Tracing high street centralities through spatial-morphological continuities from the past: the case of Islington, London

This paper builds on the authors’ previous research into movement economy theory to explore Hillier’s theory of centrality as a ‘process’. The case study is Islington, one of London’s nineteenth-century high streets, it is one example of the many cases in London where we can find spatial continuities from the past to the present. This continuity raises several questions regarding the role of street network configuration and built form adaptability in supporting the long-term socio-economic sustainability of such places. Using contemporaneous maps, including Goad fire insurance plans and the maps and notebooks of Charles Booth’s poverty survey, we analyse street network configuration, building properties (size and height) and use to explore centrality as an historical process. We find that different sections of the town centre have varying spatial properties that work to support a finely-grained diversity of land use characteristics rather than a clustering of any particular category. We argue that it is the potential of urban centres to sustain such diversity that is essential to understanding their historical endurance.