Walking: Tony Blair's London

“Oh, yes,” says Mark, landlord of the Drayton Park pub. “My mother served him at this bar back in the ’80s, he came in a few times in those days.” What did he drink? “Oh it would be Guinness,” he says. The correct choice, to judge by Mark’s rich County Cavan drawl.

We are in Highbury, in the borough of Islington, on the trail of Anthony Charles Lynton Blair, British prime minister from May 1997 to June 2007. Edinburgh-born, Oxford-educated and first elected to a Labour seat in Sedgefield, north-east England, Blair made his biggest mark in the capital city.

To follow his story, we could have started our walk on the western edge of London, in Richmond – scene, in 1971 and 1972, of rock gigs promoted by the young Tony and his friend Alan Collenette at The Vineyard youth club. Or on the southern side, in Wandsworth, where in 1979 Blair moved into 41 Bramford Road with fellow barrister – and his future lord chancellor – Charles “Charlie” Falconer.

Both departure points would have been appropriate, but to skip to the key chapters of Blair’s career, there is only one route to walk in London: Islington to Westminster.

Just around the corner from Mark’s pub is 10 Stavordale Road, which the Blairs bought in 1986 for £120,00 and sold in 1993 for £200,000 (the property market has been kind to the Blairs). Blair said before the 1997 election that Islington was “the spiritual home of Britain’s leftwing intelligentsia”. But perhaps this end of Islington was not quite the spiritual home of Tony and Cherie. In 1993 they relocated to 1 Richmond Crescent (bought for £375,000, sold in 1997 for £615,000), a curving terrace of grandiose semis only a short walk but several rungs on the social ladder away. Within a year Blair would be leader of the opposition; now with a growing family – Euan, nine, Nicky, seven, and Kathryn, five. Nearby Thornhill Road Gardens made a pleasant spot to stop and watch the kids playing. Though not as pleasant, perhaps, as the adjacent Albion – an award-winning gastro pub. Don’t order though, as we are heading to Upper Street and the most famous no-longer-extant eaterie in the country: Granita, now a Mexican restaurant called – poignantly – Desperados.

This is where, political legend has it, the Blair-Brown deal was done in 1994 following the death of Labour leader John Smith. The cheerful cantina seems far removed from the understated 1990s chic of the restaurant where the future of British politics was allegedly carved up. If you look hard, however, you’ll see a glass-fronted menu box that contains a small doll in the Russian style, which looks very much like Brown with a Zapata moustache.

Sated with nachos, roll along Upper Street, then turn down towards Holborn and Lincoln’s Inn, stopping, perhaps, at the Cittie of Yorke, a lawyers’ pub par excellence (the fact that it serves some of the cheapest beer in London confirms that lawyers never lose). A short stroll away, Lincoln’s Inn offers an oasis of faux-gothic calm amid the clatter of central London. It was here, after enrolling at the chambers of Derry Irvine (another future lord chancellor) in 1975, that Blair was noticed by fellow pupil Cherie Booth. She wasn’t immediately attracted but began to think differently when she encountered, as she puts it in her memoirs, “the smell of his skin” while passing him a balloon via her chin at a party.

It was the beginning of a relationship that would eventually, on that bright May morning in 1997, lead to Downing Street (today a brisk trek across Covent Garden). But not Number 10; cannily the Blairs chose to live at Number 11, as there was more room for the children. For cynics, the decision may have served to re-emphasise Blair’s family-man credentials, but it was vindicated by the arrival of son Leo in May 2000 (the first child to a prime minister for 150 years). Today, thanks to the visit of Spanish premier José Zapatero, we can’t get past the gates and are stuck in a crowd that pushes and throngs but not, one suspects, as much as the crowd that gathered here on June 27 2007, when Blair’s tenure finally ended, foreshortened by the Iraq war.

Wandering as we are through the epicentre of the British state, we encounter armed officers and plain-clothes policemen talking into their sleeves. Security is high for Zapatero but was even higher on the other side of Downing Street at the Elizabeth II Conference Centre on January 29 this year, when Blair met a public nemesis of sorts under the glare of widows and bereaved parents at the Chilcot inquiry.

More men with machine-guns stand outside the Blairs’ house in Connaught Square (bought in October 2004 for £3.6m – they added the house behind in 2007 for £800,000). The Bayswater address is a 25-minute walk from Parliament and, as befits the home of a former prime minister and now envoy of the Quartet on the Middle East, it is well protected. The men with guns could not be more helpful, insisting only that “we shouldn’t really be in the pictures.” It is an impressive building, and stands in stark opposition to our last stop. If Connaught Square is where the Blairs’ London story, for now, ends, the Barkers building on Kensington High Street is where it began.

In 1971, the hard-up Blair and Collenette stacked shelves at Barkers food hall by day and put bands on in Richmond by night. Now the site is occupied by Whole Foods Market, an American store where the well-heeled shop for organic granola and GM-free sauvignon blanc. It is here – as we photograph the shelves that stand on the spot where Blair once toiled – that we are finally stopped by a security guard and invited to leave the premises.

An ironic end to a day dedicated to a man with a passion for all things American. But as the Prince of Wales public house is just across the road, things can only – in the words of Blair’s 1997 campaign anthem – get better.

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The people’s pitstops

Drayton Park
There are not many traditional pubs left in Islington but this friendly, Irish-run establishment is a happy reminder of what they were once like. While the Guinness may not be good for you, it certainly tastes that way.
66 Drayton Park, N5

The Albion
Award-winning food, fine beers and bars that contrive to be both immaculately smart and pleasingly knocked about – this is an interior designer’s take on what the ideal alehouse should be.
10 Thornhill Road, N1

Cittie of Yorke
Dubious spelling aside, everything about this admirable pub is simple and effective. A big bar sells cheap and tangy real ale from Yorkshire.
22 High Holborn, WC1

Prince of Wales
Recently refurbished, this is an excellent bolt-hole, equally conducive to unwinding after a hard day stacking shelves or, indeed, political plotting.
8 Kensington Church Street, W8