At this writing, 127 Albert Road in Camden Town is a spotlessly elegant town house valued at close to $3 million. Back in 1969, though, it was the ramshackle home of two young aspiring actors: Bruce Robinson, who went on to write and direct the cult movie Withnail and I, and Vivian MacKerrell, who inspired the dissolute character of Withnail.
They would wake up late, spend a few hours drinking in the Spread Eagle pub on the corner with Parkway, then return home to crack open a bottle of red wine. “That whole Camden Town period of my life was all about cheap red and getting smashed on pot,” Robinson recalled in a recent book about the movie. “Perhaps one of the reasons the film survives is that nothing changes—people are still doing that, although no longer in Camden Town,” where, he notes, the working-class “caffs” have all become cafés.
The address’s ascent from squalor would seem to tell a familiar story of urban gentrification. Somebody making that case might contrast Jarvis Cocker buying rave tickets from “some fucked-up bloke in Camden Town” in Pulp’s 1995 hit “Sorted for E’s and Wizz” with Taylor Swift’s blandly idyllic scene in 2019’s “London Boy”: “I enjoy walking Camden Market in the afternoon.”
But I’ve been going to Camden for 30 years, I’ve seen bands in every venue, and it doesn’t feel to me like a radical transformation has taken place. The Spread Eagle is still there, for example, as is the nearby Dublin Castle, after more than 150 years. For all the absurd house prices and gourmet-food stalls in the market, the fucked-up blokes have not disappeared.
One cloudy autumn afternoon, I played the tourist by following a VoiceMap walking tour recorded by audio producer and former Brit-pop scene-ster Miranda Diboll. I followed her through the ceaseless commotion of Camden High Street, down onto the canal at Camden Lock, up and out into the verdant calm of Primrose Hill, and back around toward the Dublin Castle. “Camden is a place of transition,” Diboll says on the audio tour. “People come here, get what they want, and go.”
Camden Town coalesced in the late 18th century as a hub for people going somewhere else: a rackety intersection of roads, railways, and canals. The thousands of laborers from Ireland who built them created a demand for beer and music, hence pubs such as the Dublin Castle. As middle-class families fled to the suburbs, the handsome three-story homes were severed into rooming houses. Men who fell by life’s wayside wound up in Arlington House, Europe’s largest hostel for the homeless. This was the grimy demimonde depicted by Walter Sickert’s Camden Town group of painters before the First World War.
Eventually, though, the middle classes drifted back. “If it is sufficiently rotten and decayed, a district is certain to become fashionable,” Geoffrey Scowcroft Fletcher observed in his 1962 book The London Nobody Knows. In relatively picturesque Gloucester Crescent, the newcomers included a number of up-and-coming writers: Alan Bennett, Jonathan Miller, Claire Tomalin.
On a sunny day, a chorus of typewriters chattered from the open windows. In her memoir, Tomalin recalls her neighborhood as “border country.” If she walked to either end of the crescent, she would come to the “green expanses” of Regent’s Park and the animals of London Zoo. But if she turned off it and walked down Inverness Street toward Camden Town underground station, she was suddenly in “Dostoevsky land”: “During my first weeks I saw two men fighting with knives on the pavement outside the station. The crowds were rough, the streets and the air were dirty, the traffic was dense and difficult to negotiate.” According to Jonathan Miller’s son William, the writers would joke that if their next novel or play failed, then they would end up in Arlington House.
“If it is sufficiently rotten and decayed, a district is certain to become fashionable,” Geoffrey Scowcroft Fletcher observed in his 1962 book The London Nobody Knows.
Along Camden High Street, a lively counterculture began to spring up around new-music venues. On October 15, 1966, the Roundhouse, formerly a turntable of the kind that spun the trains around, opened its doors with the U.K.’s first-ever “all-night rave”: Pink Floyd played the launch party for International Times magazine.
A decade later, two faded music halls were resurrected by punk. In the late 1970s, U2 opened for Talking Heads at the Electric Ballroom, while the Specials warmed up for the Clash at the Music Machine, later Camden Palace, now the much more glamorous KOKO. For many U.S. artists, Camden has been a musical Ellis Island: the crucial point of entry. The Doors, R.E.M., Patti Smith, the Ramones, and Madonna all made their U.K. debuts here.
