17 APRIL 1971, Page 28

Orwell in Islington

Sir: Charles Harris (Letters, 3 April) is wrong in writing that George' Orwell 'discovered Isling- ton; he was the first of the middle- class intellectuals to settle in Can- onbury. After him, the fashionable flood.'

Orwell moved to Canonbury Square in 1944, whereas Arthur Popham, then Keeper of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum, was settled in the square in the mid-nineteen-thirties. Eliza- beth Senior, also at the British Museum until the outbreak of war, when she went to the Treasury, shared a flat in the square before the war with her sister, then at the Ministry of Supply. And there must have been others.

Cyril Ray Delmonden Manor, Hawkhurst, Kent