45 Squared 21) NORTHAMPTON SQUARE, EC1
Borough of Islington, 70m×60m
Here's a semi-elegant square at the quieter end of Clerkenwell, half of it old and half new, and all a bit on the wonk. It's tucked away in the slice of streets between St John's Road and Goswell Road, somewhere between Angel and Barbican stations but not especially near either, which can make it a bit of a walk to lectures.
Named after the Marquess of Northampton, the local landowner, Northampton Square was laid out in 1803 on peripheral fields near New River Head. It was was aligned on the skew so fits awkwardly into the grid that followed, with roads radiating out from the corners and the middle of two sides. A rim of fine Georgian terraces followed, each house tall and thin with arched sash windows and an entirely ornamental balcony. Some were shops, one irregular wedge became a pub and several were occupied by craftsmen working on clocks, watches and jewellery. Such was the concentration of clock- and watchmakers that the British Horological Institute made its headquarters in the southwest corner, their new redbrick building opened by Sir Edmund Beckett, the grumpy sod who designed the clock mechanism that triggers Big Ben. The BHI finally moved out in 1978 and number 35 is now occupied by the National Centre for Social Research, home of the British Social Attitudes survey.
In the centre of the square is an oval garden, heavily railinged, designed by Fanny Wilkinson of the Metropolitan Public Gardens Association. It includes a Victorian bandstand, a feature more usually found in a park, with a rustic tiled roof and a dance-friendly wooden floor. I was intrigued by a council notice that says "We have been informed that groups have been falsely claiming that they have hired the bandstand and telling people they must leave". Users are reassured that "if anyone not in possession of a valid permit asks you to leave the bandstand, then you are able to refuse to do so", and I can only imagine the backstory there. Fanny also built a gardener's shed which has since been repurposed as a tiny cafe, its stated preoccupation being that external tables and chairs are for customers only and must not be moved. If you've brought a refillable cup you might have more luck with the 1885 drinking fountain and its very-much-not-1885 metal tap.
What very much jars is the lack of lovely Georgian terraces across the northern half of the square. Instead hulking institutional buildings proliferate, a warren of learning stacked on many levels, this being the Clerkenwell campus of a major university. It started out as the NorthamptonInstitute in 1894, a body dedicated to promoting industrial skills including engineering, artistic crafts and (inevitably) horology. The first building occupied one of the six wedges round the square and as time's gone by two more have fully succumbed including the snuffing out of two entire streets. The demolition of multiple terraces was rubberstamped in 1962 by the LCC's Historic Buildings SubCommittee who concluded that Northampton Square had always been geometrically unsatisfactory, its six side-streets making 'the proportion of void to solid excessive'. Hence the flood of students.
Today it's the hub of City University, or rather City St George's, University of London as it now styles itself having swallowed up St George's medical school last summer. The institution has a long habit of swallowing vocational minnows, having previously absorbed St Bartholomew School of Nursing & Midwifery (1995), Charterhouse College of Radiography (1995) and the Inns of Court School of Law (2001). This latter acquisition allows City to claim four former Prime Ministers as alumni - Asquith and Attlee direct, and Thatcher and Blair as former lawyers. Perhaps my favourite Northampton Institute fact is that it's an official Olympic venue having hosted the boxing in 1908, a suspiciously partisan tournament in which Great Britain took 14 of the 15 medals. It's also where George Baxter pioneered the world's first commercially viable colour printing process, although the site of his Victorian workshop is now the student cafe if the location of his blue plaque is anything to go by.
Northampton Square is thus a peculiar hybrid of elegance and utility, one side a screen of privacy and the other a magnet for backpacks, lanyards and scurrying labgoers. Look one way and it could still be a tradesmen's terrace, look the other and the skills we need for the future are being honed in countless classrooms, because Northampton Square has always been technically-minded.
