Pentonville

Pentonville
Middlesex
Calshot Street, Pentonville
Location
Grid reference:	TQ315835
Location:	51°31’55"N, 0°6’50"W
Data
Post town:	London
Postcode:	N1
Dialling code:	020
Local Government
Council:	Islington
Parliamentary constituency:	Islington South and Finsbury

Pentonville is an urban village in Middlesex, deep in the conurbation, on the London Inner Ring Road. Pentonville developed in the northwestern edge of the ancient parish of Clerkenwell on the New Road. It is named after Henry Penton, the developer of the area.

Nearby places include Islington, St. Pancras and Finsbury.

Pentonville is not the location of Pentonville Prison though: this is on Caledonian Road, some distance north in Barnsbury.

History

The area is named after Henry Penton, who developed a number of streets in the 1770s in what was open countryside adjacent to the New Road. Pentonville was part of the ancient parish of Clerkenwell.

The church of St Silas

The church of St Mark the Evangelist

Pentonville is the birthplace of John Stuart Mill (1806) and Forbes Benignus Winslow (1810), the noted psychiatrist. In 1902 Vladimir Lenin and his wife lived just off Pentonville Road, and it was at this time that he first met his fellow exile Leon Trotsky.

In popular culture

• Mr Brownlow, a character in Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist (1838), lives in "a quiet shady street near Pentonville" in the novel and most film versions. However, in the musical adaptation, Oliver!, he lives in Bloomsbury Square.
• Mr Guppy, a law clerk in Dickens's novel Bleak House (1853), has "lodgings at Penton Place, Pentonville. It is lowly, but airy, open at the back, and considered one of the 'ealthiest outlets."
• Hyacinth Robinson, the central character in Henry James' The Princess Casamassima (1886), lives in Pentonville with his adoptive mother who works as a seamstress.