Escorts in Angel, N1 and EC1V: who is close, and how soon
The escalators at Angel are among the longest on the Underground, and at the top of them, out on the street in the evening, the first building to catch the eye is the domed corner across the junction of Pentonville Road and Islington High Street. It stands where the Angel stood, the coaching inn that gave the whole district its name when this crossroads was the last stop before London. From that corner the architecture runs two ways: north up the High Street into Victorian Islington, and west and south into Georgian squares that a water company laid out two centuries ago. The board has no one living in N1 or EC1V, and Angel escorts come up from the West End and the zones round it: an hour or thereabouts after the office agrees the evening, more at rush hour, with the lengths and their figures listed on the rates.
On the ground
Angel in practice
Landmarks on the arrival slip
By postcode, never by nameN1 0UY, EC1M 5RJ, EC1V 4JJ, EC1M 6AH.
Nearest stations
Walking timeAngel, 2 minutes. Essex Road, 10 minutes. Old Street, 12 minutes. Farringdon, 15 minutes.
Getting there
N1, EC1VTravel is included across Zones 1 and 2, and counted from the moment the hour is set rather than from when she leaves.
On the board
Nearest prints to Angel
Who works here
On the board in Angel
The six prints above are a first shortlist for Angel tonight. Any of the twenty eight on the who is free page can be asked for by name instead.
Note 02
Up the High Street from the corner
Walk north and the scale changes quickly. On Upper Street the Royal Agricultural Hall, opened in the 1860s for the great livestock shows, still keeps its great iron and glass roof; it has been the Business Design Centre for decades, but the shape of a Victorian show hall is plain from the street. A little further on, at Islington Green, Sir Hugh Myddelton stands on his plinth. He built the New River, and without him the streets across the junction would look nothing like they do.
Pentonville Road, meanwhile, runs down the hill westward to King's Cross, and Upper Street carries on north into Islington proper, so the Angel is really a hinge between the two, with the grandest things just off it rather than on it.
Note 03
The New River squares
The New River, finished early in the seventeenth century, carried drinking water from Hertfordshire to New River Head off Rosebery Avenue. Two hundred years later the company that owned it began building on its land, and the result is a run of Georgian terraces and squares that has survived largely whole. Myddelton Square has St Mark's Church in the middle of its garden. Amwell Street keeps small shopfronts beneath its terraces. Claremont Square is built round a grassed mound that is not a hill at all but a covered reservoir, which is why its houses look onto a green bank rather than a garden.
East of the High Street the river's line is still there to follow. The long gardens between Duncan Terrace and Colebrooke Row run along its old course, and a plaque on Colebrooke Cottage, beside them, marks where Charles Lamb lived. Under all of it, out of sight, the Regent's Canal passes through the Islington Tunnel and comes back into daylight near Colebrooke Row. Escorts in Angel who arrive by these streets see the best of the district before they reach the door.
From The Roundup
Two notes worth reading for Angel
Asked most often
Angel, asked and answered
Why is the district called the Angel?
What is the grassy mound in the middle of Claremont Square?
Where can the New River still be seen?
One zone either way
Next along from Angel
Last strip
Say a name and an hour
Write in with a length, a time and the zone you are staying in, and a name from the board comes back with a window attached. That is the whole of the arrangement.