Aaron Jacobs

Aaron Jacobs appears to have been the founder of the butcher’s shop at 24 Liverpool Road, familiar to anyone living in those parts until about the 1980s. He and his wife Annie, or Nancy, were born in Poland. Their eldest son Joseph (who presumably was the ‘J Jacobs’ on the shopfront in later years) was born in Leeds in 1883, and their other children in Whitechapel.

The family appears to have arrived in Islington sometime in the early-1900s, when the shop – just across the road from Chapel Street Market, as it was then called – was well-placed to take advantage of the boom years that the street-market itself was enjoying.