Chapter Six
Gentrification: The Case of Canonbury, 1850 to 1975

TANIS HINCHCLIFFE

The term ‘gentrification’ was allegedly coined by sociologist Ruth Glass in her introduction to the 1964 publication, London: Aspects of Change, where in an almost throwaway remark, she referred to the profound changes occurring in some areas of working class London as ‘gentrification’.¹ She observed: ‘Once this process of “gentrification” starts in a district, it goes on rapidly until all or most of the original working class occupiers are displaced, and the whole social character of the district is changed.’ ‘Gentrification’, and the transformation of formerly working class neighbourhoods to middle class occupation, has been considered both good and bad. For estate agents, any area appearing to gentrify is good, as house prices will rise accordingly; for the same reason, housing campaigners view gentrification with alarm, since it is bound to drive out those least able to pay the rising rents. This transformation has been going on for at least 60 years, and has now become so commonplace in London that it is in some respects surprising that it continues to be commented upon. So why should we be concerned, and is there any light that the history of the process can shed on our housing situation today?

Although gentrification is a phenomenon seen in many cities across the world, the housing stock in London gives a peculiar cast to the process here. In her introduction Glass noted that the East End of London, the traditional home of the working classes, had at that time remained exempt from gentrification. The shabby districts of Chelsea and Hampstead had already been transformed, and the ‘invasion’ of the middle classes was spreading into Paddington, North Kensington, and Islington. The latter borough came to be regarded as the exemplar of gentrification in London, and Canonbury was considered the place where it all began. It is, then, instructive to review the history of Canonbury, looking for characteristics which may have led to its early gentrification, and this is the purpose of this chapter. What happened in Canonbury encouraged gentrification in the rest of the borough, but did the ward enjoy a peculiar dynamic which made it distinct from other parts of Islington?

Where and What Was Canonbury?

In other cities of Europe and North America, gentrification tends to take place in former industrial areas of the cities, and along waterfronts no longer used for commerce. London’s gentrification began in the low-rise housing stock peculiar to the capital. This stock was what made London ‘the

FIGURE 6.1,
Map of Canonbury, Islington.

FIGURE 6.2,
Canonbury Tower, Islington, William Bolton, c.1509–32.

Unique City’, in the words of Steen Eiler Rasmussen in his 1937 publication:² instead of the blocks of flats common to the continental cities, all around the City of London and the West End lay street after street of low density, terraced houses, dating from the eighteenth century through to the early years of the twentieth.

The Canonbury estate in Islington was developed with residential building along the same lines as most other areas of the borough. Unusually for Islington, however, the estate was owned by a landed family, the Comptons of Northampton, and it had been in their hands since the early seventeenth century. The property comprised approximately 100 acres bounded by Upper Street and Lower Road (Essex Road) to the west and east, Cross Street to the south and Hopping Lane (St Paul’s Road) on the north (Figure 6.1). A distinctive feature of the estate was that it boasted a sixteenth-century tower house and walled garden of great historic interest: Canonbury House, about the only ancient building the borough could claim. The area remained semi-rural and a retreat from city life for two hundred years, enhanced by a section of the New River meandering through, from north to south. In 1770, John Dawes, a local man, began to alter Canonbury House by dismantling parts and dividing others into distinct dwellings. The brick tower and corner of the old house remained, and ensured that at its centre Canonbury retained a connection to its past that would prove invaluable in the future (Figure 6.2).

The development of Canonbury as a residential area began in earnest at the start of the nineteenth century, and although progress was uneven, over the first 30 years of the new century terraces of varying sizes in the characteristic Islington style were built between Upper Street and Canonbury Road. The estate could have continued along the same lines adopted in Barnsbury and on the Clothworkers’ estate behind the Angel but for Charles Hamor Hill. In 1837 he made an agreement with the Marquess of Northampton for a large northern portion of the estate, and proceeded slowly to turn this into a ‘park estate’ of detached and semi-detached houses with generous front and back gardens.³ The result was two long curving streets, Canonbury Park North and South, as well as Canonbury Park Square (Alwyne Square) and Grange Grove. While it took nearly 20 years to complete the development, the houses proved popular with the growing middle class (Figure 6.3). Hill’s initiative in Canonbury was to prove important, because it ensured that the area assumed a less dense and more green aspect than that of the usual terraced streets of Islington.

