Pentonville Road runs along the northern edge of Islington, linking Kings Cross Station to Angel — and, in *The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy*, it lies squarely within the real-world map of Arthur Dent’s London.
Douglas Adams lived and worked just south of here, at 22 Duncan Terrace and Upper Street, while writing *Hitchhiker’s*. Pentonville Road itself, lined with Georgian terraces and taxi depots, has long been a symbol of working London, immortalized as one of the light-blue properties on the **British Monopoly board** — a fact Adams would have appreciated deeply. It’s exactly the kind of absurd, bureaucratic landmark that might appear in the Guide’s entry on “Earth: Mostly Harmless.”
In the wider mythology of *Hitchhiker’s*, Pentonville Road represents the threshold between the real and the improbable — the route out of Islington toward the wider world. It’s easy to imagine Arthur Dent, towel in hand, trudging along it in confusion after learning that his house (and the planet) is about to be demolished.
SEARCH 51.5318334, -0.1079392 Pentonville Road, Angel, Clerkenwell, London Borough of Islington, London, Greater London, England, N1 9HJ, United Kingdom
Adams was not directly connected to the Berkeley, but its presence in his London — a place of champagne receptions and cosmic-scale pretensions — makes it emblematic of the kind of Earthly excess that *The Hitchhiker’s Guide* gently mocks. In the universe of improbability, it could easily be the sort of hotel where Zaphod Beeblebrox might park his stolen spaceship.
# See
