North London

North London is the northern part of London, England. It is an imprecise description and the area it covers is defined differently for a range of purposes. Common to these definitions is that it includes districts located north of the River Thames and is used in comparison with south London. However, it is also often used in comparisons with central London, east London and west London.

Boundary Commission

The River Thames divides Greater London into two parts. The northern part includes most of the historic central areas including the City, the East End and the West End; and the majority of the London Underground network.

This area is made up of the City of London and the London boroughs of Barking and Dagenham, Barnet, Brent, Camden, Ealing, Enfield, Hackney, Hammersmith and Fulham, Haringey, Harrow, Havering, Hillingdon, Hounslow, Islington, Kensington and Chelsea, Newham, Redbridge, Tower Hamlets, Waltham Forest, and Westminster. This definition is used by the Boundary Commission for England. The London Borough of Richmond upon Thames includes sections on both sides of the River Thames. The boundary commission class the entire district as part of South London.

London

London ⁱ/ˈlʌndən/ is the capital and most populous city of England and the United Kingdom. Standing on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia. It was founded by the Romans, who named it Londinium. London's ancient core, the City of London, largely retains its 1.12-square-mile (2.9 km²) medieval boundaries and in 2011 had a resident population of 7,375, making it the smallest city in England. Since at least the 19th century, the term London has also referred to the metropolis developed around this core. The bulk of this conurbation forms Greater London, a region of England governed by the Mayor of London and the London Assembly. The conurbation also covers two English counties: the small district of the City of London and the county of Greater London. The latter constitutes the vast majority of London, though historically it was split between Middlesex (a now abolished county), Essex, Surrey, Kent and Hertfordshire.

Finsbury Park

Coordinates: 51°34′16″N 0°06′03″W / 51.5712°N 0.1009°W / 51.5712; -0.1009

Finsbury Park is a 110-acre (46-hectare) public park in the London Borough of Haringey. Within the ward of the London neighbourhood of Harringay, Finsbury Park is in the area for centuries covered by the historic parish of Hornsey, succeeded by the Municipal Borough of Hornsey which are now, as with the Finsbury division of Middlesex from which it takes its name, generally associated with narrower areas beyond the park's boundaries. It was one of the first of the great London parks laid out in the Victorian era and served the whole of the Finsbury division which early developed into suburban and urban areas (based on the then discontinued Ossulstone hundred).

Overview

The park provides a large green space in central north London. It has a mix of open ground, formal gardens, avenues of mature trees and an arboretum area with a mix of more unusual trees. There is also a lake, a children's play area, a cafe and an art exhibition space.

Finsbury Park Mosque

The Finsbury Park Mosque is a mosque located in Finsbury Park, London, London Borough of Islington, England.

The mosque was affected by leadership disputes in the 1990s, allowing extremist Islamist preachers (many of whom were refugees from the Algerian Civil War) to take it over. In 1996 they installed Abu Hamza al-Masri as imam of the mosque, which subsequently developed a reputation as a centre of radical Islamism in London.

In 2014, HSBC bank closed North London Central Mosque's bank account. Several reliable sources report that HSBC closed it because it donated some amount of money to the State of Palestine during the 2014 Israel–Gaza war.

History and location

The main building was opened in 1994 in a ceremony attended by Prince Charles. The mosque is located opposite Finsbury Park station, close to Arsenal Football Club's Emirates Stadium, in the London Borough of Islington.

Former terrorism links

Al Qaeda operatives including "shoebomber" Richard Reid and Zacarias Moussaoui attended the mosque. In 2002, The Guardian reported that weapons training had taken place inside the building.

North

North is a noun, adjective, or adverb indicating direction or geography. North is one of the four cardinal directions or compass points. It is the opposite of south and is perpendicular to east and west.

Etymology

The word north is related to the Old High German nord, both descending from the Proto-Indo-European unit ner-, meaning "down" (or "under"). (Presumably a natural primitive description of its concept is "to the left of the rising sun".)

The Latin word borealis comes from the Greek boreas "north wind, north", which, according to Ovid, was personified as the son of the river-god Strymon, the father of Calais and Zetes. Septentrionalis is from septentriones, "the seven plow oxen", a name of Ursa Maior. The Greek arktikos is named for the same constellation, and is the derivation of the English word "Arctic".

Other languages have sometimes more interesting derivations. For example, in Lezgian, kefer can mean both 'disbelief' and 'north', since to the north of the Muslim Lezgian homeland there are areas formerly inhabited by non-Muslim Caucasian and Turkic peoples. In many languages of Mesoamerica, "north" also means "up". In Hungarian the word for north is észak, which is derived from éjszaka ("night"), since above the Tropic of Cancer, the Sun never shines from the north.