FIGURE 6.3,
Canonbury Park South, developed by Charles Hamor Hill from 1837.

In 1847, James Wagstaff took the land immediately to the south of Canonbury Tower, and here he oversaw the erection of some grand houses in Alwyne Road. The east side of the estate was completed with semi-detached villas in Clephane and Marquess Roads, and with terraces in the modest streets off Essex Road and Upper Street. By the 1870s the estate was largely built over, and it could be distinguished from other parts of Islington by the historic tower house at its centre, its grand Canonbury Square, and its park estate of detached and semi-detached villas.

One of the classic features of gentrification is the transfer of status from working class to middle class. This can be easily seen when industrial areas, such as the factories and warehouses of Lower Manhattan, lose their function and are taken over by middle class refurbishment and reuse.⁴ In London’s inner suburbs the process was somewhat different, since the nineteenth-century housing ripe for post-war gentrification started life as housing for middle- and lower-middle class families. This was certainly the case in those areas in Canonbury developed by Charles Hamor Hill around Canonbury Park North and South, where a quick trawl through the 1871 Census shows that the population was solidly middle class.⁵ In the 193 houses occupied, 74% of heads were male, and of these most were engaged in commercial activities, as merchants or merchants’ assistants. Some were professionals or civil servants, and a few were doctors. The 26% female heads tended to live off income or were landladies. In Booth’s map, the whole of Canonbury is solidly red or ‘well-to-do, middle class,’ with some pink (‘fairly comfortable’) between Canonbury Road and Upper Street.⁶

Islington had always been a mixture of classes, with some smart areas such as Highbury and Tufnell Park, and some more liminal such as Barnsbury, where a working class population gradually occupied more and more of the terraced houses. In addition, the middle class population of the inner suburbs was dropping – a general trend noticeable from the 1911 Census as improved transport, the building boom in the outer suburbs, and cheap mortgages there drew people out to a modern middle class life.⁷ This movement gave working class people the opportunity to spread out from the cramped courts of poor housing into the larger, neighbouring houses vacated by the middle classes, and observers of the social scene were quick to note the change of status from middle class to working class in metropolitan boroughs such as Paddington, St Pancras, and Islington.

Inter-War Canonbury

During the 1930s the population of Islington began an absolute decline, and in 1934 The Islington Gazette noted a net loss in those on the Electoral Register, suggesting that the ‘attraction of the suburbs’ could be the chief factor, although the move by inner-London industries to better premises on the periphery would also have been a factor.⁸ The result was that letting houses was less and less profitable, and as more houses were let as individual rooms, overcrowding and poor conditions became prevalent. But was it just the draw of the suburban semis that caused the desperate dilapidation of the housing stock in Islington and the other inner suburbs?

Housing low-paid workers is always problematic since there are no profits to be made, and this was especially so in the inter-war years. In order to stabilise the economy and safeguard the income of the middle class, successive governments encouraged a low wage regime,⁹ and one measure to ensure this was the retention after the First World War of rent restriction legislation. The original Rent Restriction Act 1915 had been introduced to prevent wartime profiteering by guaranteeing that tenants in property under a certain value had the right to a regulated rent as long as they were in possession of their tenancy. As the Act was renewed and time went on, the children of tenants could inherit the tenancy without a rise in rent if they were in residence when their parent died. The result was that the tenancy became the most valuable property right working class people owned, leading to a stagnation of the market in rented property as people hung on to their tenancies whatever the condition of their dwelling.¹⁰ Throughout the inter-war years there were many properties on very low rents, bringing in only a poor return to their landlords. Small landlords, since they could not raise rents, were unable to maintain their houses, nor were they able to put in amenities such as modern plumbing, electricity, and appliances. Because they were on low wages, the tenants needed the cheap rents, and the landlords needed undemanding, poor tenants. At the end of the Second World War, the condition of housing in working class areas of the inner suburbs was very poor – not just because of the bombing and the five years of neglect, but also because of the previous 20 years of low rents.

