Article originally published at Islington Pepople

Most recently, we’ve had the campaign to rename Archway station as ‘Whittington’, after the area’s most famous occupant.

Islington residents have been campaigning for the name change for years, and according to Going Underground’s Annie Mole, they got a ‘sort of yes’ from Boris Jounson in August of last year. But the present-day Mayor told residents not to hold their breath, and the only change most Archway dwellers have noted recently is the regular closure of the station on weekends!

And then there’s Arsenal, which is the only station on the Underground to be named directly after a football club, changed from Gillespie Road in 1932.

Two of my favourite tube factoids are to do with escalators on the Underground: the longest of which can be found in our very own Angel station. At 197 ft (60m) it takes 80 seconds to carry passengers up or down, so if you’ve ever felt like you were taking the longest escalator ride of your life while emerging from the Northern Line at rush hour, you were probably right.

Holloway Road station, meanwhile, briefly played host to the first escalator on the whole of the Underground system: a bizarre, spiral-shaped contraption that was built in 1906 but deemed unsafe and never used. It was then apparently forgotten for the best part of 80 years, before an engineer discovered it gathering dust in the station’s second, dis-used lift shaft during a routine inspection.

The spiral escalator, devised by American inventor Jesse W. Reno, was an experiment that could have been taken up all over the underground if it had been successful, and would presumably have saved a lot of space in stations. But its trial at Holloway Road seems to have been enough to bury the idea forever.

Looking at some of the old photographs found in the abandoned shaft, it’s easy to see why the device was considered too dangerous for public use: passengers would have stood on a very narrow walkway, possibly with no handrail, and with no steps to climb in the event of a breakdown. Some have speculated that the escalator was based on a fairground ride that was in use at the time. The first fully-functional, non-hazardous escalator was installed at Earl’s Court five years later in 1911.

Highbury & Islington Station, now a 1960s concrete box, was once a grand old building that looked almost like a mini version of Waterloo. With pillars and gothic arches, the original Highbury Station could not look more different from its lowly reincarnation as Hi&I Tube.

There are some fascinating eyewitness accounts from Highbury residents caught up in the blast, which came from a V1 bomber that crash-landed at the North end of Upper Street, taking out shops, gardens and the part of the station that has now become the ‘Famous C0ck’ pub.

Observant commuters entering Highbury & Islington station to this day can see a small relic of the earlier station: look to the left of the entrance, between the station and the Famous Cock, and you’ll see one solitary column that was never taken down.

Do you have any fascinating facts on underground Islington you’d like to share with us? We’d love to hear them.

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Crafty Crafty

If you get stuck (and have an opinion on which one deserves to win shoe of the year 2009) then I’ve got a poll going here.

I was especially grabbed by the rather wonderful idea for making the cheese even more seasonal: chop off a few edges in a classic brie triangle, et voila: you’ve got a brie Christmas tree. Possibly the quickest food craft ‘project’ I’ve ever encountered, but I couldn’t resist including it here as it’s not something I’d necessarily have thought of. Joyeux noel!

Fortunately, I have just a thing at my disposal, as my good old ma has passed on this wonderfully tangy recipe for me, which goes down a storm on rainy days. It’s great with vanilla icecream, and I recently took it along to a top-notch tea party I attended with the Domestic Sluttery girls.. .So without further ado I’d like to share my lemon drizzle cake, which is adapted from an old Cranks recipe. The defining feature of this heartwarming cake is the warm syrup that’s poured over the finished item at the end, but more about that over the jump…

Read on for the recipe

Apologies for the amount of parenthesis going on here: I believe all recipes should be adapted to taste, and experiments have proven that varying the ingredients can result in very different (though equally yummy) cakes. The choice is yours.

Ingredients

• 100g butter or margarine (I used a 50/50 mix for the best results)
• 150g caster sugar (or brown sugar for a denser, more gooey effect)
• 1 lemon, grated and juiced to within an inch of its life
• 1 to 1.5 free range eggs (the 1 egg version is flatter and denser again)
• 100g self-raising flour (wholemeal works well and gives a nuttier effect)

Method

Grease and line an 18cm loaf tin. Heat the butter/marge in a pan with about two thirds of the sugar, over a gentle heat until the fat has melted. Then take the mixture off the heat and add the grated lemon rind.

Next, whisk the egg(s) in a basin and add the sugar mixture. Fold in the flour and pour the whole mixture into the prepared tin.

Bake in the oven on gas mark 4 (180 degrees) for about 30 minutes until cake is just firm to the touch.

