This rather shabby-looking short passageway off Islington’s Upper Street has an unexpected gem with a Dickens link in the corner.
This part of London began developing in the 1720s, but even a century later, it was still largely fields, with houses lining only the few main roads.
Terrett’s Place is developed by now, but was always what it is today – a tiny little corner passage behind the back of a couple of shops. If it was ever expected to get larger with future housing developments, that never happened.
Greenwood 1828 map with the alley in red
Originally, it was Terrett’s Court, but it had been renamed Terrett’s Place by the 1890s, and probably recently, as the old name is included in a medical report from 1892.
As you walk down, and mind the scaffolding there on my visit, a hint that there might be something interesting comes from the doors, which are undeniably better than your average back-of-shop alley. And that bow window on the side of one house is pretty impressive.
And don’t those bricks in the corner look quite old?
And yes, that slip of brickwork is the clue – because it’s the very narrow frontage of a 300-year-old Georgian house. And very Tardis-like, it’s much larger inside than you might expect from that narrow entrance that’s been squashed into the corner.
The house was apparently built in 1720 and probably modified around 1750, and despite the tiny entrance, it boasts four bedrooms over four floors and a very large back garden.
Not only that, the interior, while modernised over the centuries, still retains many original features.
According to Knight Frank, which recently sold the house, its dating was confirmed by a 1724 halfpenny found under the kitchen floor. Also found were a number of fragments of plaster busts and associated moulds, reflecting the house’s use as a workshop in the early 19th century.
Unsurprisingly, the former owner who did so much to restore and conserve the house was Duncan Wilson, CEO of Historic England, who lived in it for 35 years. Some photos of the interior are here. And his report on the history of the house was published in the 1990 Transactions of the ASCHB.
The house has also been suggested to be the inspiration for the house lived in by Tom Pinch in Dickens’ Martin Chuzzlewit.
Next to the old house is a former 20th-century warehouse conversion, which is also a 3-bed house, and is also up for sale. That warehouse had replaced 4 Turrett Place, a house once occupied by the optician Charles Tulley. His claim to fame is that he played a small but important role in the development of the achromatic telescope by grinding glass plates into lenses for the newly founded Astronomical Society of London.
The corner is a dead end, but it may have once been a back entrance to Mydelton Hall, which used to back onto the alley. Today its mainly notable for the fire escape up to the roof terrace of the shops on Upper Street. Which is hardly that notable.
So while the alley is tiny, it does however hold a lot of history.
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