Feature: Making Inroads - The people of Holloway Road - The shops, sights and sounds of 22 different nations

Published: 22 July 2010
by PETER GRUNER

A HOT, humid day in Holloway Road. The scent of fresh ground coffee mingles with the aroma of barbecued food from a Turkish or Greek restaurant. The stalls at Archway market are brimming with homemade breads, cheeses and olives along with tasty Caribbean takeaway curry and Hungarian goulash. 

This is the beating heart of Islington, wonderfully captured in a colourful new book which was given away free as part of the recent Holloway Arts Festival. 

Making Inroads is published by Islington-based charity the Rowan Arts Project and paid for out of the National Lottery. In the book we meet 40 people who live and work all along Holloway Road, from Archway in the north, to the Nag’s Head and on to Highbury Corner in the south. They range from a vicar and owners and workers in small shops, cafés and restaurants, to community workers. 

Twenty-two nations are represented, including Malaysia, India, Lebanon, Iran, and South Africa, the West Indies, Ecuador and Nigeria as well as people from mainland Europe, Scandinavia and the British Isles. The subjects are all photographed with an object connecting them nostalgically to their country or place of origin. 

Ruth Corney, the book’s project leader, worked with an oral historian and 12 volun­teers to compile the book. “It was a wonder­ful opportunity to meet the real people who live and work in the road,” she said. “Everyone had a story. For too many people Holloway Road is part of the A1 where you simply drive through. We hope with our project we’ve celebrated this unique thoroughfare so that more people will come and visit.” 

Rev Karowei Dorgu, 52, the parish priest of St John the Evangelist, in Upper Holloway since 1998, is pictured with a Bible and a pair of bongos, which he plays during services. 

The Bible, he says, represents Christian teaching and the bongos the “outgoing” and “very exuberant” style of worship at his church. 

He talks about how his father back in Nigeria was converted to Christianity by Victorian missionaries. “At the time St John’s was one  of the churches that supported missionary work in Nigeria. I feel really privileged to be part of this cycle of God’s fatefulness.” 

Rev Dorgu describes Holloway Road as a “melting pot” of people. “You can drive from the north to the south of it and you’ll experience every continent, and people from different walks of life. The restaurants, the cafés, the things to see on the route are just amazing.” 

Holloway has always been a place of refuge. In 1665 people came here to escape the plague. Highwayman Dick Turpin robbed passengers along its secluded tracks in the 1700s and later Charles Dickens described the area disdainfully as a “suburban Sahara”. In the 1890s quirky comic character Mr Charles Pooter from Diary of a Nobody by Charles and Weedon Grossmith, was a resident of Holloway. Now also known as the A1 corridor, Holloway Road has been the setting for many recent Nick Hornby novels, including Fever Pitch. 

Laila Conteh was born in Freetown, Sierra Leone in 1953. She came to Holloway when civil war broke out in her home country in the 1990s. She has worked at the Hollo­way Odeon since 1992. 

“There was fighting going on,” she said, “and I didn’t want to witness those things.” She talks about being extremely grateful to come here with her children because “those that I left behind, some of them are dead, and some I don’t even know where they are.” 

She is pictured with a handmade basket called a bly. “It’s made of a special kind of straw you get from the river and you weave it. It’s very common in Sierra Leone. If you go to the market there you can get any size of basket.” 

Youth and community worker Desmond Riley was born in St Kitts in the West Indies in 1960 and came to Islington with his family as a boy. He founded Islington Link Up, a project for the Afro-Carib­bean community in nearby Seven Sisters Road. 

Mr Riley remembers visiting the Black House community project in Holloway Road in the 1970s, now closed, where youngsters who were thrown out of their homes could seek refuge. “It was a dump, really,” he said, “but when you’re a kid and you’ve got all your friends around you, you don’t see that. It brought us all close. It was a great source of in­formation, if you needed any advice. If you needed any solace you could always find it there.” 

In the book, he is pictured with a small painting of a St Kitts farm. “The painting is displayed in my office, very close to me. It’s a constant reminder of where I’m from. It’s also a reminder of peace and tranquillity, and the many positive things of my past.” 

Anna Streiffert Limerick was born in Stockholm, Sweden, in 1966 and moved to Holloway in 1992. “One of the things I liked about the area was that it is multi­cultural,” she said. “And as a foreig­ner you weren’t made to feel like a foreigner. It is easy to blend in. My closest friends all have roots from somewhere else.” 

Her object is a sheepskin, from Faro Island in the Baltic. “Swedes go there for holidays, cycling, nature and fantastic sandy beaches. Faro means Sheep Island and it’s full of little sheep.” 

Britain’s traditional corner shops may struggle to survive against the march of the supermarkets. But not in Holloway Road. There is a cornucopia of enticing small shops, cafés and restaurants, mostly run by hard-working former immi­grants. 

Cypriot born Sampson Sampson (“so good my parents named me twice”) has a popular barber shop opposite St Mary Magdalene Church in Holloway Road. He also teaches martial arts. 

“My kids have grown up here,” he said. “I’ve married an English lady – well, she’s half Welsh. My home is here, my family are here, my customers are here, my [martial arts] students are here, my name is here and my respect is here. So this is definitely home after nearly 40 years in this country.” 

He is pictured with a painting of the village he is from, given to him by an old school friend. Islington North MP Jeremy Corbyn, also featured in the book, sums up. He lives off the Holloway Road and is originally from Chippenham in Wiltshire. He 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.” 

• Making Inroads is currently out of print due to its extreme popularity. However, please visit www.makinginroads.org to hear extended ver­sions of the participants’  stories and find out more about Holloway Road past and present. The photographs from the project will in a touring exhibition throughout Islington later in the year.