Rowan Arts Project turns its lens on people of Holloway

Published: 02 July, 2010
by PETER GRUNER

THE dubious pleasures of living or working close to Holloway Road are explored in a colourful new photographic book featuring many well known and lesser-known local characters.

The book is the culmination of a two-year history project on the area paid funded by a £50,000 Big Lottery grant.

Three thousand copies of Making Inroads are being given away free in local libraries. 

It is published by the Rowan Arts Project charity, which is organising this week’s Holloway Arts Festival.

One hundred residents, including MP Jeremy Corbyn, representing 22 nations talk about what they like or don’t like about the area, and they are photo­graphed with an object connecting them to the place they were originally from.

Despite Holloway’s noise and congestion, most people welcome the colourful atmosphere, shops, and improvements, including the hanging baskets.

Mr Corbyn, who lives off Holloway Road, and is originally from Chippenham in Wiltshire, said: “A lot of people manage to live together here despite, on the face of it, enormous differences. It’s not perfect, there is crime and anti-social activity, but there’s also essentially a sense of tolerance and community and understanding.”

Other residents will also be familiar to readers of the Islington Tribune. ­They include Kate Calvert, chairwoman of the Better Archway Forum, Father Karowei Dorgu, parish priest at St John the Evangelist, Mary Gibson, headteacher at Yerbury School, Paul Roseby, artistic director of the National Youth theatre, and Desmond Riley, founder of the Islington Link Up Project, and hairdresser and martial arts expert Sampson Samson.

Artist Stella Michael, summing up why she likes Holloway Road, said: “If you just look around the area or are driving through it doesn’t look like much. But when people come here and we go shopping they say: ‘Oh, wow, you know everybody, it’s really nice, people know who you are.’ I’ve been to places that look like cute little villages and nobody talks to anybody.”