At this time of year I like to blog about a festively-namedstreet, however mundane it might be. This year's challenge was to find a pair I hadn't previouslybloggedabout within convenient walking distance from home. I'm pleased to say I found this particular couple a mile apart in Hackney, one in Dalston and the other in Hoxton.
Holly Street E8
A few streets east of the Overground, not far from Dalston Junction, lies Holly Street. This minor residential road used to be longer and was lined with Victorian terraces, but today its becalmed mix of lowrise flats and maisonettes wouldn't look out of place in a modern suburb. And it took Hackney council two goes to get it right.
Fifty years ago everything between Holly Street and the railway was demolished and replaced by an extraordinary chain of Brutalist housing blocks linked by a single corridor that somehow managed to be one mile long. From above the layout resembled a writhing serpent dropped onto a square lawn, indeed the Holly Street Estate soon earned the nickname of the 'Snake Blocks'. I urge you to look at this aerial photo and go "blimey". For orientation purposes that's Holly Street running diagonally across the foreground, as this diagrammatic map confirms. But at ground level the five-storey flats created massive severance, the walkways proved unpoliceable and in the late 1990s architects Levitt Bernstein decided to have another go. I can also offer you a video documentary in which the previous residents discuss the transformation. You'd guess none of this if standing here today.
The revamp sought to recreate a more traditional street pattern lined with houses and lowrise flats on a less threatening scale. Most residents now have ground floor doors, even front gardens, the architect's intention to create a clear demarcation between private and public space. It's a measure of their success that I walked down the new version of Holly Street behind a young family with a small child dawdling to greet a ginger tabby, point at an ornamental duck pushing a wheelbarrow and giggle at a deflated Santa.
Holly Street was gifted a major sports centre as a Millennium Project, although its gates are currently temporarily closed until further notice. A short distance away is a GP surgery shortlisted for the Surgery of the Year Award 2019 (although it lost out to a clinic in Blandford Forum), conspicuously bedecked in posters urging patients to have a flu jab. But these public buildings are only brief intrusions in what's now a quiet residential backwater, complete with spindly saplings and cobbled speed ramps, and not a snake in sight.
Ivy Street N1
For orientation purposes we're starting in the middle of Hoxton Street Market, which isn't quite where those at Time Out normally think Hoxton is. In the absence of any stalls at present (for tiered reasons), best look for the alleyway between Hoxton Best Kebab and the Well Hung gallery. Ivy Street starts small and bollarded before widening gradually between a modern terrace and a three-storey redbrick Victorian primary school. Ofsted liked them last December, which'll be why snippets of their report are emblazoned across the front wall.
Beyond the old pub the road opens out into full-on municipal mode. That's the Arden Estate on the southern side, which'll be why someone christened the nearest two blocks Oberon House and Macbeth House. Both are fronted by long balconies with regularly-spaced blue doors, and resemble a giant residential Advent calendar (but with unrandomised windows and numbers that go up to 40). Civic amenities include a small topiary garden with pergola, fenced off to discourage trespass, plus a larger recreational space around the back where Ivy Walk used to be.
A brief terrace on the northern side permits residents greater freedom of expression, for example by depositing a sporty Mini or a four-bodied equine statue in their front garden. But the biggest artistic intrusion is taking place right now at that old pub I mentioned, the former Queen Adelaide. Everything except its facade has been knocked down and is imminently to be rebuilt into an extraordinary curvaceous form by the architectural practice Sam Jacob Studio. Downstairs will be a community centre for the longstanding Ivy Street Family Centre, and upstairs a flamboyant flat for... heavens, the architect Sam Jacobs. I particularly enjoyed these chunks of the design rationale.
I'd have said the proposed building resembles a cross between a steamship, a mosque and a child's bathtoy, but I'm not paid to write this stuff. I'd also suggest that Ivy Street at present is like Holly Street in reverse, an ordinary residential street in which an architect's whim is about to be imposed rather than taken away. Of all the streets that are in the hood, the Holly bears the crown.
