Exmouth Market in 1982 before the Town Hall’s intervention

• I READ with interest the piece (Shabby to chic, Review, June 18) and feel I – and my friend, Sylvia, who still lives in Islington – must comment.

I am born and bred Islington, infant and junior school (Hanover), as well as secondary school (Barnsbury Girls), although I have lived in Holborn since late 1965.

I must take issue with Alec Forshaw’s comments, “Islington was like a desert, with lots of empty buildings and vacant sites… it was even thought of as too poor to have a supermarket”.

I can remember in the later 1950s going food shopping with my mother at the small stand-alone Sainsbury shop in the part of Islington High Street where it meets Liverpool Road, when it sold dairy and provisions. I believe there was a similar stand-alone Sainsbury in Chapel Market.

When I married in 1964 gentrification was already in progress and with the closing of the small Sainsbury’s, there was already a Sainsbury supermarket in Chapel Market selling food, dairy, vegetables and provisions (on the site, I believe, where Superdrug currently operates), not like today with newspapers, magazines, household stuff, etc.

When I had children, I used to push their pram to Chapel Market, an interesting walk from where I lived, through Clerkenwell to shop in Chapel Street. Exmouth Market was different. I had relatives who lived in Wilmington Square who would walk to Chapel Street for their shopping.

I could go on with recollections about shopping in the 1950s in Islington off the Essex Road.

PATRICIA CHRISTOPHER
Montague Street, WC1