Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
horse-drawn funerals. This black charger has a spirited air about him, as if he had a unicorn
somewhere in the family tree or had a crusading ancestor or else, remoter still, one who
carried a Sir Galahad in quest of the Holy Grail. Camden Passage teems with life, so that
even so grand an undertaker as a funeral carriage master seems out of character: the old
women totter up and down with laundry bundles, the Islington kids swarm like ants, and
there are dogs everywhere, cocking their legs up against the lamp-posts. The alley emerges
at a Victorian pub which possesses much good sandblasted and engraved glass, mahogany
bar fittings, and exterior elevations of Belgian and Dutch influence - that cheerful bastard
style so right for pubs, perfected by the Victorians. There is the birth-control shop, Georgi-
an above and with a wonderful enamel advertisement for female pills, and the snack bars
to enliven the scenery round here, but I miss the toy shop. This was at the far end of the
passage. The building is still there, bay-windowed and with a gas lamp outside, but the toy
shop and dolls' hospital has gone. It had seen the generations come and go. Sixty years and
more ago, the larger toys were displayed on the pavement, wooden horses and engines,
children's chairs and hoops - iron for the boys, wooden for the girls - toy bassinettes and
dolls' mail carts. The shop itself was crammed with toys - forts and lead soldiers, games,
jack-in-boxes, tea-sets, and monkeys-on-sticks:
