The Angel, Islington

https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@51.5333306,-0.1026485,3a,75y,...

The main thoroughfares of London, and likely everywhere, are likely tagged as "urban blight" for AI training models without a second thought, but twenty steps away from them and you get extraordinary surprises.

You know, skyscrapers are always accused of being phallic in a Freudian way, and I think that's unfair. What other shape would you design for high-population density structures, in an urban environment, above ground? And here's an example of a building which is definitely not phallic looking, and it's still being called phallic while being compared to a body part that is not phallic at all, nor does the nipple-esque adornment itself look in any way phallic. And yet. So what does a building have to do to not be called phallic?

Mostly joking, I liked the article.

There's this place that you'll notice if you're walking around in the area called the Business Design Centre. You'll see a couple of expensive cars parked outside, and a throng of people going in and out.

It's got an interesting little history as part of London's financial scene that most people won't have heard of, despite being the office of one of the most famous traders in the City.

Back in the day, I think the 80s, the area was pretty derelict. This old agricultural hall was sitting there long past its time. A guy by the name of Morris bought it up to develop it into a convention centre. There's a bust of him if you go up to the top floor. The fancy cars are owned by his sons who took over. All sorts of famous events have gone on there, such as Britain's got talent, along with less famous things like industrial fairs. As part of the business plan, they decided to have office units to rent along the side of the main hall. Pretty much like we wework.

Also in the 80s, a successful floor trader called Dave Kyte set up a clearing and brokerage firm there. Now the thing about DK is he is very keen to invest in other financial firms, so over the years, the BDC ended up having dozens of tenants associated with Kyte, since this allowed him to keep an eye on everyone and they could share his IT and office staff. They've since sold to RJO, so you won't find the name there now, but there are still remnants of the businesses he seeded.

This gave the BDC an interesting vibe. You had all these mini trading floors set in the mezzanine around the exhibition hall, with varying exhibits in the middle, or just a massive empty space on days between exhibits. People visiting would often peek over the blur on the glass and be fascinated by the banks of screens. Some of them would wander in and comment on how many screens there were.

This would be interspersed with a variety of office types, each with their own oddity. One office seems to just have a stone obelisk in the middle, with no staff ever to be seen. Then there was the unit that was a permanent exhibit for a window manufacturer. There was a telesales boiler room. The office of an MMO game for kids. Just every imaginable thing.

Great area for it though, good food market for lunch and restaurants as well.

On almost every visit back to London, I find myself drawn to the area bounded by The Angel at one end, Canonbury at the other, with Liverpool Rd and Essex Rd as the other two boundaries. It wasn't until a few years that I came up with an understanding of why this might be, for it seemed to go above and beyond simple childhood nostalgia.

After I was born, my parents moved to a small village in the Midlands, but we would make the 120 mile journey back to my grandmother's very frequently. Eventually, when I was 10, we moved back to London, and the person who was to become my step-father also close by lived on Essex Rd. Because of all this, I think that this little corner of the world was the place where I first learned something about how cities work. Even, perhaps, about how the world works. There were a lot of early lessons acquired simply by being in this area, the sort of lessons that you often don't even know that you've learned.

I think I go back because I need to double check. I need to dig into the things I learned about the world from Islington, intentional or not, and compare them with what another 50+ years on this spinning globe have revealed. What did I get wrong? What did I get right? How and what did I misunderstand? Or not see?

I live a small village in New Mexico now, but I'll be back in London in a couple of weeks. I can pretty much guarantee that I'll be wandering around the Angel and Upper St. at some point during that visit, looking for how I was enlightened and misled by a childhood in orbit around this place.

Notably, Angel Tube Station actually moved in 1992, when London Transport opened a new station and entrance along the line, equipped with a long escalator, and they closed the old entrance around the corner which had a big lift. For some reason, Apple Maps stubbornly refuses to use the new location and marks the entrance on the wrong street. Google Maps gets it right.

I make it a personal mission to eat somewhere different every time I visit.

I have played Monopoly (the board game) many times and have never heard if the places he is referring to.

I was surprised to see the buildings across the road demolished and Jamie Oliver restaurant is now called 411 bar.

It was always something that bugged me as a Brit to some degree, but, of course, as soon as I read that, I noticed just how much of it there was. It's ever where, on almost every high street. A bizarre mishmash of character and "meh".

> The building, recently sold on to the New River Company, is repaired and refitted for use as offices and a bank. The building looks rather less dazzling at ground floor level as a result.

The Angel, Islington is a supreme example. The same goes for the buildings along the road from it. The building above the ground floor has character. The ground floor looks exactly like what you'd see in almost any high street in the country.

Near where I worked in London, plans went up for renovation that I think ended up working out reasonably well, https://maps.app.goo.gl/XSpdfzdyQE4DpTXr8. Where that Metro Bank is, they ripped out everything behind that brick facade, and rebuilt (it badly needed it), then worked to do up the brick, maintaining the original style.

This kept the building in the characteristic style of the neighbourhood, (see https://maps.app.goo.gl/US1GvYA1fCQ9VCZi6 for examples of other buildings in the area that are of similar age), but didn't leave it stuck with the maintenance issues. Of course you can see just beside it where they didn't do that, and shoved something decidedly more modern in place, and completely at odds with the styles of the buildings on either side of it, or across the street from it.