Top 7 Islington Buildings With Extraordinary Former Lives

A visitor arriving at the Boston Music Room in Tufnell Park might reasonably assume that the building was always intended for entertainment. Its earlier history tells a much stranger story. The premises began life in 1885 as the Stanley Baths, a Victorian swimming establishment built around a pool approximately sixty feet long. Public bathing facilities were an important part of nineteenth-century urban life. They provided opportunities for recreation and exercise in an era when private bathrooms were far from universal. A purpose-built swimming pool represented both a commercial opportunity and a contribution to the changing expectations of city living. By the early twentieth century, the economics of leisure were shifting. In 1909, the building was converted for cinema use, replacing swimmers with audiences drawn to the rapidly expanding popularity of moving pictures. Later adaptations continued the transition towards live entertainment, eventually producing the music venue associated with the site today. The building's history captures several successive revolutions in popular leisure. Swimming, cinema and live music might seem like unrelated activities, but each depended on the same essential ingredients: a sizeable indoor space, paying customers and a neighbourhood eager for entertainment. The Boston Music Room is a reminder that London's cultural infrastructure is often built inside the remains of something entirely different.

On the banks of the Regent's Canal, a former industrial site became one of the most important addresses in early British cinema. Gainsborough Studios developed within buildings originally associated with electricity generation, transforming infrastructure intended to power the city into a place where filmmakers created imaginary worlds. The studio became particularly significant during the silent-film era. Alfred Hitchcock worked there during the early stages of his career, and The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog, released in 1927, remains one of the most celebrated films associated with the site. The production helped establish the suspenseful visual language that would later make Hitchcock internationally famous. Gainsborough also became known for a distinctive range of British films, including popular melodramas. Yet the film industry's changing economics eventually brought an end to production at the Islington site. After the studio closed in 1949, the buildings were adapted for more prosaic commercial uses, including whisky storage and warehousing associated with carpets. The site was eventually redeveloped for residential use, and the surviving name preserves its cinematic identity. The sequence is extraordinary: power generation, filmmaking, industrial storage and housing, all associated with the same stretch of canal. Few residential developments can claim such a direct connection to the beginnings of one of cinema's greatest directors.

The former Carlton Cinema on Essex Road is one of Islington's most startling architectural survivors. Opened in 1930, it was conceived during the great age of the picture palace, when cinema operators competed to offer audiences an experience far grander than the ordinary act of watching a film. Its designers embraced an extravagant Egyptian-inspired decorative scheme, creating a setting that turned a night at the pictures into an encounter with theatrical fantasy. The auditorium originally accommodated approximately 2,500 people. This was cinema as spectacle, with the building itself playing almost as important a role as the entertainment on screen. The cinema industry changed dramatically after the Second World War. Television ownership grew, audience habits shifted and enormous single-screen venues became increasingly difficult to sustain. The Carlton ceased regular cinema operation in 1972 and entered a second commercial life as a bingo hall, retaining a form of collective entertainment while abandoning its original purpose. Bingo continued until 2007. The building subsequently entered a new phase of religious use, with its remarkable interior surviving through successive changes of ownership and function. Its history charts three very different kinds of congregation: filmgoers, bingo players and worshippers. The extraordinary achievement is that so much of the original picture-palace character remains visible despite those transformations.

Behind Upper Street's familiar shopfronts stood a substantial complex devoted to an activity that once shaped everyday British life: sorting and distributing the post. The former Royal Mail premises occupied a large urban site, with the scale and organisation required to process enormous volumes of letters and parcels. Postal buildings were working machines. Their internal layouts were designed around the movement of mail, employees, equipment and vehicles rather than the domestic or recreational uses that characterise much of modern Islington. The complex represented an era when physical correspondence demanded extensive infrastructure in the heart of the city. As postal operations changed, the site became available for redevelopment. Its transformation into Islington Square introduced homes, shops, restaurants and leisure facilities into buildings and spaces that had previously served a specialised industrial and logistical purpose. The development retained important elements of the historic architectural character while fundamentally changing how the public experiences the site. The contrast is especially striking because both versions of the complex were designed around circulation. Where letters and parcels once moved through a carefully managed network, residents and visitors now move between apartments, businesses and public spaces. Islington Square demonstrates how a large piece of working-city infrastructure can be repurposed without entirely erasing the architectural evidence of its former life.

The London Canal Museum occupies one of the more improbable survivors of Victorian London's food industry. Its building on New Wharf Road was constructed as an ice warehouse associated with Carlo Gatti, an entrepreneur who helped transform the supply of ice into a substantial commercial business. Before mechanical refrigeration became commonplace, natural ice was a valuable commodity. Large quantities were harvested in Scandinavia, transported to Britain and stored in insulated underground wells. The ice could then be distributed to businesses and households requiring cooling, including those involved in food preservation and the hospitality trade. The warehouse's location near the canal network was no accident. Water transport helped connect imported supplies with the markets and customers of a rapidly growing metropolis. The enormous ice wells beneath the building reveal the scale of the operation and the engineering required to keep frozen water from melting before it could be sold. The building subsequently served other industrial purposes, including storage associated with London bus components, before reopening as the London Canal Museum in 1992. Visitors can still encounter evidence of its remarkable first life. What appears to be a modest brick warehouse is actually a monument to an international trade in frozen water, established long before anyone could rely on an electric refrigerator.

The enormous building on Seven Sisters Road opened in 1930 as the Finsbury Park Astoria, an extravagant cinema with an auditorium designed to evoke an atmospheric Spanish-Moorish town. Its spectacular interior offered audiences a form of escapism that began before the film itself appeared on screen. As cinema audiences declined, the building found an extraordinary second life as a major concert venue. In March 1967, Jimi Hendrix famously set fire to his guitar on its stage, several months before the more widely remembered Monterey performance. The venue later became known as the Rainbow Theatre, hosting artists whose influence reached far beyond London. Its musical history includes performances by The Who, Pink Floyd and Bob Marley and the Wailers. Marley's 1977 concerts are particularly valuable because they were filmed. The accompanying YouTube link shows Lively Up Yourself performed at the Rainbow, allowing viewers to see and hear the building in one of its most celebrated incarnations. The theatre closed as a major concert venue in the early 1980s. It was subsequently acquired by the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God and restored for religious use. Today, the building presents an extraordinary contrast between its current function and its musical past. Behind the facade of a place of worship lies a stage once occupied by some of the most influential performers in popular music. Few buildings capture the changing cultural identity of North London quite so vividly.