When I was a teenager in suburban South East London, Camden was impossibly alluring: the magical London that I heard about in pop music. Blur and Saint Etienne sang about it while the music press chronicled its late-night shenanigans. It was where you went to buy secondhand records, bootleg band T-shirts, and vintage clothes before “vintage” was a thing.
What I didn’t realize was that the musicians who enthralled me had made exactly the same journey from the commuter towns and hinterlands just a few years earlier. Ska-pop rascals Madness, who launched their career with a residency at the Dublin Castle in 1979, were the only significant band whose members had actually grown up there. Everybody else was an outsider, chasing a noisier, more colorful life.
The Doors, R.E.M., Patti Smith, the Ramones, and Madonna all made their U.K. debuts here.
Camden Town became the epicenter of Brit-pop for pragmatic reasons. Food Records, home to Blur, was based on Arlington Road, off Parkway; Creation Records, Oasis’s mother ship, operated above a shop in Primrose Hill. As the 1980s ceded to the 1990s, a number of new-music hubs opened in close proximity to Camden Town station: two venues, the Jazz Café and the Underworld; a record shop, Out on the Floor; and the offices of MTV Europe. In September 1993, Paul Tunkin, a clerk at Out on the Floor, launched a club night called Blow Up, at a gay pub called the Laurel Tree, for “people who aren’t afraid to be creative, productive, literate, and intelligent.” It became Brit-pop’s ground zero: less than two years later, the music paper Melody Maker dubbed it “the club that changed the world.”
On a recent morning I met for coffee with one of Blow Up’s original D.J.’s, Andy Lewis, a garrulous 52-year-old who still favors the club’s crisp, mod aesthetic. The Camden Town that Lewis first glimpsed on a family canal holiday from Essex in the 1970s was “tumbledown and derelict. By the time I was old enough to go there,” he says, “it had changed, but not much.” During the week, he was a postman in the suburbs, but he spent his weekends in Camden. As we approached the site of Blow Up, now part of the BrewDog chain of pubs, he remembered how the different tribes who couldn’t get into the Jazz Café or the Underworld would converge at Blow Up. Lewis calls it “a mod revival with a twist”: 1960s beat groups and New Wave upstairs, easy listening downstairs.
“Nobody started out to create a subculture or a genre,” Lewis said. “Blow Up was in Camden because it was cheap. There were loads of down-at-heel places looking to survive. We were all skint.” Blow Up was always rammed, decanting clouds of steam and smoke into the street. Inside, journalists and broadcasters would mingle with the rising stars of Brit-pop: that was where Blur asked Lewis to D.J. on their breakthrough Parklife Tour. Diboll, who was a Blow Up regular as a student, thinks she once spotted Jarvis Cocker’s crane-fly silhouette through the nicotine fog one night. “It was my golden age of moving to London,” she recalled during a phone conversation. “I thought, I want to move where all the fun is.”
On Saturday nights, you could usually find Blur guitarist Graham Coxon at Blow Up. On weekdays, he would hold court at the Good Mixer, a small, shabby pub on Inverness Street with the essential assets of a pool table and a jukebox. It was here that Coxon first met Noel and Liam Gallagher of Oasis, who greeted him with the immortal words “Good band, Blur. Shit clothes, though.”
Andy Ross of Food Records recalled going to the Good Mixer one day with Blur front man Damon Albarn, “and it was absolutely empty, apart from three members of Madness, and Morrissey at the bar.” According to Ross, the transformation of an ordinary local pub into Brit-pop Central did not endear them to the proto-gentrifiers of the 1960s: “We became the pariahs of the Gloucester Crescent set … all these young, noisy people were bringing a blight on this idyll.”
It was here that Coxon first met Noel and Liam Gallagher of Oasis, who greeted him with the immortal words “Good band, Blur. Shit clothes, though.”
When I moved to London in the summer of 1995, I was too late to see Coxon at the bar. As the Brit-pop tourists had descended, the celebrities had fled. “Let’s get away from this Camden Town, Good Mixer bollocks,” snapped Brett Anderson, singer of Suede. Noel Gallagher migrated from Albert Street to Primrose Hill, which was fast becoming a magnet for hip young things such as Kate Moss, Ewan McGregor, and Jude Law. Even Blow Up relocated to Soho. Diboll moved to Docklands. “Camden felt like it was calming down a bit,” she told me. “There wasn’t that creative angst anymore.”
