Nothing to lose but my chains

After 15 years, Mark Jones (right) is selling his Islington home. Why, he asks, did we allow rows of Identikit coffee shops to turn N1 into just another suburb?

IAM living in a kind of quarantine. After nearly 15 years' residence in Islington, I am about to be released into the outside world. Even allowing for their sadistic delaying tactics, I should be out of here by the time my 15th anniversary arrives in November. Fifteen years: from a one-bedroom flat in St Paul's Road to a two- bedroom flat in Linton Street to an end-of-terrace house in Rees Street, and a lovely hefty profit along the way.

The smugness that we successful upgraders of property all feel is bulked up by a different store of self-satisfaction that comes with a decade and a half in England's most aware and sensitive postal district: 15 years of contemporary food, state-of-the art organic produce, natural fibres, fashionable opinions, award-winning architecture. Fifteen years in Islington makes you a pretty formidable and fully paid-up subscriber of the land created by the most famous Islington resident of the lot, Tony Blair.

Living in Islington also conferred status; you got a reaction being here. A pretty sneering one, on the whole. The rest of London sneered at you as a consequence of the above-mentioned litany of smugness. We were too serious to be Notting Hill, too Leftie to be Clapham.

After 15 years, you get used to the unique notoriety that goes with living in N1. So why leave now?

It is Sunday afternoon, and I have just taken a stroll along Upper Street to remind myself why.

The stroll is superficially a far more agreeable experience than it would have been in 1986. The Angel, a grubby, sooty eyesore then, has been rebuilt by nice architects in the yellowish brick that gives Islington its warm appearance.

The Wimpy bar has gone. The first of the theme pubs has come in, as has Pret a Manger. Coffee Republic is now installed in what 15 years ago was still known as the Socialist Republic of Islington. It's nice to see that the coffee chain is continuing the Islington tradition of sloganeering. Theirs is Real Life, Real People, Real Coffee.

The reality for one longstanding small Islington coffee shop is of the hard economic sort. The Canadian Muffin Shop used to dispense great homebrewed coffee, warm cakes and a bohemian, brown-breadish ambience to weekend brunchers.

Sandwiched between Pret and Coffee Republic it couldn't survive.

The For Sale sign is up. Here's another theme we will encounter as we continue into Islington proper.

In Upper Street there are, as there always have been, young people with clipboards and posters lying in ambush. For years you couldn't get through the gauntlet of weekend activists outside the Halifax.

You'd either be shouted at by the Socialist Workers' Party, ordering you to Smash the Anti-Union Laws, or have a Living Marxism salesperson ask if you'd given a thought to Nicaragua as you tried to sneak into the Body Shop for a peppermint foot scrub. Today I am accosted by a blonde young woman who looks like a showjumper. "Can I talk to you about the World Wildlife Fund?"

she asks sweetly.

It might be four o'clock on a Sunday afternoon, but Upper Street is incredibly vibrant. "Vibrant" refers to the bustle you get when hundreds of young couples and prosperous singles spend their disposable income on clothes, cosmetics, wine and ethnic bedspreads.

When I first came here, there used to be cheap furnishing stores and down-at-heel newsagents to deaden the consumer ambience. Farther back, Islington had the rather different vibrancy of a nick on a Saturday night.

Before the developers got hold of the place, the Angel deserved its lowly Monopoly- board rating: it was dirty, scruffy and, say those who knew it in the 1960s, not a nice place to be after dark. Now the only danger is the risk of tripping over someone's Donna Karan trainers as they lounge by their chrome tables outside the restaurants that line the long length of Upper Street.

Let me correct that statement immediately. Islington is a dangerous place to be - especially if you are one of those people eating outside. As they pick at their carefully selected organic beanburgers and non-GM vegetables, they are ingesting some of the crappiest air in Britain. Upper Street and Essex Road have long dominated pollution charts in London. The breezes blow the rubbish east from the centre and the lung-clogging particulates collect in a fetid pool in our basin location at the bottom of Highgate Hill.

But let's get back to the restaurants. Who are they, these serial eatery-launchers? Est Est Est, O'Neill's pub, Caffe Uno, Starbucks, Ruby in the Dust, Brown's, Prima Pasta, Pitcher and Piano and a dozen more names familiar from the high streets and shopping malls of this prosperous land. I feel like appropriating another slogan from the ancient socialist days: eaters of Islington unite - you have nothing to lose but your chains. The chain restaurants are swamping us. The most depressing is a wacky South African called Nando's: this used to be the Upper Street Fish Shop, or Olga's as it was known to Islingtonians, where architects, writers and lawyers would hunch up next to postal workers and van drivers over the freshest fish and cheapest oysters in London.

I suppose if there is one development that makes me glad to leave Islington it's this.

The traffic and crowds it will bring are bad enough.

But when N1 is complete, we will finally be able to say that Islington really is like any other boring town or suburb; just a little more " vibrant", perhaps.

creative, bolshie Islington is still there in corners.

Granita is going strong - one of the great London restaurants where, if you are lucky, you can still see Harold Pinter and the editor of the Daily Mail eyeing each other warily over the sea bass. The dykes patrol their patch around the Blue Angel and Patisserie Bliss, the has-been actors still growl at the bar of the King's Head. There are eclectic new shops like Gotham Angels and one-off restaurants like the Afghan Kitchen.

But it's no longer enough. I know it sounds snotty, but Islington has gone suburban and there are enough suburbs in the world without creating another one here.

I'm off to live somewhere on the river - Wandsworth Park, maybe - where the air is fresher and there's no immediate prospect of a Starbucks opening next door. Like Tony, I've pocketed my profit and moved on. But I doubt either of us will ever find anywhere like Islington, or Islington as it once was, again.

Copyright 2001
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