Decorating Barnsbury Street

Barnsbury Street's terrace houses are built in London stock brick — the warm, slightly yellow-grey product of the Middlesex brick fields — laid in Flemish bond with lime mortar joints and with gauged brick arches to window openings. Ground floors on most properties are finished in lime stucco with a smooth render coat, typically painted in traditional pale stone or white, with pilasters and cornices providing Classical articulation to the entrance bays. Upper-floor brickwork is generally left exposed but has in many cases been subject to ad hoc pointing repairs in Portland cement, creating differential stress at the cement-brick interface that leads to brick face spalling. Original sash windows, iron basement area railings, and decorated column door surrounds survive in good numbers.

Barnsbury Street passes through the heart of the Barnsbury Conservation Area and is flanked by several of the formal garden squares and tree-lined residential terraces that characterise this part of Islington, including the approaches to Barnsbury Square and the open spaces of Mountford Place. The street has been home to a number of notable political and cultural figures associated with the Labour movement, given Islington's historical role as a centre of progressive politics in north London. Several of the terrace houses retain their original basement kitchens with iron cooking ranges, cast iron fireplaces, and encaustic tile hall floors, representing the intact Victorian domestic interior that survives behind many of the streets's unremarkable facades.