Locksmith Pentonville: The Suburb A Famous Prison Doesn't Actually Occupy

Pentonville takes its name from Henry Penton. He began developing these streets in the early 1770s, on land his family had held for generations. Penton Street, the first to be completed, was finished in 1773, laid out in a neat grid across what had until then been open fields on the side of Islington Hill. It was, for a time, a genuinely fashionable place to live, and the name soon spread to describe a wider area than Penton's own streets strictly covered.

Meanwhile, that reputation outran the area itself in another way too. When the authorities built a new model prison in the 1840s, they named it after this fashionable district nearby, even though the actual site sits some distance north, on Caledonian Road in Barnsbury. HM Prison Pentonville has carried that borrowed name ever since, recognisable across the country, while the real Pentonville has spent well over a century quietly not being where most people assume it is.

Where Two Revolutionaries First Met

Even so, the genuine Pentonville has its own, considerably less infamous history. John Stuart Mill was born here in 1806. Decades later, in April 1902, a Russian exile recently arrived in London took lodgings at 30 Holford Square under the name he'd go on to make his own: Lenin. When a younger revolutionary named Leon Trotsky reached London that October, his destination, by his own account, was straight to Lenin's door. Their first meeting and conversation, by most reckonings, took place right there in Pentonville.

By 1905, Lenin had returned to the area, taking rooms at 16 Percy Circus, an address still marked today by a blue plaque. So this quiet grid of Georgian streets has managed, almost by accident, to host both a fashionable name that got lent to a prison elsewhere and a meeting that helped set the twentieth century in motion. We're considerably less concerned with either. We just want the doors on whichever building you're in to do their job properly.