British and Irish Camdens

Also British Overseas Territories

England

Camden, BATH, SOMERSET

Neighbourhood in Walcot Ward, Bath & North East Somerset.

Contribution from History of Bath Research Group and Camden Residents’ Association.

By Nigel Pollard

Until the latter part of the 18th century the area of Bath now known as Camden remained largely open countryside with various orchards and market gardens now supplying the growing city. However, it was no less a man than John Wood, the architect of the Circus and the Royal Crescent, who fixed “preliminary articles” with Robert Gay the local landowner in 1725, to develop further his ideas for the north of the city. Nevertheless, it took over fifty years until his fellow architect John Eveleigh built Camden Crescent (1787-1794) at what is now the western end of Camden Road. It was named after Charles Pratt, the first Earl of Camden, who had become the ‘Recorder of Bath’ in 1759.

Built in 1787-88, the original ‘Upper Camden Place’, i.e. Camden Crescent, was initially planned to be much grander than it ended up and was to have included a sloping garden running down to a terrace called ‘Lower Camden Place’. It was planned as a crescent of 22 houses with terraces of 5 houses at either end. The reasons why this grand development of the Upper and Lower Camden Places did not happen was due to the ground conditions at the eastern end which led to a series of landslips during construction which was immediately halted, and to this day remains quite noticeably truncated with only 18 houses together with the south west wing. What was intended as the centre is pedimented and bears the arms of Charles Pratt, first Earl of Camden, while the keystones of each house bear his crest, an elephant’s head.

The original ‘Upper Camden Place’ was then called simply ‘Camden Place’ and later renamed ‘Camden Crescent’ and the names Upper and Lower Camden Place transferred to terraces built further east, along the Camden Road. In its time as ‘Camden Place’ it gained, in 1817, literary fame as the home of Sir Walter Elliot in Jane Austen’s last novel Persuasion:

“Sir Walter had taken a very good house in Camden Place, a lofty, dignified situation, such as becomes a man of consequence; and both he and Elizabeth were settled there, much to their satisfaction. Anne entered it with a sinking heart, anticipating an imprisonment of many months…”

Travelling east down the Camden Road on the north side, set back from the road, is the new Upper Camden Place, an assortment of large late 18th and early 19thcentury houses, some by the architect John Eveleigh for the local attorney John Jelly.

On the southern side are the mid-Victorian terraces of City View and Berkeley Place. These are followed by the re-sited Lower Camden Place, a picturesque terrace of early 19th century houses, possibly by John Pinch the Elder. These, similar to Berkeley Place, have banded ground floor rustication as seen in the adjacent photo. Further on and set back high above the road on the north side is Camden Terrace, a row of 6 elegant early 19th century houses again, possibly by Pinch the Elder. They are of single window width with thin reeded porches. The two in the centre project slightly and have ground floor banded rustication and a further pediment with the arms of Charles Pratt, the first Earl of Camden.

Further along still on the north side is Prospect Place, a long terrace of pretty cottages, mostly built in 1810 by Abraham Chubb. Prospect Place seems to have been built on what had been a botanic garden set up in 1793 by the previously mentioned attorney and amateur botanist John Jelly. Some distance further on still is Claremont Place, four pairs of elegant regency villas, built in 1817, probably by Pinch the Elder. Opposite is Frankley Buildings, the steep row of Georgian houses at right angles to Camden Road.

On the south side of the road are the late Victorian houses of Belgrave Place and Belgrave Terrace and Belgrave Crescent, and back on the north side, Stanley Villas and Coburg Villas. The Camden Road ends with the few shops of Claremont Buildings, once a vibrant community centre, but still providing a hairdresser, a couple of estate agents and a pub. It was here that the Camden Residents’ Association held a Street party on the occasion of our late Queen’s Platinum Jubilee in June 2022.

Returning to the western end of Camden Road, the piece of land in front of the Crescent directly above Hedgemead Park, has been recently cleared and renamed ‘Camden Meadow’ an initiative by a sub-group of the Camden Residents’ Association. Together with the help of the occasional visits by both pigs and goats to help keep the vegetation under control, this year (2022) has also seen the result of some busy bees whose hives have also been erected on the site.

As a post script to this story should be added ‘Camden Mill’, down on the Bath riverside and part of the new ‘Bath Quays South’ redevelopment. A former steam-powered flour mill built in 1879-80, by Henry Williams, it was extended by F.W. Gardiner in 1892. It is a large rectangular block with similar frontages to river and road, intended for shipment of grain in and onward distribution of flour. The building is constructed from coursed squared limestone, tightly jointed, under a Welsh slate roof with overhanging timber hoists. The interior structure has timber beams supported on cast iron columns with some brick fireproofing.

