Lonsdale Square


Lonsdale Square, in Barnsbury, is a garden square in London. Its tall brick town houses have steep gables, mullioned cream-dressed windows and alike-dressed steep, triangular cornices, arched, dark front doors and formal street-side railings. The private communal garden, on one side having a row of conifers, takes up the central, precise 50%, of the, otherwise paved and asphalted square, measured internally. Inclusive of all gardens, the square stands on.
The houses are listed in the middle category of the national scheme for the recognition and protection of buildings and have rear gardens.
The nearest tube stations are Highbury & Islington to the north-east and Angel to the south-east. The postcode is N1. The Anglican parish is Barnsbury, an early offshoot of Islington.

Architecture

The square was built between about 1838 and 1845. The houses are of Gothic Revival dimensions, ornamentation, interiors and colouring by R. C. Carpenter, with wholly below-street level basements and slight projections to the main bays which are of aged yellow brick with stone dressings. The square was built in the same style as the two approach roads which unusually share in its name; of a different style is the public house at the north end of one of these, since the late 20th century trading as The Drapers Arms, its theme of quality food means it is termed, in London, a gastropub.

Notable residents

Since 2000

Conductor Simon Rattle has a home on the square. Whole houses cost several million pounds. Upmarket zones away from the West End of London are typified by more highly skilled, UK-based professionals with families than diplomats or the superrich. The author Salman Rushdie had a basement apartment, per his memoir, .

Legal mechanism of communal garden

A residents' association, the Lonsdale Square Society annually agrees and collects the maintenance contribution to the garden. The rule of Halsall v Brizell means that freeholders using the infrastructure must contribute to it; the original positive covenant was maintained by mechanism of the owner-occupiers only being granted long leases, in the typical Central London style which provides no escape from most obligations; some owners have been able to gain and use the right to buy up, by a prescribed mechanism, the third-party interests to their homes and become the freeholders.