White Conduit Street, N1

White Conduit Street was laid out and built up with houses and tenements from the mid-1790s.

It was subsequently extended north of the Penton Estate to link up with Cloudesley Road in Islington, but has now been reduced to a short dead-end.

White Conduit Street acquired a number of shops, but the London County Council refused for a time to allow the building line to be broken by the erection of projecting shops there, curbing its development as a shopping street.

The first three houses, of 1795–6, were at the south end on the west side.

The east side of the street was built up in the following decade, with a public house, the Spanish Patriots, at the north end. The rest of the west side followed in the 1820s, and No. 2 on the east side in the 1830s.

The forecourt shop addition to No. 2 was built by J. S. Campion in 1922 for Simon Cohen, a draper, whose facia specified his trade more grandly as ’costumier’ and ’furrier’. No. 1 (with No. 26a Chapel Market) was rebuilt in 1925 by A. Class & Son, a replacement that had long-since been intended. No. 23 was rebuilt in 1954, to designs by Eric S. Brown.

The northern parts of the street were cleared around 1980 for the Sainsbury’s development and its neighbouring car park in Liverpool Road and Tolpuddle Street.

In the image below, photographer John Gay captured this image of a line of children holding hands as they walk along the middle of White Conduit Street towards the junction with Chapel Market in Islington in the 1950s.

Children in White Conduit Street, Islington