Although the transformation was inexorable, it was gradual. There was not a dramatic change for the landlords of the inner suburbs, except that the income from their property went into a noticeable decline. The inter-war housing market in the older boroughs was quite complex, with different types of tenancies, depending on the income of the tenants. On the one hand, ground landlords, such as the Marquess of Northampton, had blocks of property for sale leasehold, with the prospect of an income from the rents for the new owner. On the other hand, the estate themselves let individual properties of the kind which would appeal to a middle class clientele:

An advertisement such as this was aimed at the middle class, and no contradiction was seen in the different markets in rented rooms, flats and houses in close proximity to each other. One of the middle class residents of Canonbury was Ronald Carton, a journalist who was on the editorial staff of The Times, and had been editor of Country Life since 1937. The Cartons lived at 5 Canonbury Place, close to Canonbury Tower, described in his obituary of 1960 as a ‘delightful, old, country-like house with its big garden that they had in Canonbury (many years before that London village became fashionable).’¹² The houses around Canonbury Tower could be described as a special case since they were not just secluded, they were of acknowledged historical interest and they had easy access through rail and bus to the City and the West End. At the same time Canonbury also participated in the growing working class culture in Islington, which ultimately led to a decline and devaluation of the housing stock.

The Post Office Directories bear witness to the many small businesses that were woven into the fabric of Canonbury, and in 1936 a ‘modern’ factory in Canonbury Street was up for sale.¹³ Before the Second World War it would appear that the character of the area became split between the streets to the north of the New River, including Canonbury Park North and South, and the properties along Canonbury and Essex Roads, and behind Upper Street. Here many of the properties were described in the Directories as ‘apartments’. Some of these could be in an appalling condition. One such property in Douglas Road was reported to Islington Council’s Housing Committee in the autumn of 1931:¹⁴ the tenant of the basement had sub-let two rooms to a Mr Pannell, his wife and six daughters at 15s. per week; three of the teenage daughters slept in the smaller room, under the stairs, a space measuring 7 x 6 ft, which was 6 ft high and had no ventilation except for a small vent in a riser of the stair. The Pannells had lived there eight years and had not been able to find somewhere better to live.

The Northampton Estate did show interest in working with Islington Council to improve the condition of their housing stock. In 1919, when the Council was searching for sites for their flat-building initiative under the new Housing Act, the Medical Officer of Health met with the Marquess’ agent concerning houses in Halton Road which were in such a dilapidated condition that he thought they should be demolished.¹⁵ These subsequently were replaced by Halton Mansions, one of the Council’s first purpose-built estates of flats.

Although during the 1920s the Marquess of Northampton himself converted houses in Compton Terrace and Canonbury Square into self-contained flats, he was not averse to council housing on his estate, and in certain circumstances positively encouraged it. In 1928 he sought the Council’s assistance in rearranging his property behind Upper Street, and ultimately the Council was able to build Wakelin House in 1935, which they linked to the slum clearance of nearby Church Lane, close to St Mary’s Church.¹⁶ Later, in 1937, the Council had their eye on a block of five acres between St Paul’s Road and Canonbury Place, but the Marquess claimed he had his own plans for this site. In the end the Council took a total of seven sites comprising about 12 acres on the south side of Canonbury, but nothing was built here until after the Second World War.¹⁷ This did ensure, however, that a substantial area of Canonbury was ultimately given over to council housing, and in addition the Northampton Trust themselves built three blocks of flats to rehouse their tenants from Clerkenwell.

