The Angels of Islington

By Tom Miller.

"“We are the dead.” John McCrae, In Flanders Fields (1915)

The corner of Islington High Street and Pentonville Road has long been an important London crossroads. For some 500 years it was the site of various incarnations of The Angel, a legendary pub and travelers’ inn. The adjacent underground railway station opened in 1901. A century ago, such rail hubs were scenes of transport for British troops heading to the front in the First World War. In this mix, sounds of the bustling contemporary underground station blend with static carrying traces of the ghosts of the First World War, from the excitement and good-byes of leaving for the front to the poison gas bombardment and carnage of trench warfare. The resonant frequencies of the Angel Islington ticket hall resolve into the echoes of a choir and the voice of Lieutenant-Colonel John McCrae reciting his famous poem, a memento mori for the hundreds of thousands of soldiers who never returned home from the battlefields of Ypres and the Somme.

Audio sources: Angel Islington ticket hall c. 2016 Cities and Memory & London Sound Survey

Audio dramas or “descriptive sketches” from 1916-1918 (contemporaneous recorded re-enactments of war scenes by Maj A. E. Rees and others) Gas Shells Bombardment (1918) Leaving for the Front (1917) For Valour (1917) With Our Boys At the Front (1916) In the Trenches (1917) The Big Push (1917) from Historic Voices XI: The Great War LP (Saland Publishing 2008)

Popular songs from the front and the home front There’s a Long, Long Trail – John McCormack (1917) Victrola 10” shellac 64694 Keep The Home Fires Burning – John McCormack (1914) Victrola 10” shellac 64696 Will You Remember - Alice Green and Raymond Dixon (1918) Victor 10” shellac 18399-A

In Flanders Fields Poem recited by John McCrae Lest We Forget… LP Imperial War Museum AV00824 (2013)

Choral setting by John Jacobson Brisbane Birralee Voices Voices of Birralee – Come to the Music LP (2000)"

Part of our project The Next Station, reimagining the sounds of the London Underground and creating the first ever tube sound map. August 2016 - for more information see www.citiesandmemory.com/thenextstation