On the hob, warm the remaining sugar along with the lemon juice to make a warm syrup.

Prick cake all over with a fork, then spoon the lemon syrup all over it.

Leave in the tin to cool.

Adapted from an original recipe by Cranks

On arrival, we were soon to discover another slight error in our planning, however, which was managing to book a trip slap-bang in the middle of TWO major local sporting events (including the now-infamous Thierry Henry handball game) but this didn’t seem to ruin things too much – we just gave Temple Bar a slightly wider berth than we otherwise would have done. Joe fortunately knows the city well enough to find a bar that wasn’t too full-on on for the first night, so he sunk a few Guinnesses while I continued stoically with the gin that had earlier helped me board the flight…

We stayed in a particularly lovely hotel called Number 31, which was set in the Georgian part of town and very modernist despite its history. They gave us a huge room with three beds and a comically massive chair. It claimed to have won an award for the best breakfasts in Ireland, which turned out to be a very good thing when I discovered the reality of finding a vegetarian meal anywhere in Dublin.

There were plenty of cafes during the day serving veggie stuff but our fine dining habit was curtailed from day one, when Joe was served bacon in a ‘vegetarian’ risotto at one of the places we’d booked in advance. Ho hum! On our last night we shared a romantic bag of chips on Baggott Street followed up by a 9 inch takeaway pizza in the hotel.

Don’t assume we sat around eating junk food and drinking obvious drinks, mind you: plenty of art and culture was observed, including two art exhibitions, a tour around the Chester Beatty library and its wonders, and culminating in a trip to the Gate Theatre to see a new adaptation of The Birds.. In the unlikely event that any of you ever go and see it, I won’t spoiler the end. But good grief it was chilling! We also managed to catch up with ex Benwell Road resident Nora, take a walk along the canal and buy ghastly souvenirs, so all in all not bad going for a three day jaunt. I liked the city and want to go back, but will be factoring in a day trip to Cork next time where the nearest rated veggie restuarant is situated

Admin and outings

Joe and I declared Wednesday and Thursday ‘admin days’, which meant that he played computer games while I went out shopping and got my hair cut. It’s quite short now incidentally – I must have got to that age. Oh, we got some boring stuff done as well – I’m looking at a ‘to-do’ list that’s 90% ticked so some progress must have been made but I’d never be so rude as to blog about it.

Brighton break

No week off would be complete without at trip to see Dad and Julia on the coast, so we picked another gloriously gale-ridden day to jump on a train and show up for a couple of days’ lounging, tea-drinking and cat watching. We also made the obligatory pilgrimage to Food for Friends, which just keeps on churning out the goods. On the cat front, Boingley is still with us (in some senses at least) but has a dodgy thyroid and is so zonked out on drugs to lower her levels that she rarely emerges from the cat basket these days. During the weekend I dragged my folks to a big craft fair that was a lot of fun, particularly since I’d forgotten how amusingly bizarre my Dad’s behaviour is towards total strangers whenever we go anywhere together. This has not changed.

While I was down there, the urge struck me to equip myself with a new phone, and I finally settled on the HTC Hero, having conducted extensive twitter-based research. Unfortunately I’ve been unable to test out its myriad and apparently wonderful Android features as yet, because the person who served me at T-Mobile was new to the job and of course I was too British to demand that someone else do it despite knowing it would go wrong. I’m still waiting for them to put me on the right data package and may soon have to ‘turn to twitter’ to ensure this happens promptly.

Update: It has indeed ‘gone wrong’. I still can’t access the google android store a week later, despite several despairing calls to T-Mobile. If anyone else can help me out here you’ll be my hero…

home is where the hearth is

On Sunday, I packed my bags and headed up to London to play the drums: you can read about the fantastic time I had banging away on them below.

The Craftacular, which only started to host events in the UK a year ago, has fast become an important fixture in the indie crafter’s diary. Its summer event was a huge hit, and this more tinsel-tastic affair promises to be splendid fun too – with a Christmas tree Tombola; tea and cake at the Lady Luck Rules OK Pop-Up Christmas Party, knitting know-how with Prick Your Finger and Knit & Destroy’s giant knit-along Christmas decoration. And if that’s not enough to get your needles knocking, plenty of very hip-sounding DJs will be in residence, spinning tunes as you craft the night away.

Anyone else planning on going along?

Bust Christmas Craftacular: 12 midday – 7:00pm, York Hall, 5-15 Old Ford Road, Bethnal Green, London E2 9PJ