The chief perk of being banged up in Pentonville nick? The Islington postcode

In the early Eighties I took up residence in Finsbury Park. Just beyond the window of my bedsit, some women used to congregate with a strangely purposeless air. One day I asked my landlord who they were. "Prostitutes," he said cheerfully, pocketing my week's rent. At the local pubs, collections were raised for the Irish republican movement. On alternate Saturdays in winter, rivers of tough-looking young men flowed along the terraced streets towards Arsenal football ground. One car in ten had no wheels. This all took place within the borough of Islington - the wrong half of Islington, possibly, but Islington none the less.

The modern entity was formed 40 years ago with the merging of the boroughs of Islington and Finsbury. Prior to moving there, I'd had no expectations of it being particularly smart. Growing up in York, I had heard of Islington purely because of the Monopoly board's Angel Islington, named after the huge pub (now a bank) on Islington High Street. Only the dour, brown combo of Whitechapel and Old Kent Road offered cheaper property, and I later discovered that the Angel was on the Monopoly board only because Marjorie Wallace, secretary at the firm's Leeds manufacturer, Waddington's, had stopped there for a sandwich while scouting locations for the game.

Sometimes, on my trips south in the late Seventies, I would wander into the district north of King's Cross and east of York Way where the glasses tended to stick to the beer mats in the pubs, and the pickled eggs looked like something in the British Museum. Belle Isle is the correct, though completely inaccurate, designation for this area, which was, and is, in Islington. If you strayed too far from the station, you struck Pentonville Prison, which seemed like a warning for me to retreat to the smaller-scale and greener pastures of the Vale of York. But there's one thing to be said for being banged up in Pentonville: you do have an Islington postcode.

Not being familiar with the migratory patterns of the London middle classes, I had no idea that television producers, poets, journalists and antique dealers had been colonising Islington's Georgian squares for the past two decades. Of course, by the early Nineties, when I was working as a journalist on the London Evening Standard, I was all too aware of the rise of Islington and its association with new Labour. It seemed that every new feature idea pitched to me was about some great new restaurant in the borough; I would always respond: "Forget it. Nobody wants to read about food." (It was at about this time that I began to notice people being promoted over my head at Associated Newspapers.)

I was given a reminder of the other side of the borough when I interviewed the Islington native, brilliant comic actor and ex-boxer Arthur Mullard. The encounter yielded a gem that subsequently appeared in The New Penguin Dictionary of Modern Quotations. "Boxing got me started on philosophy," said Mullard. "You bash them, they bash you and you think: 'What's it all for?'" He also said that he felt the cold very badly and liked to go somewhere warm in winter, by which he meant not the Caribbean, but Islington's public libraries, which apparently always had the radiators turned right up. Mullard was old Islington, but new Islington would soon be rampant.

As well as being home to very many poor people (a handsomely

produced new book on Islington by Mary Cosh reminds us that it was England's eighth most deprived area in 2004, with an unusually high rate of smoking-related deaths), the borough

today is also home to very many rich people. In fact, so desirable

is the notion of Islington that it has given rise to the estate agent's concept of "Greater Islington" ("Grizzle" for short), which includes bits of Hackney and Haringey and has a bigger population than Nottingham, Southampton or Newcastle.

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