Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
the place as a political theatre venue, and two years later, the Roundhouse began to stage
rock gigs - everyone from Hendrix and The Doors to The Ramones and Kraftwerk - and
other nonconformist happenings. In 1966, it held a launch party for the underground
paper,
International Times
, at which Pink Floyd and Soft Machine both performed, later
hosting a Dialectics of Liberation conference organized by R.D. Laing, not to mention
performances by the anarchist Living Theatre of New York, featuring a naked cast.
Jewish Museum
129 Albert St • Mon-Thurs & Sun 10am-5pm, Fri 10am-2pm • £7.50 • First Thurs of month 5-9pm • £3.50 •
T
020 7284 7384,
W
jewishmuseum.org.uk •
!
Camden Town
Despite having no significant Jewish associations, Camden is home to London's
purpose-built
Jewish Museum
. The Welcome Gallery, on the ground floor, features ten
extremely varied accounts of what it's like to be Jewish in contemporary London, from
a teenager at the JFS to an Orthodox rabbi - you also get to see a thirteenth-century
ritual bath (mikveh) from the City. On the first floor, there's an engaging exhibition
explaining Jewish practices and illustrated by cabinets of Judaica from all over Europe,
including a seventeenth-century Venetian Ark of the Covenant and treasures from
London's Great Synagogue in the City, burnt down by Nazi bombers in 1941. On the
second floor, there's an interactive display on the history of British Jews from 1066
onwards, with good sections on Yiddish theatre, boxing, tailoring plus a special
Holocaust gallery which focuses on Leon Greenman (1920-2008), one of only two
British Jews who suffered and survived Auschwitz. The museum also puts on a lively
programme of special exhibitions on the top floor, as well as various talks, films,
discussions and concerts, and has a café on the ground floor.
20
Islington
!
Angel
Since the 1960s,
Islington
's picturesque but dilapidated Regency and early Victorian
squares and terraces have been snapped up by professionals and City types and
comprehensively renovated. The impact of this gentrification, however, has been
relatively minor on the borough as a whole, which stretches as far north as Highgate
Hill, and remains one of the city's poorest.
Chapel Market
(Tues-Sun), to the west of
Upper Street, selling cheap clothes, fruit and veg and Arsenal football memorabilia,
is a salutary reminder of Islington's working-class roots. For more on the history of
Islington, visit the borough's museum (see p.151).
There's little evidence of those roots on the main drag,
Upper Street
: the arrival of its
antique market - confusingly known as
Camden Passage
- coincided with the new
influx of cash-happy customers, and its pubs and
restaurants
reflect the wealth of its
new residents. For entertainment, Islington boasts the long-established
King's Head
pub
theatre
(see p.419), the Little Angel
puppet theatre
and the ever-popular Almeida plus
several live-music venues (see p.400). All of which make Islington one of the liveliest
areas of north London in the evening - a kind of off-West End.
THE NEW RIVER
In 1613,
Hugh Myddelton
(1560-1631), Royal Jeweller to James I, revolutionized London's
water supply by drawing fresh water direct from the River Lee, 38 miles away in Hertfordshire,
via an aqueduct known as the
New River
. A weathered statue of Myddleton, unveiled by
Gladstone in 1862, stands at the apex of Islington Green. Right up until the late 1980s the New
River continued to supply most of north London with its water - the original termination point
was at
New River Head
, near Sadler's Wells theatre (see p.416); the succession of ponds to the
northeast of Canonbury Road is a surviving fragment of the scheme; north of Stoke
Newington, much of the river remains
in
situ
.
