I don’t normally associate Islington in North London with the sea or think of its people as having a great sense of humour – if you’d have asked me, I’d have said that the eternal search for just the right kind of olive oil was too time consuming for anything so trivial as a good old larf, or even a little gentle irony.
Yes, I know that’s a cheap joke, but couldn’t resist it. In fact, a short stroll with Islington pals in the unusually warm October sun yesterday afternoon have put me right, as the photos above clearly show. Please click on them to understand why…
Does anyone out there know the story of how three separate properties in Southgate Road, all many miles from the sea came to be named Seaview Cottage, Harbour View and Coastguard Cottage? Does anyone else sense that there’s something vaguely Douglas Adams-ish about all this?
As if to prove that I haven’t entirely lost my marbles, here are some photos of boats on the Regent’s Canal, which runs through this part of town. It was good to see the area busy with people – it all seemed very different from the time when I regularly cycled this route two decades ago.
