Departing from our Moonwalk London 2014 theme, and looking northwards in honour of the late and great Bob Hoskins, who passed away today at the age of 71. Hoskins, who was born in Suffolk, was brought up in Finsbury Park from the time he was two weeks old.
A major road that runs south of Finsbury Park is Seven Sisters Road. The name comes from a tavern called the Seven Sisters, which in turn commemorated the fact that, in front of it, stood a circle of elm trees with a walnut tree in the centre. The trees, removed in the 1840s, were supposed to have dated back to around the 14th century, planted on the spot where a martyr had been burned.
‘Seven Sisters’ refers to many things, most notably the Pleiades, who were the seven daughters of the titan Atlas and the sea-nymph Pleione; a star cluster was named after them. There is a series of chalk cliffs, called the Seven Sisters, which forms part of the South Downs in East Sussex.
The term is used for a loose association of seven US liberal arts colleges, historically women’s colleges: Barnard, Bryn Mawr, Mount Holyoke, Radcliffe, Smith, Vassar, and Wellesley. Finally, ‘Seven Sisters’ is said to refer to a set of cannons used in the Battle of Flodden, a 16th-century conflict between the Kingdom of England and the Kingdom of Scotland.
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2 responses to “Seven Sisters Road, Finsbury Park”
[…] Lear died on this day in 1888. He was born in Bowman’s Mews in Islington (off Seven Sisters Road) the mews takes its name from the fact that the area was a popular site for archery in Elizabethan […]
[…] Seven Sisters Road in Finsbury Park takes its name from a tavern called the Seven Sisters. The tavern, in turn, commemorated the fact that a circle of trees with a walnut tree in the centre once stood in front of it. The trees, removed in the 1840s, were supposed to have dated back to around the 14th century, planted on the spot where a martyr had been burned. […]