian period onward. The market itself — formally the Metropolitan Cattle Market, established in 1855 to replace the ancient Smithfield — drew Irish traders and dealers from across North London, and the streets around it developed a commercial character that bore the Irish community's stamp. Street trading, hawking, and the informal economies of the market's fringes were among the few commercial niches open to Irish immigrants with limited capital and English.

The Caledonian Market and its surrounding streets became known as a place where things could be bought and sold outside the regulated structures of the formal economy — second-hand goods, surplus stock, produce of uncertain provenance. Irish families who had arrived with nothing used this informal economy as the ladder they needed: buying cheap, selling at a margin, accumulating the small capital that could eventually be invested in a barrow, a stall, and eventually a shop. The trajectory from market trader to shopkeeper was one of the standard Irish immigrant trajectories in Victorian London, and Islington's market economy supported it more effectively than many other parts of the city.

The Irish traders of the Caledonian Road area were a different social type from the navvies of the courts — more mobile, more commercially oriented, more integrated into the London economy even if still marginal within it. Their presence gave the Islington Irish community a greater economic diversity than the communities of Kilburn or Cricklewood, where construction was the dominant male occupation. This diversity would prove important for the community's long-term resilience.

Gentrification, Persistence, and the Political Character of Islington Irish

The irony of Islington is that it became, in the late twentieth century, the emblem of a certain kind of English liberal prosperity — the borough of Tony Blair, of the champagne socialist stereotype, of houses worth more than many Irish towns. This transformation began in earnest in the 1960s and 1970s, as the Victorian terraces that had been subdivided into lodging houses were converted back into single-family homes by incoming professional classes drawn by proximity to the City and the character of the streets. The Irish community that had lived in those houses was displaced, gradually and without drama, to the outer boroughs — to Islington's northern reaches, to Haringey, to Edmonton and Enfield.

What remained behind the gentrification was something harder to measure: the trace of the Irish presence in the physical and cultural fabric of the borough. The Catholic parish that had served the Irish community remained active, though its congregation was now more diverse. The burial records at St Mary's still carried the Irish surnames accumulated over a hundred and fifty years. And the political culture of Islington — its Labour tradition, its trade union connections, its particular form of working-class radicalism — bore the imprint of the Irish Catholic working class that had helped to shape it.

The Islington Irish had, from an early date, been more engaged with British political life than many of their counterparts elsewhere in London. This was partly a function of their greater age as a community — families who had been in Islington for three or four generations by the mid-twentieth century had had time to acquire the habits of civic participation — and partly a function of their engagement with the labour movement. Irish workers in Islington's printing trades, in the building industry, and in the municipal services had been active in trade union organisation from the late nineteenth century, and the political networks they built through that activity connected them to the wider labour movement in ways that the more transient communities of Cricklewood and Kilburn were never quite able to achieve.

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