Long term Kentishtowners will recall the Father Christmassy resident of Highgate Road throughout the 1980s, known to all simply as ‘Yorkie the Tramp’. This ruddy-faced local legend occupied a bench in a prime location: in front of the listed modernist flats of Haddo House with a view of the Georgian splendour of Grove Terrace just across the road.
The fact that a homeless man was left alone to construct a small shack in such a public spot, then sit out front daily drinking super-strength larger whilst joking with the passing schoolchildren highlights the different social era it was. But Yorkie’s permanent abode was not the strangest thing about this place.
Directly behind where his original bench stood there still lies an odd monolithic concrete box. It houses a long-sealed doorway through which stairs descend to the abandoned underground home of Camden Borough Control.
Built in 1953, this was the council’s Cold War bunker, one of a set of such remote command centres dug across London in the rather futile hope that town halls would continue to exercise some form of jurisdiction when the bomb dropped.
The vast WWII ‘deep level shelters’ in Belsize Park, Camden Town and Goodge Street are more well-known local subterranean oddities, and were originally planned to be repurposed into a high speed branch of the Northern Line – but ended up becoming archive storage facilities. Camden Borough Control was purposely located out on its own, however, a self-contained, never-used underground nerve centre.
It was taken out of use when the Civil Defence Corps was disbanded in 1968; then, as nuclear policy shifted again in the 80s, so too did the location of the council’s bunker, rebuilt under Town Hall in Euston Road.
While the warren of rooms at the original site have been left to crumble ever since, it’s still possible to see the unusual manhole emergency exit covers and ventilation shafts dotting Highgate Enclosures, the landscaped gardens directly above.
The Enclosures are also the last remaining link to what was once Kentish Town’s own village green. This was an area of ancient common land that increasingly became enclosed as the surrounding roadside plots were developed (local names like Little Green St nod to this).
In 1897 the last of the green space was protected by covenant during the building of Lissenden Gardens (a sop to ensure the ambitious mansion block scheme was approved quickly). Therefore the village green remains in our midst today, against the odds and shaped by centuries of peculiarly Kentish Town decisions and histories.
From modernist tower blocks to underground control centres via Edwardian town planning – let’s not forget a friendly old alcoholic known to a particular generation of schoolchildren for his beard, and the bench he was allowed to call home.
8 thoughts on “Where was Camden’s nuclear bunker?”
Yorkie! There was a tree erected to him after he died (in the early 90s), and a play was even written and performed in his honour, I think at the Hampstead Theatre…? I used to pass him almost every day on my way to school, can’t say I ever remember him being drunk or anything other than kind and polite. A great (and still missed) character of Kentish Town
Where was the tree erected and how did we miss it? Tom may have got carried away with the drinking bit…
Brilliant!! Cheers Tom – I’ve always wondered what that was! 🙂
There was certainly drinking involved, but he was always jolly and polite with it, rather than shouty and stumbly. One Christmas my sister gave him a can of Tennant’s as a gift and he couldn’t have been happier. I think she was too young to buy it herself so my mum did (as I said, a very different era.)
I remember him always being friendly with a can of blue Tennants in hand, he featured in the local papers back then I think…it’s part of my childhood, bless Em for getting him some alcohol for Christmas..!
With reference to your splendid feature on Haddo House, its bunker and of course Yorkie who I knew very well being a resident of Haddo House since 1965, regarding the question of the tree that was planted in his memory, I am afraid vandals distroyed both the tree and its plaque which was never replaced. As you quite correctly report Haddo House won an award when it first opened in 1965, but now the Council has altered our block by blocking up an entire kitchen window on the second floor (you will be able to notice it as you pass by) with a huge black flu pipe sticking out. So what was once an award wining block, is now becoming something an ill thought out ad hock block. I find it rather sad, having always been proud to live here. I am sure Yorkie would have felt the same way!