One story ends there: the stars moved on. But if I had kept coming back to the Good Mixer, I would have eventually seen a young Amy Winehouse shooting pool and pulling pints. Walk through Camden Town today and you might well assume that Winehouse is its patron saint: the colossal mural outside her rock ’n’ roll local, the Hawley Arms; the bronze statue in Stables Market; and the memorial tree outside 30 Camden Square, where she died in 2011, festooned with ribbons, flowers, letters, and fan art. Winehouse moved to Camden in the early 2000s and absorbed the neighborhood into her persona, from her retro fashion and tattoos to her music’s jukebox sensibility.
This was the period when the Roundhouse reopened, the multi-venue Camden Crawl festival returned, and the tiny Barfly became the home of the indie-rock boom. Carl Barât of the Libertines has described Winehouse’s 2007 show at the Proud Galleries as quintessential Camden: “beer raining down, dodgy sound and bacchanalian fervour abounding.” Winehouse accepted the 2008 Grammy for record of the year shortly after a fire ripped through Camden Market and the Hawley Arms. “This is for London,” she told the Staples Center in L.A., “because Camden Town ain’t burning down.”
In the book Amy Winehouse: Beyond Black, the singer’s former stylist Naomi Parry wonders, “Would she have grown out of Camden and moved somewhere quieter like the rest of us?” Because this is what people do with Camden: they arrive when they’re young and reckless, squeeze the juice out of it, and move on. As Andy Lewis told me, problems arise when people don’t move on. A few years ago, he tried to host a club night at the Good Mixer but it was quashed by complaints about the noise from residents in the nearby apartments. “People decide that they want to live where it’s all happening, and then when they get there, they discover that what’s brilliant about where it’s all happening is that you can leave.”
You could certainly take in the million-dollar canal-side apartments on the site of the old gin distillery, or the epidemic of coffee shops and real-estate agents, and conclude that Camden isn’t what it used to be. “To me it looks more like a shopping mall than it did,” Diboll told me. “In my mind it was dingier, the lighting was yellower.” You could say that it is less a center of youth culture than a crass advertisement for it. Half the shops on the High Street are indistinguishable ragbags of T-shirts, lighters, vapes, and cell-phone cases. The Good Mixer now has a line of merchandise and framed photographs of its bygone celebrity clientele.
There is a punk who perches on Camden Lock bridge, with his foot-high Mohawk and his riot of tattoos and piercings, holding a cardboard sign that reads Help a punk get drunk. While he resembles somebody who might have seen the Clash at the Electric Ballroom in 1980, he charges around $1 for a photograph and has almost 100,000 followers on Instagram. “Too much food and not enough music,” sighed Andy Lewis as we walked through Stables Market, where the Clash once posed for the cover of their debut album and tourists now shoot videos for TikTok.
Nonetheless, Camden Town has an irreducibly grimy and raucous heart. It is constantly overwritten but never wiped clean. While fabled London venues such as the Astoria and the Hammersmith Palais have succumbed to the wrecking ball, Camden’s retain their memories. This means that you can arrive too late for one wave yet catch the next. My daughter, who was born a few weeks before Amy Winehouse released Back to Black, has been coming here since she was 12: first for photographs, then for cheap jewelry, then piercings, and now punk shows. She had her 16th-birthday party on Primrose Hill. She does not feel that she has missed Camden’s heyday, whenever you think that was.
“Every new generation comes up to Camden and discovers something for themselves,” said Lewis as we pushed through the market. “Look around you. Saint Etienne wrote ‘London Belongs to Me’ about Camden. But it doesn’t belong to you, it doesn’t belong to me—it doesn’t belong to anyone. It belongs to different people at different times. I’m guilty of saying it’s not what it was when I was young, but to a new generation it is what it is, and they’re having a fantastic time.” He took in the clamorous spectacle. “It’s brilliant.”
Dorian Lynskey is the author of 33 Revolutions Per Minute: A History of Protest Songs, from Billie Holiday to Green Day and The Ministry of Truth: A Biography of George Orwell’s 1984
