Bank Holiday walk to Highbury

River Lea at Leyton

Many a great walk starts by crossing the Sacred River Lea.

Sunken narrowboat on the River Lea Navigation at Hackney

I resisted the temptation to see the sunken narrowboat as a bad omen.

Royal Sovereign pub mural
Stoke Newington Church Street

There’s always a bohemian air to Stoke Newington Church Street that seems to resist gentrification and somehow stands apart from other North London streets. I wonder if it has something to do with all those anarchists that nested around here.

Clissold Park Stoke Newington

I sat on a bench in Clissold Park in the late afternoon sun with a flat white and a cannoli and a sfogliatella.

Highbury streets

I loved walking these Highbury streets in our happy years living here in the late 90s. I walked through Highbury Barn and briefly stood outside our old basement flat.

Highbury Park
Highbury Park
Highbury Barn, North London
Highbury Fields
Highbury Fields

I wandered over Highbury Fields in glorious sunshine and caught the train home from Highbury and Islington drenched in nostalgia.

Highbury Fields Forever

A walk from Homerton through Hackney, Dalston, Newington Green to Highbury Barn

The pull of nostalgia is a powerful thing. It was during the first lockdown that I devised this walk from Leytonstone to Highbury – from my current home to one from my past laced with happy memories. It was a comforting thought in such an uncertain time. Now in the first week of the third national lockdown it seems an apt moment to post this video of that walk which I finally embarked upon during the second lockdown.

It starts on Homerton High Street, which was recorded as Humberton in the 14th Century, and is said to be derived from a lady’s farmstead Hunburh. We take a look at the Tudor Sutton House built in 1535, before walking through St. John’s Gardens to Hackney Central. Along Mare Street we pay homage to the Hackney Empire, designed by Frank Matcham in 1901 as a Music Hall.

Our walk takes up Graham Road to Ridley Road Market, Dalston and then along Kingsland Road (Ermine Street) to the Rio Cinema. Next we go up John Campbell Road and Mildmay Road to Newington Green where we look at Richard Price’s Unitarian Chapel built in 1701.

From here we pass along Ferntower Road to Petherton Road where the New River runs beneath a green strip of land running along the middle of the street.

Highbury Fields

Highbury Fields

Highbury New Park takes us to Highbury Grove and we turn up Baalbec Road to Highbury Place.

Highbury Fields is one of my favourite spots in London, a beautiful open space covering a high ridge of land which was once known for its springs and conduits. We walk around Highbury Fields contemplating the possibility that the name suggests that this was once the location of an ancient burial mound, barrow or fortification given that the area was previously known as Newington Barrow.

Our walk ends at Highbury Barn at the site of the former pleasure garden famed for its milk, custards, and concerts.

Northern Heights – Highbury to Hornsey

Highbury Fields – one of my favourite places in London, yeah I know, I have a lot of favourite places in London. It was here that Londoners sought refuge during the Great Fire of 1666 and watched the city below burn down. It still feels like a place of retreat from the madness of Highbury Corner and Holloway Road.

Passing the Queen Victoria Diamond Jubilee Clocktower I stop to admire Aubert Court, a fine modernist block of flats designed by E C P Monson, who also built Islington Town Hall and numerous other public buildings and social housing across London from around 1895 – 1940. The flats occupy land that was once home to Highbury College of Dissenters, opened in 1825. Alexander Aubert, who gives his name to Aubert Court and Aubert Road was a wealthy stockbroker who owned a mansion and grounds in Highbury and most notably built an enormous observatory on one wing of Highbury House.

Highbury Clocktower

It is odd now to be able to wander around the perimeter of the old Arsenal pitch at Highbury – now Highbury Stadium Square, diminished by conversion to flats built into the stands, hard to recall being in here with 40,000 chanting fans.

I move on through Gillespie Road Nature Reserve and across Finsbury Park, feeling fatigued and wondering where to head next. The high ground of the Northern Heights draws me on towards Hornsey and to the corner shop made famous by the great ZomCom Shaun of the Dead. When I came here for one of the chapters in my book This Other London, I studied the scene in the film where Shaun wakes up on the day of the Zombie outbreak and, heavily hungover, walks across to the shop for a can of Diet Coke and a Cornetto. I then attempted to recreate single tracking shot with my point and shoot camera.

I stopped shooting my weekly YouTube video at this point and wander onto Crouch End Broadway where I pick up a History of Highbury pamphlet I first bought 20 years ago and lost, a book on Prehistoric England, and a copy of the Tales of King Arthur that I used to read in my Primary School Library.