The Gentrification Process

After the Second World War, the consensus was that something positive could now be done about the condition of the housing stock in inner London, and local authorities were given the task of carrying this out. The amount of new housing produced was certainly impressive, but some of the effects on the housing market were as unexpected as those that had resulted from the Rent Restriction Acts. With the continuing fall in the inner London population through migration to New Towns and overspill estates, the local authorities were given powers to compulsorily purchase large areas of what they considered derelict housing for redevelopment. The policy disrupted the local market by putting large numbers of terraced houses out of use while the local authority waited until they had accumulated enough land for a viable estate. Otherwise, they let the properties on short-term tenancies while their plans ripened, and the houses deteriorated further.¹⁸ The effects of this policy could be seen in parts of Barnsbury, particularly down from Liverpool Road to King’s Cross. Landlords expecting the Council to buy up their property were also loath to spend money on their houses, and would leave them empty rather than repairing them. At the same time there was a continuing housing shortage, with people waiting years to be rehoused and a growing awareness that much of the old housing stock was unfit for modern conditions.

It would seem that local authorities thought they had all the time in the world to bring their housing plans to fruition, but they had not counted on new entrants into the local housing markets – the influx of the owner-occupiers. Landlords, wanting to get out of the letting business, were only too willing to sell their houses to individuals, able to buy a house for refurbishment and occupation by themselves or other owner-occupiers. Relaxation of the rules for letting through the Rent Act 1957 and generous improvement grants opened the way for others to upgrade their property into high-rent flats. After a few years of unbelievable bargains in the 1950s, house prices began to rise, and eventually reached a level local authorities were unable to match. At this point, the movement of middle class home owners into the formerly working class areas of the inner suburbs became an accepted fact, along with acknowledgement of the profits that could be made. The remaining poor and elderly working class and new immigrants, who had once been left to negotiate the local housing market among themselves, were now in competition with the better resourced middle class for the same housing stock.

If the working classes were experiencing changing circumstances, so were the middle classes. After the First World War the expansion of the suburbs on cheap agricultural land gave an alternative to inner-city living. After the Second World War the newly established Green Belt prevented suburban house-building on such a vast scale within easy commuting distance of central London. The inter-war suburbs were still occupied by their original residents, but at the same time many young people who had taken advantage of the post-war expansion in higher education were descending on London with the hope of getting work in television, journalism, design and in more traditional middle class professions. Already priced out of Chelsea and Hampstead as noted by Glass, they looked to the boroughs further east in Kentish and Camden Towns and in Islington. The social consequences of this worsened the shortage of housing for essential service workers. As Father Paul Byrne, Director of the Shelter Housing Aid Centre, observed, those working in the service industries could no longer compete on the open housing market with ‘the dolly birds’.¹⁹ On the other hand, the middle class professionals had fewer choices than imagined, and as Margaret Watson (later Hodge and before she was an Islington Councillor) said in the same report: ‘I’m just as guilty, being a middle class person sitting here but … well, I feel we needed a home.’²⁰

In 1937 the Marquess of Northampton intimated to Islington Council that he had plans for his Canonbury estate, and at the end of the war he called on the services of the architect Louis de Soissons, designer of Welwyn Garden City, for a scheme that would initially replace bomb damaged houses, and then the surrounding streets. Small houses were built in Grange Road and Canonbury Parks North and South, from 1946, in a pleasing neo-Georgian style, using bricks and wood from the destroyed houses (Figure 6.4).²¹ The scheme dried up after only 28 houses were completed, perhaps because it became apparent that the task of refurbishment was beyond the resources available to the Marquess and the Northampton Estate. In the spring of 1951 he sold a good portion of his Canonbury estate to two property companies: the area to the east and south of the New River was bought by Oriel Property Trust, while the northern and western portion, including Canonbury Square, was taken by Western Ground Rents.²² This left the Northampton Estate with the tower house and a few of the surrounding streets.

During the 1950s, gentrification in Islington was almost unknown, for the reason that it was very difficult to get a mortgage on such doubtful properties. As PR Williams has put it, ‘Until the late 1950s and early 1960s there existed a financial void in Islington … the larger building societies, banks and insurance companies were very reluctant to make any loans at all in this area’.²³ The financial arrangements of the two property companies provided Canonbury with another opportunity to distinguish itself from the rest of the borough: by actively engaging in the market through refurbishment, new-build and mortgages, they were able to encourage middle class migration to the estate before anyone else had dreamed Islington could attract such people. They also turned the profits from the process into lucrative investments for their associated financial institutions.

