OLDER TENANTS 

Archway is named after a bridge that is no longer there.

 

They tried to tunnel through the hill first. Eight hundred people came out on the Sunday to look at the works. It fell in early the next morning, before anyone had arrived. The workmen said the noise was like distant thunder. It was blamed afterwards on too little brick in the arch and poor cement holding it together.

 

While the tunnel was being argued over, a comic opera was staged at the Lyceum called Highgate Tunnel, or The Secret Arch. It included a battle between the Victuallers of Highgate and the Tunneleers.

 

So they cut the hill open instead and carried the lane over the gap on an arch built to look like a Roman aqueduct. There was a toll gate in the cutting until 1876.

 

Nash’s arch was taken down at the end of 1897. The iron bridge that replaced it opened in 1900. It carries the date 1897.

 

The lane crosses high above the traffic. From the middle you can see the city laid out to the south. The bridge is listed. There is fencing in front of the parapets now, three metres high, and spikes along the ledge, and a rolling bar of spikes above them.

 

The square outside the station is called Navigator Square. The name was chosen by public vote in 2017, following a resident’s suggestion. Navvy is short for navigator: the men who dug the canals and cut the railways. The Irish came to Upper Holloway in the 1830s, before the famine. They came again after the war — nurses and navvies. Many of the nurses at the Whittington were Irish.

 

There is a market in the square on Saturdays.

 

On Holloway Road there is a pub called the Mother Red Cap. Alewives wore red caps. Women brewed and sold the beer, and the cap was how you knew the house. The name is recorded here from the 1600s.

 

The present building went up in 1871. It closed on the 18th of March 2024 and reopened in June 2026.

 

The station opened as Highgate in 1907, faced in oxblood glazed brick. It became Archway (Highgate) in 1939, then Highgate (Archway) in 1941, and finally Archway in 1947.

 

The original station building was demolished in 1963 and replaced by concrete.

 

From 1884 a cable tramway ran up Highgate Hill from outside the Archway Tavern. It was the first in Europe. Two steam engines at the top of the hill turned a cable eight thousand feet long, and the cars gripped it. The gradient is one in eleven in places.

 

On the 5th of December 1892 the cable snapped and a car ran away down the hill. The tramway closed. It opened again in 1897 and closed for good in 1909.

 

Inside the tavern, the rails are still underfoot.

 

The photograph on the cover of the Kinks’ Muswell Hillbillies was taken in the same room in 1971.

 

Up the hill, natural springs feed the three ponds in Waterlow Park. To the west, a branch of the Fleet runs beneath the streets of Dartmouth Park, enclosed in the sewers. At York Rise it crosses the railway in a pipe beside the footbridge.

 

The river goes over the trains.

 

Where Highgate Hill begins to climb there is a stone on the pavement, inside a cage. Portland stone, set there in 1821. It replaced an earlier stone, which had replaced one older than that. A black limestone cat was added in 1964. People stroke it on the way into the hospital. The lettering on one face had almost disappeared. The stone was cleaned and the letters recut. It was unveiled again in April 2026.

 

A young man walking out of London in defeat is said to have stopped here. Four and a half miles behind him, the bells of St Mary-le-Bow called him back.

 

Turn again.

 

The Whittington Hospital carries his name, a few minutes from my room. People have been brought to that ground to be cared for since 1473, when a chapel and a lazar house were built there for lepers. It closed at the Dissolution. In 1848 a smallpox hospital was raised on the same ground, moved up from King’s Cross to make room for the station.

 

In December 1897 one of Charles Booth’s investigators, walking the district with a police inspector, noted that the site had just been bought by the Islington guardians, to be used as an infirmary. It opened in 1900, for the sick and poor.

 

Lepers, smallpox, the workhouse sick. Then the promise of care for everyone.

 

Booth’s investigator came up Holloway Road that same December, with the inspector beside him. Of a street a few minutes west he wrote that it was very poor, and vicious, the inspector said, and that it was a disgrace. Of this street he wrote one line. The people were working class.

 

I wonder what the street made of the two men.