Farringdon Road

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Farringdon Road.

Farringdon Road is a road in Clerkenwell, Central London. Its construction, which took almost 20 years between the 1840s and the 1860s, is considered one of the greatest urban engineering achievements of the nineteenth century. Not only was it one of the first engineered multi-lane roads, but it also buried the River Fleet in a system of underground tunnels, solving one of London's most daunting sanitary problems. Its construction also included the building of the world's first stretch of underground railroad, a branch of the Metropolitan Railway that later became part of the London Underground running beneath Farringdon Road from King's Cross into the City at Farringdon Street station.

Today, Farringdon Road is part of the A201 road connecting King's Cross to Elephant and Castle. It goes south-east from King's Cross, crossing Roseberry Avenue, then turns south crossing Clerkenwell Road before going past Farringdon station. It finishes on the border between the City of London, the London Borough of Camden and the London Borough of Islington, at an intersection with Charterhouse Street and Farringdon Street.

The construction of Farringdon Road necessitated the removal of the Fleet Market that had been built in 1736 above the course of the River Fleet, London's largest subterranean river.

Amongst the notable buildings on Farringdon Road are the former headquarters of The Guardian newspaper at no. 119, the Zeppelin Building (built in 1917 after a Zeppelin raid) and the western side of Smithfield Market.

Plaque commemorating a World War I Zeppelin raid on 61 Farringdon Road.

The most notorious building ever built on Farringdon Road, was the Farringdon Road Buildings, a five tenement block of dwellings built for the working classes during the Victorian era. Lacking bathrooms and with poor sanitary conditions, these buildings were still occupied up until the early 1970s and was one of the last slum dwellings to exist in Central London. Common features were poor lighting, overcrowding, with rat and cockroach infested living conditions, and people trapped by their own poverty. Residents were re-housed by Islington Borough Council and the buildings, close to Exmouth Market and the Royal Mail Mount Pleasant Sorting Office were pulled down in the mid-1970s, to be replaced by a multi storey car park. A contemporary description of the buildings is given in George Gissing's novel The Nether World.^[1]