Infamous as the location of Pentonville Prison, the district of Pentonville was engrossed in rolling hills and pasture. In the eighteenth century, portions of the land were fenced off into layers for the purposes of farms and tourism. The area became popular among Londoners and travelers who wanted to spend their holidays eating, drinking, and being entertained along the Islington High Street. One of the famous inns, the White Conduit House, opened in 1649 with the service of catering to pleasure-seekers.
Development of Pentonville kicked off in the mid-1760s when the Penton estate - acquired by Henry Penton I in 1710 - agreed to lease portions of its land, creating a predominantly middle-class residential district. It wasn’t until the early 1800s that Henry Penton III sold the remainder of the undeveloped western end of the Penton estate and Pentonville became a suburb. In James Malcolm Rymer’s The String of Pearls, or, The Barber of Fleet Street: a Domestic Romance (1850), Rymer depicts the suburban culture of Pentonville by having the middle-class John Jeffrey, colonel in the Indian Army, residing in this district in 1785.
Pentonville’s population increased over time, which resulted in poverty, crime, and prostitution. As a result, in 1806, the London Female Penitentiary was established in the Cumming House. For the male population, Parliament established Pentonville Prison in December 1842.From the 1870s to early-1900s, there have been many changes in this district, including improvement of buildings and economic conditions. Slowly, the Pentonville district built up with office development in the 1970s and a public housing agreement in 1999 under the control of the Peabody Housing Trust.