Top 7 Unexpected Design Discoveries In Islington

Chapel Market has a visual identity drawn from the market itself. The placemaking scheme, developed by BOB Design with architects Carver Haggard and local stakeholders, takes inspiration from the steel tubes, bends and joints of the traders’ stall frames. These details informed the market’s bespoke 1903 typeface, while large pavement patterns help organise the space and maps use colours borrowed from the traders’ tarpaulins. The result is a joined-up design system in which signs, lettering, colours and the physical environment belong to the same place. It is an unusually thoughtful approach to wayfinding: rather than imposing a generic corporate identity, the designers found the raw material for the entire scheme in the market’s existing character.

At the corner of Grant Street and Chapel Market, a painted advertisement for Redfern’s Rubber Heels promotes a product with an almost impossibly appealing slogan: “Make Walking a Pleasure”. The sign advertised rubber heel attachments designed to make footwear more comfortable, and its lettering once occupied a prominent position across the building. Later layers of paint obscured the advertisement until renovation work revealed it again in 2007. Ghostsigns researcher Sam Roberts subsequently documented its history, including the possibility that a neighbouring leather business had a connection to the advertising arrangement. This is commercial design preserved by accident: a forgotten product, an economical promise and a piece of hand-painted typography that has outlived the business it was created to promote.

At 10 Camden Passage, a surviving Hovis ghost sign preserves an older form of outdoor advertising. Before illuminated panels and digital billboards, brands paid for prominent wall space and had their names painted directly onto buildings. This sign has an especially good local story: a baker who lived in the building was later involved in Islington council, and the advertisement was reportedly protected from removal in the 1980s. Its survival turns an ordinary building facade into a record of the neighbourhood’s commercial past. The design is simple, but its setting gives it another layer of meaning. What began as paid advertising has become part of the street’s visual heritage, noticed today by people who may never have encountered the original product campaign.

Finsbury Park station has a distinctive visual detail that commuters can easily overlook: a crossed-pistols motif incorporated into the Victoria line platform tile design. The graphic belongs to the tradition of London Underground station identities, in which repeating patterns and symbols help give each station its own character without interfering with the practical business of moving passengers. Its unusual imagery makes it more memorable than a conventional decorative repeat, while its position within the station means it is encountered as part of an everyday journey rather than in a gallery. This is the kind of design discovery that rewards a second look: a small, specific visual decision embedded in infrastructure millions of people use without necessarily thinking about how it was designed.

Facing Packington Street, the surviving mural at City of London Academy Islington was created around 1964 by William Mitchell. Its bold geometric composition features a large pair of compasses, circular patterns and blocks of colour, with a face at the hinge surrounded by words referring to James I and the New River that brought water from Hertfordshire towards London. Made from tile, broken china, glass and other tesserae on concrete, the mural connects abstract visual design with a very specific piece of local engineering history. Historic England lists it at Grade II, recognising its artistic quality and rarity as a surviving example of 1960s public art. It is a striking reminder that a wall can carry a story about science, infrastructure and place without resembling a conventional historical plaque.

On Islington Green, the bronze memorial to Street Cat Bob offers a different kind of design discovery. Rather than commemorating a monarch, military figure or grand civic achievement, the sculpture celebrates a cat whose story became familiar through the books of James Bowen. Its modest scale and recognisable subject make it approachable, while its placement in a busy public green allows it to become part of everyday neighbourhood life. Memorial design is often formal and distant; an animal sculpture invites a more immediate response, especially from people who recognise the character being commemorated. It provides a lighter counterpoint to the historic lettering and industrial objects elsewhere in this ranking, showing how a carefully chosen subject can make a small public artwork feel personal and welcoming.