Upper Street begins at the junction of Pentonville Road and City Road, runs northwards past Angel, splits at Islington Green, ending at Highbury Corner.
The southernmost section of Upper Street carries the historical name of Islington’s High Street.
The hilltop village of Islington originally consisted of two streets alongside the High Street: Upper Street and Lower Street, which diverged from the High Street at Islington Green. Both date back to at least the 12th century.
In the 18th century Upper Street began to be redeveloped from an agricultural to a residential area. Ten houses were built in 1768 (later named Hornsey Row), and a further group built immediately south of Hornsey Row in 1792.
In the late nineteenth century, Upper Street became notorious for its night-time entertainments. In 1885, it was widely known as ’The Devil’s Mile’ on account of its prostitution, crime and the level of drunkenness. Charles Dickens described the area as "amongst the noisiest and most disagreeable thoroughfares in London."
Upper Street is unusual in being one of the few streets in London to have a ’high pavement’. This was constructed in the 1860s to protect pedestrians from being splashed by the large numbers of animals using the road to reach the rear of the new Royal Agricultural Hall.
In the 1970s and 1980s Upper Street was a focal point of the radical left. It was home to Sisterwrite, Britain’s first feminist bookshop, as well as the Trotskyist Pioneer Books, the anarchist Rising Free shop.
Upper Street now contains many fashionable shops, pubs, restaurants and theatres, including the now closed Granita restaurant where Tony Blair and Gordon Brown were said to have made their deal on the future leadership of the Labour Party.
Upper Street was one of the settings for local resident Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series. The London-based sections of the later books are set in and around Upper Street, the home address of Fenchurch.
