NLA

NLA Walking Tour: Housing in Islington

Tour

Saturday 28 February 2026
14:00 - 16:00

Focusing on housing, this tour explains how low-rise Islington came to be the home of some of London's most distinctive high-rises.
For centuries, the townscape around Angel, Islington has been associated with its well-preserved, genteel Georgian and Victorian buildings, streets and terraces. In the twentieth century, whilst some notable post-war housing at a mix of low and high-rise scales was built in Finsbury, just to the south of the Angel, the urban environment here has remained predominantly low-rise.

However, after a change in attitude towards tall buildings, in recent years there has been an explosion of sky-scraping residential blocks built along City Road towards Old Street. Do these taller blocks destroy the original character of this neighbourhood or are they simply a new form of the traditional terrace, albeit rising into the sky? This tour will look at these contrasting housing typologies and how they came about.

Highlights include Bunhill 2 Energy Centre, Duncan Terrace/Colebrooke Row Conservation Area and The Atlas Building.

This tour connects to our Homes for Londoners research. Find out more here.

Speaker biographies

Joseph Granata

Tour Guide and Architectural Illustrator, The Fox and the Flâneur


Housing

#NLAHousing

Meeting point

In the small square outside Angel Station, N1 8XB

What3Words: ///veal.policy.tells

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