North London Food & Culture

So what was Camden Lock Live really like?

The West Yard makes for a pretty exceptional festival site, so while it might be easy to despair at the uniformity of an "urban festival" in 2013, Tim Sowula is won over

It's getting hot out here...Camden Lock Live
It’s getting hot out here…Camden Lock Live

Let’s play buzzword bingo: “Boutique”? Check. “Urban”? Check. “Reclaimed”? Check. “Reworked”? Tick. “Vintage”? Double-tick. “Vintage tea-party”? Yah. “Brisket”? Ah-ha. “Pulled-pork”? Yes please. “Ping pong”? Naturellement. “Pop-up”? Oh please. “Liquid Nitrogen”? Fo shiz. “Swing band”? Darling. “Antipodean coffee”? G’day. “Cheese stall for the Frentishtowners”? Certainly. “Quiet space for people to badly perfom terrible poetry”? Forsooth. “Ironic straw hats”? Everywhere.

Easy as it is to despair at the uniformity of what constitutes a hip urban festival these days, we enjoyed wandering around Camden Lock Live with the thousands of people crammed into the smallish cobbled space. And what a beautiful hot summer’s evening it was, too.

Unlike a field in the middle of nowhere, the West Yard makes for a pretty exceptional festival site: the balcony running around the top from the Lock Lounge to the Middle Yard provides a perfect viewing platform, with a second stage in Camden Lock Place plus events in the Middle Yard.There were enough bars and food outlets to keep everyone well fuelled, and most regular traders got involved as well, either trading or demonstrating to punters how they craft their stock for sale. We filled our bellies with a damn good Mexican smoked pork sandwich, and – our favourite – the Frenchie’s melted raclette, saucisson, gherkins on sourdough bread drizzled with truffle oil. It’ll kill you but it’s worth dying for.

Camden Lock LiveMusical highlights? Khushi and Marcus Foster, headlining the main stage, who certainly got everyone going and played a tight, energetic set. The DJs in the White Rabbit tent, Kino Levi and Marvin Dez, played some good tunes and everyone was raving around, although that might have been due to the oh-so-potent cocktails.


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Being picky, there wasn’t a huge sense of direct locality: we didn’t, for example see any community stalls or promotion for local charities in the enclosed arena. And surely this sense of locality is what Camden Lock’s owners are trying to cultivate with events like this? The idea of the Lock Market being as popular with Londoners as it is with tourists?

But what might first have come across as a generic twentyteenies festival scene, only lacking the Guardian live-blog, was in fact pure Camden – because, as we explained here, the market seeded, spawned and spread so much of the culture that now dominates the festivals across every weekend in Europe.

So the verdict? Yes, there were pretty young things strewn across the cobbled yard, and you were never more than ten feet from a camera phone – but it didn’t feel like the pose-fest that bigger, more established festivals have degenerated into. Everyone we saw was, like us, just having fun – and credit is due to the organisers for pulling it off with just a few weeks’ planning.

Did you go? What did you think?


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