Little Green Street

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Little Green Street is an eighteenth century street in London, located off Highgate Road in Kentish Town.

1 History
2 Recent History
3 External links
4 References

[edit] History

The street is diminutive, with only eight houses on one side and two on the other. The houses were built in the 1780s, are Grade II listed, and remain one of the few intact Georgian streets in London. There are records of the small, bow-fronted shops selling ribbons and mousetraps, and previous inhabitants include manual workers such as carpenters.

One of the first official mentions of Little Green Street is in the court records of the Old Bailey for 10 July 1805, where Mary Lee, a female servant was fined and sent to the Clerkenwell House of Correction for "simple grand larceny" (theft).^[1]

Almost a century later, in 1898 or 1899, Charles Booth, in his survey Life and Labour of the People in London, gave the following description of Little Green Street:

"Little Green St. (E. side of H. Road) with 8 old-fashioned cottages; 2 st. and 2 plus attics; round projecting windows; small panes of glass; quaint; been done up; decent. Pink. These on N. side. On the S. are 2 or 3 more modern but much worse houses; 2 and 3 st. light blue."

(The colours in this description refer to Booth's poverty classifications. Light blue was: "Poor. 18s. to 21s. a week for a moderate family". Pink was "Fairly comfortable. Good ordinary earnings.")

[edit] Recent History

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Little Green Street became in recent years the only access road for developers hoping to build 20 houses, 10 flats, and an underground car park on derelict land behind Little Green Street. [1] Despite the road's width, the developers insisted that Little Green Street was big enough to carry all the machinery needed, and to carry the waste away from a forty-foot deep excavation being dug to build an underground car park. Some of the lorries and cranes weigh up to 49 tonnes and some are 2.9m wide. Little Green Street is just 2.5m wide, and this has resulted in the proposed destruction of the road to aid building works. [2]