Islington

The Domesday Book of 1086 records the name as Iseldone, and that last syllable, dune, is the Old English word for hill. The first element is almost certainly a personal name, probably Gisel or Isel, whose bearer farmed this north London ridge in the eighth or ninth century. Gisel is a Germanic name from an old root meaning pledge or hostage, common in the early medieval period when noble families exchanged hostages as living guarantees of peace treaties. The hill of Gisel: a landowner's name, a landform, and a thousand years of subsequent life compressed into three syllables.

Between the Norman Conquest and the fourteenth century, Iseldone transformed into Iseldon, and Iseldon into Islington. The change from -dun (hill) to the -ton ending is puzzling because it replaced a topographic word with what sounds like the settlement suffix -tun (farm). But the shift was driven by phonetic pressure rather than any conscious decision: medieval people heard the sounds of their neighbors, not the etymologies of their scribes. By 1360 the name appeared in its recognizably modern spelling.

Islington's actual geography confirms the old name. The borough sits on the southern slope of a ridge running from Highgate in the north toward the Thames plain, and the highest parts of Upper Street and Highbury were noticeably elevated above the flat city below. In the eighteenth century, the area was known for dairy farming and market gardens supplying central London. The New River, an artificial channel constructed between 1609 and 1613 to bring drinking water south from Hertfordshire, ran through Islington before ending in a reservoir at what is now Claremont Square.

The Angel coaching inn, whose name now labels the junction and a Tube station, gave Islington a point of orientation as the population grew from 10,000 in 1801 to 95,000 in 1851. Georgian terraces replaced the market gardens decade by decade. The hill that Gisel once farmed became one of the most densely built inner-London boroughs. The London Borough of Islington, created in 1965, retains the name without the hill: the landscape feature that caused the name has been entirely obscured by streets and buildings.