The two companies purchasing the Canonbury sites present an intriguing insight into the workings of the property market at this time. Western Ground Rents was an offshoot of Shop Investments, a property company set up in 1932 by Francis B Winham, an estate agent, in order to buy up the ground rents of commercial property in the suburbs of London. Western Ground Rents was established in 1938 specifically to buy the Marquess of Bute’s Mountjoy Estate in Cardiff, thus making the company a prime landlord in the centre of that city.²⁴ Oriel Property Trust was incorporated in 1937, and its chairman, David Haldin Davis, was a Director of Shop Investments, so although the latter did not acquire Oriel Property Trust until 1957, there had always been a link between the two companies.²⁵

Western Ground Rents and Oriel Property Trust kept a low profile, as did Francis Winham and his brother Cyril, until the 1960s, when it was realised with some amazement that they had acquired a sizable empire of properties. They were pioneers in a new method of finance, which became more common in the post-war property boom. When Western Ground Rents bought the Mountjoy Estate, they had the help of two insurance companies, the Clerical, Medical and General Assurance Society, managed by Andrew Rowell, and the Equity and Law Life Assurance Society, whose chairman was Lord Kennet.²⁶ In 1939, Equity and Law took a controlling interest in Western Ground Rents, and provided the capital for further acquisitions. In 1948, insurance company Clerical, Medical and General, still under Rowell’s management, bought a controlling interest in Oriel Property Trust. Rowell was apparently the brains behind the linkage of insurance with property, and by 1958 he was the chairman of the parent company, Shop Investments.²⁷ The three companies – Western Ground Rents, Oriel Property Trust, and Shop Investments – shared an address in Queen Street, Mayfair, and their business was handled by Royds’ Estate Agents, managed by the Winhams and by Wigram Solicitors, also of Queen Street. They were obviously a tightly integrated operation.

FIGURE 6.4,
House in Canonbury Park South by Louis de Soissons, 1951.

Besides commercial property acquired by Shop Investments, the Winhams bought sites in Chelsea and Pimlico, as was disclosed by The Observer in December 1961:

The Winhams seem to have had a predilection for aristocratic property (although this was probably an opportunistic move, given the state of aristocratic finances after the war). Also in 1961, while their attention was caught by the activities of Western Ground Rents in Cardiff, The Observer noted:

Thus it was recognised that the Winhams were not only involved in property dealing, but also with the active increase in the value of their acquisitions by means of a potential middle class market for whom they supplied the all-important mortgages.³⁰

Western Ground Rents continued the redevelopment of their property that the Marquess began but abandoned before selling up. First off was a collection of houses and flats for married police officers and later a hostel for single men (Figure 6.5).³¹ Small houses and flats in a modest neo-Georgian style then replaced the older houses, in a section bounded by St Paul’s Road, St Mary’s and Grange Roads, with an attractive terrace by Raymond Erith facing Canonbury Place. In 1965 The Observer noted that ‘Western Ground Rents have built over 170 houses and flats in the area in the last seven years. A further 80 flats are going up and all are sold.’³² Evidence given to the Milner Holland Commission by one of the property companies concerned Canonbury, and the progressive refurbishment of property there.³³ The representative, who possibly spoke for Oriel Property Trust, explained that as properties became vacant they were refurbished and let on long leases; to facilitate this practice, they would decant tenants from one property into a partially inhabited one, or rehouse them in property off the estate, but nearby. There seemed perfect logic in this policy, until the Commission considered the implications for those who had been moved on. It registered that the working class element in the area was being eroded and prices were inevitably rising. It should be noted, however, that even in Canonbury Park South the Council managed to build two small blocks of working class flats, Marie Curie House and Lilian Bayliss House.

FIGURE 6.5,
Police houses and flats, Canonbury, by WS Grice and SJ Hanchet, 1952.

