Owen's Field

The name Owen’s Field comes from a local C16th legend whose exact details vary in the different accounts: an arrow was fired at a maid named Alice Wilkes while she was playing (or milking a cow), which only just missed her (or her hat). To thank God for this act, she determined to carry out charitable acts. She became wealthy through marrying three times, lastly to Judge Thomas Owen, and in 1613 she endowed a new boys' school in Islington. A girl’s school was later built in 1886 named Dame Alice Owen’s Girls' School. The area that is the site of Owen’s Field today appears to have been the boys' playground before being shared between the schools, with the boys' school to the north and the girls' school to the south. Over time, the playground again became solely for the use of the boys’ school and the girls' school had its own larger plot of land.

During WWII, the pupils were evacuated and the girls' school cellars were used as an air raid shelter. On the night of 15 October 1940, a bomb hit the school leading to most of the building collapsing. The 150 people taking shelter in the cellars were crushed or trapped, and the cellars flooded following damage to the nearby water mains. A total of 109 people died in the incident. After the war, a replacement school was built, which then moved out to Hertfordshire in 1976, where it remains. Today, the old boys' school is modern flats and the old girls' school is part of the City & Islington College. When the school moved out, the playground became the small public park named Owens Field (or sometimes Owens Fields).

Owen’s Field is bounded by Owen’s Row to the south and by Owen Street to the north, the latter originally an unnamed small alley, later widened and named. Owen’s Field is a rather plain space with a main tarmac pathway surrounded by grass. High bushes are present near the fences and trees nearby cast shade on the park. The tarmac pathway widens in the middle of the park where a long curved wooden bench separates the pathway from the grass area. On a tarmac platform is the sculpture ‘Edgerunner’ by the UK-based Romanian artist Paul Neagu (1938-2004). It was fabricated in 2012 by Architectural Stainless Ltd and installed in Owens Fields in July 2012. Neagu, who had lived and worked nearby, has been called 'the most important Romanian artist since Constantin Brancusi'. The plaque on the base records that it was 'presented by the Romanian Cultural Institute and Anton Neagu to the people of Islington, as part of the London 2012 Cultural Olympiad with support of the Paul Neagu Estate and Islington Council'.