What’s in a name?
Who was Arlington?
Does anyone know why our square is called Arlington? Before our streets were laid out and our houses built, this was a greenfield site. (Shepherd and Shepherdess Fields, to be precise, where flocks of sheep were parked overnight on their way to Smithfield Market, via Shepherdess Walk.) There was no sign of any Arlington here before 1848. So who came up with the name, and why?
It would be nice if we could trace an aristocratic origin. The title Earl of Arlington was bestowed on Henry Bennet in 1672, along with a knighthood, for services to King Charles II. Sir Henry was keeper of the privy purse, whose duties included procuring and managing mistresses for the King. He took his title from his birthplace, the Middlesex village of Harlington (also spelt ‘Arlington’ or ‘Hardington’), now part of the London Borough of Hillingdon.
When the houses around our square were being built, the Earl of Arlington was Henry FitzRoy (1790–1863). He was associated with East Anglia (colonel of the West Suffolk Militia, MP for Bury St Edmunds, etc.) and doesn’t seem to have had any connection to Islington. So why did our developer Henry Rydon pick the name? Was there another Arlington, an influential Islingtonian, who was deemed worthy of being commemorated by a square and street name?
No relation: Margate’s Arlington Square
Arlington Street SW1, which runs south from Piccadilly, was almost certainly named after the first Lord Arlington, who leased land around there from the Earl of St Albans in the 17th century. Thus the Eggs Arlington on the brunch menu at the Bellanger Brasserie on Islington Green are sadly not named after Islington’s foremost square but after the West End street where Bellanger’s owners used to manage the Caprice restaurant. And there’s an Arlington Square in Margate (perhaps we should twin with them?), so called because the offices of its 1960s developers were in the SW1 Arlington Street.
There’s definitely no connection between us and the famous Arlington military cemetery in Virginia, USA. That was created in 1864 on the Arlington Estate owned by the Custis family, whose ancestor John Custis had emigrated to Virginia from the village of Arlington in Gloucestershire. (We bet you didn’t know that Arlington Row Cottages in Arlington village are depicted on the inside cover of a UK passport.)
But we have wandered far away from N1. Can anybody propose a plausible explanation for our ‘Arlington’? We’re offering a bottle of Arlington Square’s finest bespoke olive oil to anyone who can give us convincing proof of how we got our name.