External factors impinged on the business of the two companies when the Leasehold Reform Act 1967 meant that it was now open to leaseholders to buy or extend their leases. This may have led to the Oriel Property Trust selling a large part of their Canonbury property in 1966 for £1,150,000.³⁴ The cleared land would go to form Islington Council’s Marquess Road Estate by Darbourne and Darke. When Francis Winham died in 1968, Shop Investments was sold to Amalgamated Investment and Property, and it was assumed that they would also buy Western Ground Rents. What actually happened was that it was bought by BP Pensions in the spring of 1969 – an event claimed in the press to be without precedent.³⁵ In September 1969, David Pinto incorporated Rushclose, and he seems to have taken over the rump of Oriel Property Trust’s interests in Canonbury. By this time, Canonbury was well accepted as a middle class enclave in Islington, despite the fact that a good half of the original estate was now occupied by Council flats.

By attracting Western Ground Rents and Oriel Property Trust, the Canonbury estate drew in the sort of investment needed to refurbish the area to the extent that it would attract not just a few eccentric artistic middle class householders. Lack of investment was the bane of the older inner suburbs: low rents prevented repairs and upgraded amenities, leading to a cycle of decline. Only when mortgage providers had the confidence to lend on older properties did the tide turn for certain acceptable houses in a borough such as Islington. Canonbury led the way, but it enjoyed advantages over other areas, firstly by having houses attractive enough to entice a middle class clientele and secondly by having two ground landlords with the foresight to develop their asset in a consistent manner. The close proximity to Council flats did not seem to detract from the character of Canonbury as it did elsewhere, and it may even have been an advantage when the landlords sought alternative accommodation for their sitting tenants. In 1961, The Guardian was able to comment on ‘the most extraordinary postwar renaissance in Canonbury … it is now one of the smartest, pleasantest and most convenient villages of inner London.’³⁶

FIGURE 6.6,
Houses in Canonbury Place, by Raymond Erith, 1963–70.

Describing Canonbury as a ‘village’ fitted in very well with the cultural construction of the inner suburbs of London during the 1960s and 70s. Often it was suggested that London was a collection of villages, each with its own character. When the Barnsbury Society wanted to advance its position in Islington in the face of threatened redevelopment by the LCC, they put forward a refurbishment programme by David Wager, which included a ‘village centre’ at the top of Barnsbury Road where five roads met.³⁷ Whether this artificial centre would have worked was never tried, but it bears witness to the belief that such a centre was needed to make an area ‘go’, and it underlines the importance of the area of Canonbury around the tower which formed a natural centre of the ward. Besides a parade of shops, there was a community hall, donated by the then Marquess of Northampton in 1907. From 1952 to 2003, the hall and Tower provided the home for the Tavistock Repertory theatre, an important cultural addition to the life of the area. Despite its secluded ‘village’ atmosphere, Canonbury benefited from the opening in 1968 of the new Victoria underground line and its nearby station at Highbury and Islington, but was also lucky when plans for the motorway box along St Paul’s Road were scrapped.

Alongside the efforts of Louis de Soissons and the Marquess to reinstate Canonbury as a desirable residence, there is evidence that after the war there was still a good deal of dereliction. Much is made of George Orwell coming to Canonbury Square in 1944 after he and his wife were bombed out of their flat in Kilburn. There is disagreement among his biographers whether the Canonbury flat was situated in a slum – certainly, however, from descriptions in letters it would seem that the area was run down.³⁸

FIGURE 6.7,
‘The Alwynes,’ Alwyne Villas, Canonbury, developed by James Wagstaff from 1847.

After a decade of refurbishment, the Daily Herald could celebrate the arrival in Canonbury of a number of ‘intellectual, artistic and professional people’.³⁹ These included Sir Philip Hendy, Director of the National Gallery; Sir Dennis Proctor, Director of the Tate; and, more famously, Sir Basil Spence, the architect of Coventry Cathedral, whose involvement in the area points up an important aspect of gentrification, the proprietorial ownership of an area by its middle class residents.

