It's already time to return to my new feature in which I walk the entire length of Britain's B Roads, sequentially, starting with the lowest numbered. But whereas you've had to wait four days for the next instalment, I merely walked for a few minutes up the A1200 to reach the start of my next road.
I'm taking an existential risk in continuing because my previous reportage on the B101 delivered the smallest number of visitors to this blog on any day in the last two years. With readers staying away in droves I'm reticent to mention in advance that the B102 has similarly few points of interest, but you'll discover that soon enough.
The B102 used to be longer, kicking off south of the Regent's Canal rather than just to the north. This made sense when Bridport Place was part of the main route from Hoxton towards Stoke Newington, complete with tramway, but today the middle of that street has been grassed over. The terraced streets hereabouts were bombed so badly in the war that they were occupied first by prefabs and then, around fifty years ago, entirely replaced by Shoreditch Park.
The original road is now a broad lamplit promenade dividing the park in two, with a granite scrambling boulder on one side and an adventure playground on the other... but we must leave this interesting greenspace behind because it's now outside the B Road remit.
The modern B102 bears off New North Road just beyond the canal bridge. For the next three quarters of a mile it marks the dividing line between two London boroughs, with everything to the west being Islington and everything to the east being Hackney. It's also the path of the 21 and 141 bus routes, in case that helps a certain minority of my readers to picture it better. For the first quarter mile we'll be following the Regent's Canal, then bending north on a beeline for the Balls Pond Road, if that in any way whets your appetite.
Baring Street kicks off with a hideously complicated road sign which attempts to explain, across three panels, when the local Controlled Parking Zone is in operation. Best hope it's not an Arsenal match day, I think is the general gist. Anyone seeking a more interesting walk can access the canal towpath down some steps through a gate on the right, but a long brick wall the entire length of the street ensures the waterway is otherwise invisible. The street wasn't originally straight but bent away from the canal to skirt some warehouses, and that original road is also still called Baring Street (which makes for a brief but unusual brief bifurcation).
A quick hello to the bods who change timetables at bus stops. The panel at bus stop XE on Baring Street still contains a poster inviting responses to a consultation which ended three years ago, and perhaps you should take it down now.
All the big interest on the B102 is at the dogleg where it bears away from the canal. Here we find the Rosemary Branch, at first sight a smart Victorian pub topped by a pair of eagle's wings, but in fact a former music hall in which Marie Lloyd (and possibly Charlie Chaplin) once played. Go back 200 years and I'm told this was the site of the Rosemary Branch Equestrian Theatre, a tea garden with a timber circus building in which pony races took place. The entertainment tradition continues today in a small auditorium above the pub which hosts performances varying from family-friendly puppetry to "warning: mentions of animal and child abuse, graphic violence and death". The beaver in the front window is not original.
The pub nextdoor with the green glazed tiles is the Southgate Arms, purveyors of Barclays Ales and Stouts, or might still be if only it hadn't been converted to flats. As for the tall brick building completing this fine canalside trio it once belonged to Thomas Briggs Ltd, purveyors of rope and heavy canvas products. Founded in the early 19th century they had larger factories in Salford, Leeds and Barrow and for many years were the sole tent maker for HM's War Office. Impressively they held out until the 1960s before finally folding, and today their Islington branch is a small business hub in multiple-occupancy.
After the bend the B102 switches to its northern limb - Southgate Road. The initial trees are courtesy of Rosemary Gardens, a borderline Islington park, and the remainder of the view is mostly modern flats. I always chuckle at the Tesco Express on the corner of Balmes Road which proudly claims "Established 2009" on its facade as if one day this will make the store look distinguished. They'd be better off putting a blue plaque outside because this supermarket was, somewhat incredulously, once visited by Joseph Stalin, Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky. They came in 1907 (when this was the Brotherhood Church) to attend the 5th Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party... and there's something to mull over next time you're standing at the self checkout doing all the work yourself.
The road ahead is lined by substantial three-storey villas of the kind that make estate agents overexcited. This is because the B102 marks the western edge of De Beauvoir Town, a smart suburb built for the emerging middle classes in the 1840s. All the finest stuff is further east around the central square, but Southgate Road's residences are not to be sniffed at and are likely to have featured in a fair few Sunday supplement shoots. Pillared porches and steps down to basement flats are commonplace but not ubiquitous. I think the householder who named their interstitial dwelling 'Seaview Cottage' was having a laugh.
Where Southgate Road wins out is playing host to De Beauvoir Town's chief shopping parade. The doctors' surgery and builders' merchant are very much par for the course, but less so the wholefoods supermarket, the wine-flogging pizzeria and the hamper-delivering deli. The real outlier is J Smith Esq Bespoke Milliner, a boutique displaying a windowful of snazzy headgear including cowls, sequinned bonnets and a creation I can best describe as an explosion of fur. Even the pub grub at the De Beauvoir Arms is locally targeted, prioritising chard, aioli and pomegranate over chips and peas. I don't think it's too much of a spoiler to say that the B108 has nothing like this.
The remainder of Southgate Road is broad and continuously desirable, although I suspect the limited number of parking spaces peeves the residents. The only shops that intrude are Barry's Locks (which has been here so long the sign above the door still advertises an 0171 phone number) and Mira Food Store (where it seems to be impossible to buy a halloumi-free sandwich). The tone is only lowered at the far end by the fairly average Dover Court council estate, at which point the B102 reaches the Balls Pond Road and stops. I'm surprised it doesn't continue straight across and connect to Newington Green, but the officials who classified the nation's roads in 1922 must have had their reasons. We'll get there soon enough.
In good news there is no B103. There used to be, a fraction west of here, but it subsequently got reclassified as the more important but frankly unmemorable A1199. If you think of central Islington as a big triangle formed by Upper Street and Essex Road, this is the shorter third side that connects the two northern ends. It's better known as St Paul's Road, and hurrah I do not have to blog it because the B103 no longer exists.
