Canonbury Square is Malcolm Saville's Brownlow Square

Brownlow Square was a little forgotten corner of London. It wasn't really a square because two of the sides were longer than the other two. Three narrow streets ran up hill into it and people who saw it for the first time were always surprised by its shabby gentility and promise of peace and quiet. All the houses were tall and narrow, with steps leading down to a dark basement. Some of them had coloured front doors. No. 7 was scarlet - like a fire station, Dickie said - and some of the fronts were nicely painted in cream or grey. In the centre of the square was a patch of grass surrounded by a tired-looking hedge of laurel and an iron fence.

Brownlow Square was a surprise and a challenge to the dull streets surrounding it. The Mortons knew that it was not smart or fashionable, but it was quiet and not very far from the centre of London and quite near shops and a Tube station. Although there were a lot of stairs in the house, there were also plenty of rooms; and as the Mortons enjoyed  entertaining their friends their new home gave them the opportunity of doing so.

That comes from Lone Pine London by Malcolm Saville, the 10th Lone Pine Club story, which was published in 1957.

But what was the model for Brownlow Square? The doyen of Saville scholars, Stephen Bigger, suggests that it is Canonbury Square in Islington. So I went there yesterday afternoon to pass the time before meeting some Liberator friends for a drink.

In the blurb for his video about Canonbury, which also made me want to see it, John Rogers says:

This walk takes into a magical realm just off the hustle and bustle of Upper Street Islington as we take a walking tour around the streets of Canonbury. Ed Glinert described Canonbury as ‘The best preserved and most picturesque suburb in inner London’ (The London Compendium). In The London Nobody Knows, Geoffrey Fletcher wrote that to walk from Upper Street to Canonbury Square is to ‘move into an entirely different world’.

And they're all correct: it is an extraordinary area to find just round the corner from Highbury and Islington station.

As John explains early in this video, Canonbury Square was not always the desirable area it is now. It was damaged by bombing during the war and the houses were in a poor state of repair anyway.

But the Mortons chose the right time to move there - we're told in Lone Pine London that they'd not been living there long.

Because in 1957, they year the book was published, the North London Press (25 January), Basil Spence, the architect of Coventry Cathedral, had taken a house just off Canonbury Square. His neighbours, the paper said, included Sir Philip Mende, the director of the National Gallery, the critic Raymond Mortimer and the writer and critic Lionel Hale.

Spence told the paper:

"The view from every window is beautiful. We have Canonbury Tower, there are lovely mulberry trees 400 years old, and from the top windows we can see several Wren spires. It is quiet, and there is no parking problem."

So the Mortons were the original gentrifiers.

There is no house in Canonbury Square with a front door like a fire engine, and no. 7 shares a portico with the house next door, which Saville would surely have mentioned. So I imagine the Mortons' house as looking like the ones in the photo at the top of this post. 

In a corner of the square you will find a green plaque for George Orwell, who lived in a top-floor flat here in the late 1940s. This is where he began writing Animal Farm.

And the bottom photo shows Canonbury Tower, which Spence mentioned. It is part of the remains of a Tudor manor house and a wholly unexpected building to find in Islington.