Camden Town history and architecture

Camden's 2007 appraisal traces settlement here back to 1690, at the point where the old road out of London split for Hampstead and for Highgate. A tavern occupied the spot now taken by the Old Mother Red Cap, and the two branches carry on today as Chalk Farm Road and Kentish Town Road.

Roughly half a century on, a coaching inn stood close to where Mornington Crescent station is now, and by 1777 the Britannia, which gave Britannia Junction its name, was trading. The appraisal concludes that the place began as a halt for people travelling in and out of London.

Source: Camden: Camden Town Conservation Area Appraisal and Management Strategy (adopted 4 October 2007)

London's growth reached the fields here at the end of the 18th century. Charles Pratt, Earl Camden, granted building leases on the land east of the present High Street, and Charles Fitzroy, Baron Southampton, did the same to the west; a good many street names still recall one family or the other.

The Jeffrey's Street statement adds that Lord Camden's leases ran for 40 years, against the 99 that were usual in smarter districts south of the New Road, and that Jeffrey's Street and the terraces around it date from about 1800.

The difference still shows on the High Street, where the appraisal finds the buildings on Camden's eastern land more generous than those on Southampton's western side; Nos 103 to 109, built in the 1780s and much altered, are the most notable survivors.

Tompson's parish map of 1801/1804 already shows a terrace in Gloucester Place, the road now called Crowndale Road, and houses lining both sides of the High Street.

Sources: Camden: Camden Town Conservation Area Appraisal and Management Strategy (adopted 4 October 2007), Camden: Jeffrey's Street Conservation Area Statement (agreed 19 November 2002)

The Regent's Canal company was formed on 31 May 1811 at a coffeehouse in Percy Street, and digging on the length from Paddington to Camden Town started in October 1812.

The eastern stretch was delayed by court cases brought by the landowner William Agar, and the waterway was not complete until 1820, by which time building on the Camden estate east of the High Street was well advanced.

Traffic grew from half a million tons of goods a year in 1830 to 1.4 million in 1876; the last commercial boats passed in the late 1960s, after which the canal served leisure.

Sources: Camden: Regent's Canal Conservation Area Appraisal and Management Strategy (adopted 11 September 2008), Camden: Camden Town Conservation Area Appraisal and Management Strategy (adopted 4 October 2007)

The railway arrived next. Its bridge over the canal stands on stone foundations of 1837, and a vaulted underground winding engine house once dragged trains from Euston up the Camden Incline to meet their locomotives.

Camden's Primrose Hill statement notes that an 1834 map shows the terminus at Chalk Farm, before the line was taken on to Euston, and that the winch was given up once engines grew powerful enough.

Three of the great northern railways ended near the canal, beginning in 1839 with the London and Birmingham Railway's depot north of Camden Lock, and in 1850 the North London line was carried on a brick viaduct above the southern end of Kentish Town.

The appraisal is blunt about the effect: tradespeople came to serve railway and canal workers, and poorer families moved into streets made grimy by the trains. Our history of the Roundhouse follows one of the railway buildings that survives.

Sources: Camden: Regent's Canal Conservation Area Appraisal and Management Strategy (adopted 11 September 2008), Camden: Primrose Hill Conservation Area Statement (adopted 2000), Camden: Jeffrey's Street Conservation Area Statement (agreed 19 November 2002), Camden: Camden Town Conservation Area Appraisal and Management Strategy (adopted 4 October 2007)

By the 1840s the streets west of the High Street had become family homes for professional households, a transition, as the appraisal puts it, between Nash's grand Regent's Park and Park Village houses and the working districts to the east.

English Heritage blue plaques record some of the people who lived there: Walter Sickert at 6 Mornington Crescent, Dylan Thomas at 54 Delancey Street and the storyteller George MacDonald at 20 Albert Street.

Those houses still shape what can be done to them today; our house refurbishment page sets out how we repair them street by street.

Source: Camden: Camden Town Conservation Area Appraisal and Management Strategy (adopted 4 October 2007)

East of Camden Road, Camden New Town's bigger wave of house-building began around 1845, with large houses round Camden Square first.

St Paul's Church, raised in 1849 to stand at the centre of a symmetrical square, marked the corner of Cantelowes Road with a tall spire until it was pulled down in 1956.

The Midland Railway's tunnels beneath the square brought vibration and sulphurous smoke from their shafts, which the 2011 appraisal says made the area less sought after.

The artist Lawrence Alma-Tadema lived in the square, and the meteorologist George James Symons at No 62.

Wartime bombs aimed at the railway flattened whole stretches of street, and the 1942 Abercrombie Plan, never carried out, would have driven a ring road through Camden Town.

Source: Camden: Camden Square Conservation Area Appraisal and Management Strategy (adopted 11 March 2011)

Late in the 19th century the blocks round Britannia Junction were rebuilt, small shops replaced by larger ones with three or four ornate storeys above.

The Royal Camden Theatre, now Koko, followed in 1900-01 to W G R Sprague's design, with seats for 3,000.

In 1907 Leslie Green gave both Underground stations his Northern Line style of oxblood tiles and broad arches; Mornington Crescent, which survives complete, is listed at grade II.

In 1926 the Carreras Tobacco Factory rose on the old Mornington Crescent Gardens; 550 feet long, and now called Greater London House, it was turned into offices in 1998.

Source: Camden: Camden Town Conservation Area Appraisal and Management Strategy (adopted 4 October 2007)

The appraisal credits Camden's relaxed, Bohemian air and cheap housing with drawing writers and artists, Charles Dickens among them: he lived on Bayham Street as a boy and used its poor streets to give his books their character.

Tudor Lodge at 20 Albert Street, a Gothic house of 1843 listed at grade II, is thought to be the oldest surviving purpose-built artist's studio in London.

From the 1960s architects and designers took to the old industrial buildings and mews, and later the north end of the town became a centre of youth culture.

Source: Camden: Camden Town Conservation Area Appraisal and Management Strategy (adopted 4 October 2007)

When we survey an NW1 house we date its fabric against this sequence of estate, canal and railway building, so repairs follow the right period rather than a general idea of Victorian London.

Roofs and rear walls often carry the clearest evidence of when a terrace went up and how it was altered later; our Camden Town loft page explains how that history bears on a new room in the roof.

For the services we offer across the district, start from the Camden Town renovation guide.

• Camden: Camden Town Conservation Area Appraisal and Management Strategy (adopted 4 October 2007)
• Camden: Jeffrey's Street Conservation Area Statement (agreed 19 November 2002)
• Camden: Regent's Canal Conservation Area Appraisal and Management Strategy (adopted 11 September 2008)
• Camden: Primrose Hill Conservation Area Statement (adopted 2000)
• Camden: Camden Square Conservation Area Appraisal and Management Strategy (adopted 11 March 2011)