Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
successful literati and artists over the years: H.G. Wells, W.B. Yeats, Friedrich Engels,
Kingsley Amis and Morrissey have all lived here. You might catch the present denizens
such as Jamie Oliver, Ewan McGregor, Alan Bennett or Martin Amis browsing the
bookshops and galleries on
Regent's Park Road
, which skirts Primrose Hill to the east.
Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath lived in a flat at 3 Chalcot Square, just east of Regent's
Park Road, and it was nearby at 23 Fitzroy Rd, the house that Yeats once lived in, that
Plath committed suicide in 1963.
Camden Town
Until the canal arrived,
Camden Town
wasn't even a village, but by Victorian times it
had become a notorious slum area, an image it took most of the past century to shed.
In the meantime, it attracted its fair share of artists, most famously the Camden Town
Group formed in 1911 by Walter Sickert, later joined by the likes of Lucian Freud,
Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff. These days, you're more likely to bump into young
foreign tourists heading for the market, and as-yet-unknown bands on the lookout for
members of the local music industry.
For all the gentrification of the last thirty years, Camden retains a gritty aspect,
compounded by the various railway lines that plough through the area, the canal and
the large shelter for the homeless on Arlington Road. Its proximity to three mainline
stations also made it an obvious point of immigration over the years, particularly for the
Irish, but also for Greek Cypriots during the 1950s. Nowadays, the
market
overwhelms
the area, especially at weekends, and is now the district's best-known attribute.
20
Camden Lock
If you've seen enough market stalls for one day, stand on the bowed iron footbridge by
Camden Lock
itself, and admire the castellated former lock-keeper's house, to the west.
You can catch a boat to Little Venice (see p.281); the flight of three locks to the east
begins the canal's descent to Limehouse and the Thames. The first lock pound is
overlooked by Terry Farrell's former
TV-AM Building
, now occupied (and revamped) by
MTV, but still retaining its giant blue-and-white egg cups from breakfast television
days. To the south are the covered basins of the Interchange Warehouse, linked by a
disused railway line to the
Camden Catacombs
, built in the nineteenth century as
stables for the pit ponies that used to shunt the railway wagons.
Roundhouse
Chalk Farm Road •
T
0844 482 8008,
W
roundhouse.org.uk •
!
Chalk Farm
Camden's brick-built
Roundhouse
, on Chalk Farm Road, is now a performing arts venue,
but was originally built in 1846 as an engine repair shed for 23 goods engines, arranged
around a central turntable. Within fifteen years the engines had outgrown the building,
and for the next century it was used for storing booze. In 1964, Arnold Wesker established
CAMDEN MARKET
Camden Market
was confined to Inverness Street until the 1970s, when the focus shifted
to the disused warehouses around Camden Lock. The tiny crafts market which began in the
cobbled courtyard by the lock has since mushroomed out of all proportion, with stalls on
both sides of Camden High Street and Chalk Farm Road. More than one hundred thousand
shoppers turn up here each weekend and
Camden Lock
and the vast labyrinth of the
Stables Market
now stay open all week long (see p.434). For all its tourist popularity,
Camden remains a genuinely offbeat place. To avoid the crowds, which can be overpowering
in the summer, aim to come either early (before noon) or late (after 4pm), or on a Friday. The
nearest tube is Camden Town, though this is exit-only at peak times; Chalk Farm tube is only
ten minutes' walk up Chalk Farm Road from Camden Lock.