In 1956 Spence took a house at 1 Canonbury Place for his office and home, and maintained an interest in the amenities of the area. When at the end of the 1960s the Marquess of Northampton sought to redevelop land bounded by ‘the Alwynes’ (Alwyne Road, Villas and Place), he turned to Spence. Spence and his son-in-law, Anthony Blee, produced a scheme which would provide 14 houses and 30 flats in a modern configuration, but one they thought was totally in accord with the surrounding area (Figure 6.6).⁴⁰ The local reaction was more violent than anyone might have expected and was based on several different points. First there was the argument that the new houses would be out of place in terms of style and scale. Secondly, there was an anticipated loss of a stand of mature trees which provided a green space although inaccessible to the public. Third and most important was the principle that houses in a conservation area as defined by the 1967 Civic Amenities Act should be safeguarded from demolition, despite the fact that they were not individually listed. Very vocal residents started a ‘Save the Alwynes’ campaign, and the Canonbury Society was established to fight the proposals (Figure 6.7).

An article in The Guardian by Judy Hillman in November 1970 alerted readers to the consequences of Spence and Blee’s scheme, and the efforts made by Islington Council to place a building preservation notice on the endangered property.⁴¹ This request was refused by the then environment minister, Peter Walker, who gave the reason that the houses were not distinguished enough to be protected. Similarly, in a letter to the editor of The Times in February 1972, Basil Spence took issue with those who decried his scheme for the Alwynes and objected to the disruption of the conservation area.⁴² He argued that the houses that would be demolished to make way for the new scheme were Victorian and therefore had no architectural merit, so they should not be considered an indispensible part of the character of the area, which was Georgian: ‘I would suggest that the ambience of Canonbury does not derive its life blood from the bulky Victorian villas, but from their properly preserved Georgian neighbours and from the trees, all of which are listed’, he wrote. This sentiment belonged to a former time when anything ‘Georgian’ was acceptable, but anything ‘Victorian’ was considered outside the bounds of taste.

Architectural commentators such as Tony Aldous, Ian Nairn, Simon Jenkins and Stephen Gardiner weighed into the controversy. The GLC’s Historic Buildings Board supported the objectors, and an amendment to the Civic Amenities Act was proposed to ensure that unlisted buildings would be protected if they contributed to the conservation area. The Spence/Blee scheme was dropped shortly after the publicity, but the Alwynes was an important test case, since it strengthened the argument for the amendment, and gave the conservation lobby a stronger hand in dealing with development schemes. The amendment also meant that those gentrifiers who had bought houses in conservation areas could rest assured that their property would not be devalued by what they considered inappropriate demolition and redevelopment. The vocal ‘ownership’ of their neighbourhood had prevailed.

An altogether different effect of gentrification was illustrated in a case that came up in 1973. Islington Council tried to block planning permission for Rushclose Developments – the company that took over the remains of Oriel Property Trust’s Canonbury interests – to convert some Victorian houses into small flats and bedsits and to add extensions on to two houses. The main issue was that the newly established green space behind St Paul’s Road would be adversely affected by the extensions, but it soon emerged that the local residents’ society objected to the development on the grounds that the company wished to move elderly residents out of their homes in the surrounding streets to small flats and bedsits concentrated in Wallace Road.⁴³ This, they claimed, would free up the larger houses for selling off at inflated prices and hasten gentrification in the area.

David Pinto of Rushclose argued that the company was only doing what Oriel Property Trust had done in the 1960s, and quoted the Milner Holland report which he said had condoned the property company’s activities because it had put resources into the estate in the early years without much in the way of return. The larger houses were in any case more suitable for families than for single elderly people, who Pinto claimed would be happier living together in the converted flats. In addition, if the larger houses had been converted into flats, the tenants might find that under the Housing Finance Act they would not be able to claim rebates since the accommodation would be considered too expensive. Pinto’s arguments were eminently rational and he won his case, but by the 1970s the mood had changed, and what had passed as reasonable development in the 1950s and 1960s was now questioned. Not only were the protestors arguing for the elderly controlled tenants to stay in their old homes, they were concerned that the Canonbury area would become completely middle class and that the developer would make an inordinately large profit. These were all arguments that had been exercised in protests against the practices of property companies in areas such as Barnsbury from the mid-1960s, and would soon be aired again in protest at the activities of property companies in Barnsbury’s Stonefield Street.⁴⁴

