Farringdon Road.

Today, Farringdon Road is part of the A201 road connecting King's Cross to Elephant and Castle. It goes south-east from King's Cross, crossing Roseberry Avenue, then turns south crossing Clerkenwell Road before going past Farringdon station. It finishes on the border between the City of London, the London Borough of Camden and the London Borough of Islington, at an intersection with Charterhouse Street and Farringdon Street.

Farringdon Road follows the course of the River Fleet, London's largest subterranean river.

Amongst the notable buildings on Farringdon Road is the headquarters of The Guardian newspaper at no. 119 and the western side of Smithfield Market.

The most notorious building ever built on Farringdon Road, was the Farringdon Road Buildings, a five tenement block of dwellings built for the working classes during the Victorian era. Lacking bathrooms and with poor sanitary conditions, these buildings were still occupied up until the early 1970s and was one of the last slum dwellings to exist in Central London. Common features were poor lighting, overcrowding, with rat and cockroach infested living conditions, and people trapped by their own poverty. Residents were re-housed by Islington Borough Council and the buildings, close to Exmouth Market and Mount Pleasant Sorting office were pulled down in the mid-1970s, to be replaced by a multi storey car park. A contemporary description of the buildings is given in George Gissing's novel The Nether World: p. 1889. (Oxford World's Classics ISBN 0-19-283767-2).

See also

• Farringdon Station

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