North London Food & Culture

Kentishtowner Awards 2012: The Results Are In


2012 has been good to Kentish Town, hasn’t it? The global outlook might be largely doom and gloom, but we’ve seen flourishing local-level successes to counter all that bad news. Strong community spirit, enthusiastically-received new openings plus a genuine buzz about the place have all made it a pretty damn exciting 12 months.

It’s been the year in which Soho House Group opened three restaurants in K-Town in a single day, we’ve gained our very own brewery bar and enjoyed gourmet street food served regularly. Pubs have been sympathetically restored to former glories rather than become more apartments, while everything from budget lunches to quick cuppas have improved wildly, with enticing new options popping up almost daily.

From sun-kissed street festivals to cool gallery events and from theatre, comedy and vintage sales above pubs to book clubs and community meetings, there’s simply loads going on, quite a lot of it for free and all infused with generous creativity. Plenty to keep locals tickled, in other words.


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Which leads us to our Awards, since the industriousness in our midst deserves a bit of celebrating. Last year we were pretty chuffed that a hardcore of devoted locals took the time to vote in our poll. This time around you did it in your hundreds. 2012 has also been the year the Kentishtowner grew from a humble local blog into a daily magazine garnering national media attention, so the results feel all the more significant this time around, for us and for all the people doing great things in the local area.

We’ll take it as a compliment, but there was some obvious cheating on the vote for the first time this year. We’ll not question (on this occasion) whether this was a case of overly-ambitious business owners or excessively supportive customers, but those thatbvoted multiple times for the same institution were swiftly identified and all such votes removed from the final tallies.

The best thing about going through your responses is the breadth of businesses, local heroes and cherished locations in the area. There’s a lot to be proud about. Sponsorship of the 2012 awards by cool minicab app service Kabbee only goes to show how far all this has come. We can only say thanks to everyone who took the time and voted in such a strong turnout.

The winners and runners up in our 13 categories will be announced daily on the site between now and Christmas. We’re also happy to reveal that the first ever print edition of the Kentishtowner will be available in January, celebrating all these Award-winning local businesses in a collectors’ edition to be found across NW5. Look out for it!

So let’s get going and present the first award Best New Opening 2012


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About Kentishtowner

The award-winning print and online title Kentishtowner was founded in 2010 and is part of London Belongs To Me, a citywide network of travel guides for locals. For more info on what we write about and why, see our About section.