History of Stroud Green

Stroud Green in London, England, is a suburb adjacent to Finsbury Park in the northern part of Greater London. While most of the area (east and north) is in the London Borough of Haringey, a very small part (west and south) is in the London Borough of Islington. The Stroud Green Road (running WNW-ESE) not only forms the boundary between the two boroughs but is also the area's principal thoroughfare and a busy local shopping street, with many popular restaurants and bars.

The Stroud Green Road also represents a border between the ancient ecclesiastical parishes of Islington and Hornsey. At one time, this part of Hornsey parish, and thus Stroud Green, stretched into what is now Hackney, following the present-day Blackstock Road as far as the junction with Mountgrove Road, all beyond the Seven Sisters Road (created c.1832) that today forms Stroud Green's eastern boundary. Here in that former part of Stroud Green was the site of the Eel Pie House, a tavern on the New River (approximately the site of Number 41 Wilberforce Road. When this was demolished in the 1870s another inn, now the Arsenal Tavern took on the name) ^[1] then the New River ran above ground at this point. This was originally in a wooden, lead-lined aqueduct - known locally as the Boarded River - but eventually that wooden construction was replaced by a raised earth embankment, atop which the river ran. Nowadays the New River runs underground in this area.

Records for Stroud Green date back to the start of the 15th century, but today it seems that nothing remains as physical evidence of Stroud Green's distant past, and the area is now dominated by housing that dates from the late-nineteenth century. Destruction of some parts of Stroud Green was caused by aerial bombing during the Second World War,^[2] and this led to the creation, by the then Hornsey Borough Council, of several zones of public housing. Since c.2003 much of Stroud Green has been designated as a Conservation Area (Planning (Listed Buildings and Conservation Areas) Act 1990), defining the areas as: "the triangular area enclosed by Stroud Green Road and the Haringey/Islington border to the south and west, Mount View Road to the north, and the railway line to the east" (see the full rationale below: Twenty-first-century appreciation). This geographical zone seems to mirror the area referred to as Stroud Green throughout the Victoria County History of Middlesex (1980), which, unless otherwise indicated, is used as the basis for much of the historical data provided here.