Wednesday Picture: Carnival on the former wastelands of Talacre

Sunday’s Kentish Town Carnival, held in and around our very own Town Green at Talacre, was a fitting marker of how much this prized corner of urban open space has changed over the years. But also, in fact, how little has changed.

Take a look photographer Sally Lyall Grant’s gallery of images from the day (above), which started with a procession from Queen’s Crescent and culminated in music and song as the sun – eventually – did come out. Themed floats from local faves included the Pineapple pub’s fittingly fruity effort, and the Pirate Castle flying the skull and crossbones down Malden Road.

Among the highlights were tasty pulled pork from Phileas Hogg (also available weekdays at Harry’s), a big outdoor version of the Oxford’s resident Dandy Lion Market, and plenty of live music (see review overleaf) as the Lottery Heritage Funded Many Culture One Community project reached its culmination.

Yet this was far from the first time the space has seen a community gathering. In 1850, the first St Pancras Almshouses were built on the land now known at Wilkin Street, overlooking modern day Talacre Gardens, then simply open fields, with unbroken views up to Kenwood and Highgate in the opposite direction too. As this early engraving shows, they were beautiful and grand Victorian buildings (a small chunk of which still remain on Prince of Wales Road, the posh apartments now known as The Gates), housing up to a hundred over 60s. However those pictured only stood for 4 years, until the railway carved its way through West Kentish Town and the whole job lot was razed to the ground.

Until the 1860s the open land of Talacre, now flanked by railway arches, was known as the Claremount Cricket Ground, but over the following decade it was covered over with tight streets of working class housing. There was bomb damage in WWII to the area now known as the Quiet Garden, however, as historian Gillian Tindall was at pains to point out in her lecture at St Pancras Old Church last week, the whole area was never a “bomb site”.

Instead, the “slum” housing was slowly, methodically cleared in the 1960s. We can but speculate how much these condemned properties would be on the market for today, but the spirit of post war progress saw them all off, leaving the dusty wasteland that became the focus of Ed Berman’s pioneering youth project work in the 70s.

The battle to keep the space from redevelopment has raged ever since, defeating a 1973 plan to build a 195 ft tower block where the playground currently lies and culminating in the successful campaign to protect Talacre for future generations by the award of status as London’s very first Town Green in 2006.

And while local debate currently rages about the controversial building looking out across the prized fields of Talacre – the towering Princes Park block – it is in fact merely the latest grand project in a highly chequered history of building and demolition right here throughout the last century and a half. How long will this particular structure stand?

Meanwhile, Sunday’s bunting and marquees made this contested land feel more like a Town Green than it has since the days of cricket matches and picturesque almshouses. A fittingly jolly splash of colour for an area that, though small, has overcome much to return to its green and pleasant fields beneath.

Click to page two below to read Gav Duffy’s review of the live music at Kentish Town Carnival