Farringdon Road

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Section of Farringdon Road (photo taken in 2007)

Farringdon Road is an inner-city street in Clerkenwell , London .

The construction of the road lasted from the 1840s to the 1860s and is considered one of the most important urban engineering achievements of the 19th century. Not only was it one of the first multi-lane streets in a big city, but the River Fleet was laid underground in a system of tunnels, thus solving one of London's greatest sanitary problems at the time. The construction of the road also included the world's first section of the underground, a section of the Metropolitan Railway that later became part of the London Underground and runs below Farringdon Road from King's Cross St. Pancras via Farringdon to the City.

Farringdon Road is currently part of the A201 road that connects King's Cross with Elephant and Castle . From King's Cross it heads southeast, crosses Roseberry Avenue, then turns south, crosses Clerkenwell Road, and then reaches Farringdon Station. It ends at the border between the City of London , the London Borough of Camden and the London Borough of Islington , at the intersection with Charterhouse Street . Your further course in the City of London is Farringdon Street.

The construction of Farringdon Road necessitated the removal of the Fleet Market , which in 1736 spanned the River Fleet , now the largest of London's underground rivers . North of the market (around Ray Street Bridge) was Hockley-in-the-Hole , an area known for bear hunting and related activities.

Notable buildings on Farringdon Road include the former headquarters of the daily newspaper The Guardian at number 119, the so-called Zeppelin Building, built in 1917 as number 61 after an air raid with a zeppelin during World War I, and the west side of Smithfield Market .

Plaque commemorating the Zeppelin air raid on 61 Farringdon Road.

An infamous building on Farringdon Road was the Farringdon Road Buildings, a five-building tenement built for the working class in Victorian times. A lack of bathrooms and poor sanitary conditions marked one of the last slums in central London, which was inhabited until the early 1970s. The buildings were poorly lit, overcrowded, and infested with rats and cockroaches. Residents were trapped in poverty and then relocated by Islington Borough Council, and the buildings in the neighborhood of Exmouth Market and the Royal Mail Mount Pleasant Sorting Office were demolished in the mid-1970s and replaced with a parking garage . A contemporary description of the circumstances in these buildings is contained in the novel The Nether World by George Gissing .

See also

Web links

supporting documents

  1. ^ Zeppelin damage in Farringdon. wordpress.com, February 3, 2013, accessed September 24, 2016 .
  2. ^ George Gissing, Stephen Charles Gill: The nether world (=  Oxford world's classics. ). Oxford University Press, Oxford / New York 2008, ISBN 978-0-19-953828-7 ( gutenberg.org - first edition: Smith, Elder, & Co., 1889).

Coordinates: 51 ° 31 ′ 13 ″  N , 0 ° 6 ′ 21 ″  W.