New Publications
The Survey’s latest volumes, South and East Clerkenwell and Northern Clerkenwell and Pentonville, will be published in May 2008. Together they describe the whole of the ancient parish of Clerkenwell and a small zone between the parish itself and the historic boundary of the City of London. A wide area, Clerkenwell extends from the ‘village’ centre around Clerkenwell Green as far as the Angel and the fringes of King’s Cross, and includes all the streets and squares between Goswell Road and Farringdon Road.
South and East Clerkenwell (volume 46) focuses on the older-developed parts, centred on the Green and Close. Tracing the story of this tightly knit, multi-layered area, it relates the social, political and economic transitions, from its medieval monastic origins to its recent emergence as a location for the design and media professions and for fashionable loft-living.
Major individual buildings covered include the Knights Hospitallers’ St John’s Gate (1504) and the former Middlesex Sessions House (1788–92). Discussion of buildings and building development generally follows a broadly topographical arrangement, based on historic patterns of landholding. Separate chapters are devoted to the most important historic road, St John Street, and to Farringdon and Clerkenwell Roads, constructed from scratch in the nineteenth century.
Northern Clerkenwell and Pentonville (volume 47) deals with the more spaciously planned streets from Exmouth Market and Rosebery Avenue north to Pentonville, the Angel and Islington High Street. The story here is dominated by house-building in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries on a group of great family and corporate-owned estates. It includes the now largely vanished Georgian suburb of Pentonville and the elegant villas of the Lloyd Baker and New River Company estates. But there is an important pre-development history too, concerned with the spas, wells and pleasure grounds which characterized the area from the seventeenth century. Due consideration is also given to the sweeping changes of the twentieth century, in the form of public housing construction, war-damage and de-industrialization.
Among individual sites and buildings described in detail are New River Head, a vital component in London’s water supply since the early 1600s; Sadler’s Wells Theatre, the last survivor of the old places of entertainment, dating back to the 1670s; and Finsbury Health Centre, Berthold Lubetkin’s Modernist masterpiece of 1937–9.
Though complementary, the new books are self-contained. They are available separately or, with a discount, as a pair. Readers familiar with the series will find that significant innovations have been made. While the traditional double-column format has been retained, the books have a much more up-to-date appearance. For the first time, extensive use has been made of colour, and the illustrations (of which there are more than in previous volumes) have been fully integrated with the text.
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