4. News Just in: Kentish Town was always ragged!
Reader Rosalind Delmar dropped us a line recently to say that Kentish Town’s less salubrious past is written about in Mark Rutherford’s Deliverance by William Hale White, a book much admired by George Orwell.
Hale White houses his hero in Camden Town, just off Camden Rd, and in search of something less limited than a park, would stroll towards the Heath. “The only drawback” he writes, “being the squalid, ragged,half town, half suburb through which it was necessary to pass. The skirts of London when the air is filled with north-easterly soot, grit, and filth are cheerless, and the least cheerful part of the scene is the inability of the vast wandering masses to find any way of amusing themselves.
“At the corner of one of the fields in Kentish Town, just about to be devoured, stood a public-house, and opposite the door was generally encamped a man who sold nothing but Brazil nuts. Swarms of people lazily wandered past him, most of them waiting for the public house to open. Brazil nuts on a cold black Sunday morning are not exhilarating, but the costermonger found many customers who bought his nuts, and ate them, merely because they had nothing better to do.”
This, reckons Rosalind, gives us a different version of a Kentish Town “on the cusp”.
Next: Live music at Camden’s new fish shop
3 thoughts on “Pinboard: New free April print issue out now! Plus Bull & Gate, Spaniards Inn and St Pancras Old Church”
I’ve always found the row of shops on Fortess Road leading up from the junction with Kentish Town Rd to The Junction a little disconcerting:
-the hat shop that never looks open
-the thai restaurant that never seems to have any customers (but does seem to have a revamp on an annual basis)
-the junk shop with the cage permanently outside (often with furry handcuffs on)
Having previously lived in the piano shop that’s no longer a piano shop, it was a very odd road to walk along daily. Genuine new arrivals would distinctly improve that road.
The hat shop? You mean the tailor Chris Ruocco? Try a bit later in the day. I think earlier in the morning Chris is busy organizing things at the men’s pond on the Heath. He has a harmonium (or some small keyboard instrument) in the front of the shop, and has specialized in clothes for musicians, including – most famously – George Michael in the Wood Green early years. Very much worth asking Chris for a Kentishtowner interview: has many stories to tell.
Agree – I knew someone who had a suit made by Chris and he mentioned Diana Ross used to pop in also.