North London grew late, then split families over football
For centuries London barely spread north of its old Roman wall: the ground beyond was marshy and the roads poor. Canals and railways finally turned those rural parishes into suburbs, and today the area's loudest identity may be the rivalry between Arsenal and Tottenham Hotspur.
A first northern suburb appeared around Cripplegate early in the twelfth century, but growth in that direction lagged behind the rest of the city, and most of the future North London stayed farmland until Victorian times. The Regent's Canal, cutting through Islington and St Pancras in the early 1800s, got expansion moving. Railways then carried commuters outward, cars added more in the twentieth century, and only the Metropolitan Green Belt, created soon after the Second World War, finally halted the sprawl.
Its edges remain fuzzy. The area usually runs from Clerkenwell and Finsbury up to the Hertfordshire border, and six boroughs are commonly counted: Barnet, Camden, Enfield, Hackney, Haringey and Islington. Official planners keep redrawing it; the 2011 London Plan's northern sub-region had just three of those boroughs. Even the N postcode district, introduced in 1857, takes in places few would call North London and leaves out many that plainly are.
On the pitch, Arsenal and Spurs contest a derby called one of English football's fiercest, capable of dividing households. In league meetings Arsenal lead with 66 wins to Tottenham's 54 across 167 games, with 47 draws. Silverware has changed hands only once in a head-to-head, when the 1991 Charity Shield ended level and was shared. Arsenal twice clinched the league title at Tottenham's ground, in 1971 and in 2004.
The weather varies within the area too. Hampstead, at 137 metres the London area's highest weather station, has records going back to 1910, and its northern heights often run about a degree cooler than districts near the river. Snow sometimes lingers toward the Chilterns while central London stays clear.
Source: North London