Over the years Canonbury’s reputation has been mixed, with some hostility expressed at its success and some wonder that it had gentrified at all. An example of middle class attitudes to the new areas into which they were moving appeared in an article by columnist Benny Green in the January 1971 issue of Ideal Home.⁴⁵ This was an extended piece on the Grinlings, a theatrical couple who had moved east from St John’s Wood to Canonbury. In his article, Green places Islington within that list of locations in London where the middle classes had ventured as intrepid ‘colonisers’. What is perhaps more interesting are the terms Green uses to describe Canonbury as a sort of enclave of civilisation within the dark chaos of working class London:

Did a sense of guilt lie behind the need to make the striking contrast between middle class Canonbury and the surrounding streets? Balancing this curious eulogy is a more sober evaluation by Tony Wardle in the same issue of Ideal Home, which makes reference to a nearby refurbishment by the De Beauvoir Trust in Hackney:

Wardle goes on to enumerate some of the unforeseen problems generated by gentrification, such as lack of accommodation for key workers and the destruction of communities of longstanding.

Conclusion

What can we conclude from this history of Canonbury and its gentrification in the middle of the twentieth century? First, there were some strokes of good luck in its early history: the old tower house at its centre gave it a historic core which was never completely deserted by the middle class. Then Charles Hamor Hill’s decision to produce a ‘park estate’ on the land he leased resulted in an attractive suburban setting for houses of a suitable size and style for the mid-twentieth century middle class. That the Marquess of Northampton took the long view of Canonbury’s fortunes ensured that the area did not fall into complete decrepitude. By converting houses into self-contained flats, by selling property to Islington Council for housing, and by inviting Louis de Soissons to design new houses in bomb-damaged areas, he managed a modicum of control over the fortunes of his estate. But probably the most significant event in Canonbury’s recent history was when the Marquess sold most of it to Western Ground Rents and Oriel Property Trust. These two, through their association with insurance companies, were able to bring into the area investment with which they refurbished the houses on a rolling programme at a level not seen before. This intervention changed the nature of the local market, and introduced much more affluent residents to the area. These soon found an identity in the old streets which they strenuously defended, even at the expense of new housing, like that proposed for the Alwynes. By the 1970s, property prices had risen to such an extent that the value of previously neglected residential property was assured. This led to the sense that, for example, the remaining Canonbury houses were ‘too good’ for pensioners, whose removal was planned by Rushclose, the successors to Oriel Property Trust.

What, we might ask, would the middle classes in London have done without the apparent endless supply of nineteenth-century houses in a falling population? We are about to find out as London’s population burgeons and we run out of older, ungentrified property near the centre. Gentrification got successive governments off the hook, as there was what seemed to be an unending stream of property available for middle class consumption in London after the 1950s. The refurbishment of those properties was funded privately by mortgages – that is, middle class debt – but more recently the stream has started running dry and prices have soared. This may partly have been the result of low interest rates, as higher prices could be asked if interest payments were low. As the middle classes seek out more affordable houses, new areas in the outer suburbs and beyond become acceptable especially for young professional families, just as areas of Islington did in the 1950s and 1960s.

Another option is the middle class occupation of ex-council houses, as the Right to Buy turns into the ‘right to sell.’ But cheap houses in Islington were unaffordable even for the middle classes, while building societies refused to provide mortgages for older properties, so the property companies had to kick-start their refurbishment of Canonbury by themselves offering mortgages to prospective buyers. Once the market in older houses was set in motion, the building societies changed their stance and were only too happy to finance the wave of gentrification. Today, as new global investment disrupts the balance of housing markets throughout the capital, it might be time to review how we finance the way we house ourselves. In the excitement, however, we should remember that there are at best only small profits in providing decent housing for people on low incomes, young or old – and yet all of us need a home.