Copenhagen House, Islington, Middlesex.

Copenhagen House, Islington, Middlesex. "Copenhagen Fields, Islington, was an open area on the hill between Maiden Lane and Holloway popular for mass meetings. The house, a part seventeenth-century gabled building, may have got its name through being built as a hostelry for Danish visitors when the King of Denmark came to James I's court in 1606. By the 1750s the grounds of the house were a tea-garden, and later in the century it was used for skittles, fives, dog-fighting and bear-baiting. A cricket ground was opened in 1835. Athletics was occasionally practised there in the 1840s in the form of highland games and occasional sports meetings. John Garratt was the owner in 1850, when legislation was introduced to ban professional running from the roads, where it had traditionally taken place. On a section of the cricket ground he built a 200yd sprint track, opened 24th September 1850. . . .The Old Cope closed on 21st March 1853, after damage from a severe storm in December. Soon afterwards it was taken over for the Metropolitan Cattle Market, in order to close Smithfield hence the present-day road called Market Road. The house was demolished. The Market clock tower, built approximately on its site, still stands in Caledonian Park which now occupies the site."