Place Name
Previously known as St Paul’s Road, it was renamed Agar Grove in the first half of the 20thCentury, after William Agar (1767 – November 5, 1838) an irascible Yorkshireman, who lived in the vicinity. Agar, a barrister, had leased Elm Lodge and its 72 acre estate to the north of the present day King’s Cross Station in 1816. At the time it was still open fields with plans for part of the route of the Regent’s Canal to be cut through the property. Agar objected and got the canal rerouted. Alan Faulkner, who documented the saga in his book The Regent’s Canal, London’s Hidden Waterway, sums it up as follows: “In retrospect the dispute seems barely credible. Agar took his claims to absurd lengths in his self-appointed role as professional litigator. While the company was not entirely blameless at times, it was dealing with an individual who was unreasonable and motivated by greed; an experience it could well have done without .” Agar meanwhile poured much of his money into the Unitarian Church, which despite not being fully legal at the time, he continued to promote, opening a chapel on Little Portland Street, Regent Street. He had married well, to the niece of the Earl of Shrewsbury. The couple had a son and daughter. He left everything to his family. Sometime in the 1830s part of the property was sub-let, and was quickly developed with rows of two and four-roomed workers’ cottages. By the 1840s the district had become known as Agar Town – a notorious slum area “crammed with the penniless and the criminal,” says Gillian Bebbington in London Street Names, “and later crowded with the poor of St Giles whose homes were destroyed when New Oxford Street was formed”. The area was even given the ironic nickname La Belle Isle. This squalid settlement built between the Camden Square district and Somers Town had no proper drainage and soon attracted the attention of journalists, who described the hovels and the mud and filth that passed for its streets, which had all been named after English towns. When Agar’s descendants attempted to renew the lease they were blocked from doing so. Instead when the lease expired it was transferred to the Midland Railway Company, which swept away the rookery to build rail lines and warehouses.
