Camden Town used to be a quiet little village surrounded by fields with a peaceful river running through it,
until the beginning of the nineteenth century, when London crept in and swallowed it up within the space of a few years. The
river was piped off underground and the Regent's Canal built to carry trade more efficiently, down to the Thames at
Limehouse. The owner of the farmland, William Agar, struck lucrative deals for his land with the canal company and the
railway company, and the mainline stations at St Pancras and Kings Cross were built, along with elegant streets and
expensive housing for businessmen and railway executives. The new little town quickly filled up. Its pretty houses and
convenience for the City made it a fashionable place to live, especially by the canal, full of pleasant spots in those days. It
wound round the edge of lush green Regent's Park, where there were entertainments and public concerts in summer. In 1845
the Royal Zoological Gardens (now London Zoo) opened to the public, creating an added attraction.
However, by the turn of the twentieth century, Camden Town had become very industrialised and much of its housing was
being rented out room by room to poor immigrant families, mainly Greek and Turkish. Hosts of scabby little businesses
filled up Camden High Street and Kentish Town Road. Trade on the canal was dying out, and parts of it were highly polluted
by factories discharging waste. My father tells tales of swimming in the canal as a kid in the Fifties, when they always swam
by factories because the water was warm there: hot jets of lord-knows-what, shooting into the canal, making a spa for the
local kids. A far cry from the elegant entertainments of the original inhabitants. The kids spent the rest of their time mucking
about on the bomb sites, which lingered after the war for around twenty years because nobody could be bothered to develop
the run-down area.
By the seventies the bomb sites had been neatly filled with council estates and the area's fortunes started looking up
again. The canal was improved and the towpaths re-opened in 1973, and all the qualities which had made Camden Town
attractive back in the 1800s started to pull the rich punters back in. The canal market and local clubs and pubs became highly
fashionable. In the 80s TV-AM built flashy modern offices near the market, and Nick Grimshaw designed the new
Sainsbury's: lots of shiny steel and neo-industrialism, with a clump of attendant houses like futuristic sardine tins along the
canal.
Today the average price of a medium-sized house in Camden Town is half a million, five times more than William Agar
was paid for the whole area back in the 1800s: but if you're a tourist, don't expect it to look expensive and pretty. It's shabby
and peeling, and still run-down. Even the Grimshaw flats have weathered, and are begining to look decidedly manky. The
canal is cleaner, but it's something of a hang-out for cidered-up old crusties and smackheads, skimming a flotsam of loose
change off the wake of the tide of tourists which chokes the streets round the market on Saturdays. The market itself is a bit
of a rip-off, and the cafés are badly placed for people-watching and none too clean, but the freakshow is one of the best in
London, as a few people above have pointed out. This week there seems to be a trend towards enormous polio-child platform
boots, gleaming PVC zebraskin trousers, and plastic hair extensions. Not hair exactly, but 2mm thick strands of stuff like
candy, faintly shiny, knotted to the scalp. If this is your dream outfit, you can get it here..