There is nowhere quite like Camden. Is there? It’s a bit like Venice Beach in LA (without the beach). But it does have canals; but it’s not Venice is it?
So what do we have? Film stars, pop stars, TV stars. Quite a few street artists and street folks. The occasional, very pale, very thin, manic drug addict dashing from one missed street appointment to another. Plenty of families. Loads of tourists, always doing the same thing: trying to find the zoo, which although 36 acres in size, eludes most folks (can someone put another directional sign from tube to zoo?).
Then we have subcultures, which used to run sequentially (ie hippies, then punk rockers, then new wave, etc) but now all run contemporaneously. So we have plenty of goths, sexagenarian skinheads, rappers, hippies (not many, I think Camden’s a bit noisy for them), and pretty much every conceivable fashion statement one can make. Fashion researchers from Paris and Tokyo devote time and effort to studying trousers up, down, flared, narrow, bell-bottom, patched, torn, and whatever else you can do to trousers, apart from wear them.
Waves of visitors, tourists from Dortmund, Yokohama, Philadelphia. Jeez, I don’t know where they come from. I’m just guessing. Inland tourists from ‘the north’. Yes, ‘northerners’ roving in groups with say, Yorkshire accents, sitting at a large table in my pub, The Spread Eagle, in Parkway. We have a special table for them with a sign ‘Do not feed’. Only joking. I love the north and when I go to Hull, pronounced ‘Ull’ I have a wonderful time – I don’t think I’ve ever met some nice, friendly people. Anyway, for the record, I am from the Midlands. I was made in Birmingham (when things used to get made in Birmingham, before it became a shopping centre).
Back to Camden. There are times when I think ‘Why am I here, this is ridiculous’. Then I look at a small poster outside the Dublin Castle showing band names like ‘Death of the High Street’ and think ‘Yes, this place is probably weird enough, even for me’.
Music venues, there’s loads of them, as most folks know. The Jazz Café, The Underworld, Electric Ballroom, The Roundhouse, The Forum (up the road in Kentish Town… my favourite venue because it’s large enough and small enough, plus I saw a brilliant gig by The Psychedelic Furs there once), and of course KOKO, which got burned down but has now been done up beautifully.
I dunno, what kinda music do you like? You’ll probably find something you like. There’s even folk music. In fact there’s the English Folk Dance and Song Society at Cecil Sharp House, an amazing, vast brick-built hall where I went to a friend’s birthday party once and witnessed the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain.
Back to pubs. I mentioned The Spread Eagle, a Young’s pub, in Parkway on the corner of Albert Street. So well run by my friend Nabil O’Toole.
The Spread provides you with a superb range of ales and lagers, all manner of tricky cocktails and a great menu, although being a traditionalist I stick to my pints of ‘Ordinary’ or ‘Special’ combined with the odd crisp.
There’s a photo of HM Queen Mother pouring a pint. What a gal.
Spread customers break down into categories: sports teams coming off Regents Park for lagers; local residents (all six of them); inland tourists, ie from ‘England’ (the territory north of the North Circular A406), including, as I mentioned wonderful folks from Yorkshire and elsewhere; foreign tourists – we had a nice group from Australia the other day (they said there were a bit tired, I’m not surprised, it’s 9,250 miles away, that’s a long way to go for a pint of Ordinary); and me and Vinnie.
There are other pubs in Camden. Not just The Spread. It kinda depends. Are you a Goth? There’s a Goth pub, The Devonshire Arms. It combines your typical Goth with heavy metal. Are they the same thing? Can you be a Goth and not like AC/DC? I don’t think so!
There’s Underworld, a huge pub the size of Gatwick with a gig venue, that by the look of the website, looks like offering pretty Gothy gigs. Rock on Underworld!
There’s one bar, more a bar than a pub, that seems to get a humungous amount of punters. The Blues Kitchen. Crikey, it’s a sell-out. Always rammed. They must be doing something right. Looks a bit American ie long bar and a diner feel. I’ve walked past it a thousand times. I think I am the only person who does that. Everyone else is in there.
I can’t talk about every pub and bar. I guess the trick is to go into everyone, case it out until you find the right fit. Just like trying to find a comfortable pair of shoes at TK Maxx in the High Street (good luck with that).
Interestingly, when the railways were being built in the nineteenth century, the immigrant workers had their dedicated pubs, hence Edinboro Castle, Delancey Street, and Dublin Castle, Parkway; there was also the Cardiff Castle (now no longer); the idea was to keep the Irish, Welsh and Scots apart to avoid too many local skirmishes!
If you’re not the bar/pub/club type, you can try the bubble tea places in Parkway. Bubble Tea? I was in Florida a few years ago and my American friend, Vietnam vet, Bob Wilde, showed my bubble tea places and I said “That will never catch on in Camden”. Now I see queues of people lining up for their bubble tea.
Coffee shops… no shortage of those either. If you’re not into the formula places like Starbucks or Costa and like a bit more character, try the Coffee Jar in Parkway. It’s very popular – very well made coffee, very fresh pastries and wonderful folks serving who remember your name even if you go there once a year. It’s very small but perfectly formed and very much the local hangout.
This now leaves us with the market, a huge sprawling affair, that gets hundreds of thousands of visitors. You walk down the High Street to Camden Lock (as in canal, not jail) and then you kinda meander through the London equivalent of an Arabian bazaar full of street food places and clothes and other stuff. One place that sticks out is the Cyberdog store; it looks pretty original to me and I guess a one-off. If you go up and down the land and see the same chain stores in every High Street, it’s quite refreshing to see loads of individual stores. Besides, I’m a big fan of local, small businesses. Yes, I’m not into global takeover by soul-less megacorps!
One more thing: tattoos. There are some neat looking tattoos places. We had guests recently from the US. They’d travelled to England to have tattoos done. Weird. I’m not tattooed yet but I’m thinking of something like ‘Made in Birmingham’ on the back of my neck. Or possibly μολὼν λαβέ (Molon labe). This is what King Leonidas replied to Xerxes at the battle of Thermopylae in 480 BC when Xerxes had demanded he surrender his weapons. It means ‘Come and take (them). What do you think?
