Navvies on the canal and the railway
Two pieces of engineering fixed the shape of this corner of north London. The Regent's Canal, completed in 1820, curls east of Primrose Hill through Camden Town. The London and Birmingham Railway followed a decade or so later: Robert Stephenson drove a tunnel through the London clay beneath the hill itself, with work starting in 1834 and the line opening in 1838. It was a punishing contract. The blue clay swelled once it was exposed to the air, the appointed contractor was driven into bankruptcy, and Stephenson ended up finishing the tunnel with labour he employed directly.
The men who did that digging were navvies, the itinerant excavators who built Britain's canal and railway networks. They came from Ireland, England, Scotland and Wales, and Irish labourers made up a large enough share of the workforce that almost every account of Victorian Camden begins with their arrival. Their work is still in plain sight. The Italianate portals of Primrose Hill Tunnel, usually attributed to William Budden, were listed in 1974, and the tunnel is commonly described as the first railway tunnel in London.
Where the Irish settled in Camden
Before the industrial expansion of the nineteenth century, London's Irish population was concentrated further south, around St Giles. The clearances that came with the building of New Oxford Street, completed in 1847, pushed many families north towards Camden Town and the notoriously poor district then called Agar Town, on the railway lands behind Euston and King's Cross. London's Irish-born population peaked around the middle of the century, at something in the order of 109,000 people at the 1851 census, or roughly four and a half per cent of all Londoners.
Camden's role as a first stop for Irish arrivals lasted well into the twentieth century. Arlington House on Arlington Road opened in 1905 as the last and largest of Lord Rowton's lodging houses for working men, and became strongly associated with Irish labourers; the writer Brendan Behan and the poet Patrick Kavanagh both stayed there at different times. The building survives, listed, and is still in use as a hostel.
The Castle pubs and a story worth checking
Anyone drinking in this part of NW1 will eventually be told that the local Castle pubs, among them the Pembroke Castle in Primrose Hill and the Edinboro, Windsor and Dublin Castles in Camden Town, were each built for a different nationality of navvy so that rival gangs could be kept apart. It is a good story and it does not survive scrutiny. The local historian Peter Watts has pointed out that the pubs did not open together, that several of them post-date the canal works by decades, and that navvies were rarely housed in anything as permanent as a brick public house. The Pembroke Castle, for instance, opened in the late 1860s, long after the canal navvies had moved on. The tale appears to be a later blending of separate truths: that navvies worked here, that they had a reputation for drinking and for fighting along national lines, and that Camden happens to have an unusual number of pubs named after castles.
Nurses, builders and the post-war generation
The post-war wave was different in character. From the late 1940s, Irish men filled the building trades that repaired and rebuilt bombed London, while Irish women were recruited in very large numbers into the new National Health Service. Through the 1950s and 1960s, NHS recruiters toured Ireland, interviewing school-leavers in local hotels and signing them up for nurse training in British hospitals. By 1971 there were around 31,000 Irish-born nurses in Britain, about twelve per cent of all nursing staff. The oral-history projects that have recorded these careers frequently mention north London hospitals, the Whittington in Archway among them.
Institutions followed the people. The London Irish Centre opened in Camden Square in 1955, founded by the Catholic Church and sited for its closeness to Euston, where the boat train from Holyhead arrived. It began as a hostel offering beds, advice and help finding work, and continues today as a cultural and welfare organisation.
What that community left behind
The most audible inheritance is musical. Irish showbands and singers played through the 1950s and 1960s at the Camden Town dance hall now known as the Electric Ballroom, and the packed late-night folk sessions that entertained Irish labourers are part of the ancestry of Camden's later live-music reputation. Pubs, cafes and social clubs across the borough carried the same connection for decades.
For anyone working on the older houses around Primrose Hill, the connection is more practical than sentimental. The cuttings, retaining walls, tunnels and brickwork that turned these fields into a commutable Victorian suburb were dug and laid by hand, by a workforce in which Irish labour was prominent. The stock-brick villas that people now restore sit on ground reshaped by that generation, and the railway that made the neighbourhood viable is still running underneath it.