It was originally converted to office use in 1974-5 and later in 2021 renovated by the TCN Group into a state-of-theart commercial development within the new Bath Quays Development. It has been listed by Historic England as Grade II as a good example of an increasingly rare survival, a large-scale Victorian flour mill designed by a recognised regional architect together being one of the few remaining buildings which demonstrate the importance that river traffic had for Bath, beginning with the opening of the Avon Improvement in 1727. It is a valuable reminder of Bath's former importance as the centre of an agricultural area, although any links to The Earl of Camden remain unknown.

Camden Town, NORTH LONDON

Population 28,200 (Camden Town with Primrose Hill and Cantelowes wards)

Contribution from Camden History Society.

The land that became known as Camden Town formed part of the large parish of St Pancras, Middlesex, whose ancient church, of 6th-century origin, was nearby. Before the late 18th century, the area was open country, with a few scattered dwellings and a tavern wayside taverns. Farms in the area supplied milk for the metropolis and hay for its horses. Begun in the 1780s, the earliest development was along the west side of the road to Highgate, later to become Camden High Street, on land owned by Charles FitzRoy, Lord Southampton.

East of the road to Highgate lay the lands of Cantlowes manor. In 1681, the 210 acres of Cantlowes demesne were acquired by John Jeffreys, a City of London tobacco merchant and Transatlantic slave-trade financier originally from Brecon in Wales. The land was leased from the canons of St Paul’s and passed to Lord Camden through his wife Elizabeth Jeffreys. He came into full possession of the property in 1785. [For the full story see camdentownhistory.info].

Three years later, intent on developing a ‘new town’ on the land, he obtained a Private Act of Parliament enabling him to do so. An ambitious plan for the whole estate, by the architect George Dance the Younger, was abandoned and a simple grid of five roads was set out, initially east of the High Street. Building leases were granted to builders from 1790. [Building Camden Town - a chronology].

At first the development was indeed a self-contained new town, separated from London by acres of open land. The name ‘Camden Town’ quickly came into general usage to describe development on both Earl Camden’s estate and on land west of the High Street owned by Lord Southampton. The neo-classical Camden Chapel (now All Saints’ Cathedral) was erected in 1822-24 to serve its respectable inhabitants. The Regent’s Canal was constructed through the area from 1814, en route to the Thames at Limehouse, and opened to traffic in 1820; wharves and warehouses quickly sprang up along it.

The canal was never as profitable as expected and was soon eclipsed by competition from the railways. The London & Birmingham Railway was opened to Euston in 1837. Charles Dickens, a childhood inhabitant of Camden Town, wrote graphically in Dombey and Son of the upheaval caused by the construction of railways, likening it to an earthquake. Vast tracts of land were needed for the Birmingham railway’s freight depot, which although on Southampton land was named Camden (Goods) Station.

There would be further disruption when the suburban North London Railway, opened in 1850, sliced through the area on a viaduct. Camden Town began as a middle-class suburb. The neo-classical Camden Chapel (now All Saints’ Greek Orthodox Cathedral) was erected in 1822-24 to serve its respectable inhabitants. A Camden Literary & Scientific Society flourished for three decades from 1836.

Eastward, a new turnpike road, from ‘Marylebone to Holloway’ was authorised by Parliament in 1824 and later named Camden Road. On either side of this new road George Pratt, 3rd Lord Camden, continued the development of a spacious new suburb known as ‘Camden New Town’. Laid out with villa houses and containing two squares, it was finished by 1871, so completing the residential development of the area.

Canal and rail links encouraged the development of industry in Camden Town, which became famous for the manufacture of pianos, then an important part of everyday life. Collard & Collard and Herrburger & Brooks mass-produced complete instruments, while at the other end of the scale there were small assembly shops, and makers of small parts. The renowned organ builder Henry Willis had circular factory in the area. Other concerns, and (besides the railways) major employers of labour, included Gilbey’s, wine importer and spirit distiller, the Aerated Bread Company, Charles Goodall & Son, once the world’s largest makers of playing cards, Hilgers, making optical instruments, the printers and publishers Dalziel Brothers, and Idris, mineral water manufacturers.

Throughout its existence Camden Town has attracted many artists and engravers, often congregated in communal studios, and some working in stained glass. The Camden Town Group of artists (1911–), of which Walter Sickert was a member, took its name from the district.Towards the end of the 19th century, the area was prosperous and busy. There were professional people in the larger Georgian houses, lower-middle-class tenants in the terrace house, and shopkeepers in the main streets, while churches and chapels were established, in new or adapted buildings, by the Church of England and by nonconformists.

Camden Town was by then fully a part of inner London, connected to the centre by numerous transport links. Tracks had been laid along the main roads, initially to carry horse trams: the first route opening in 1871. Electric trams were introduced in 1909, two years after the arrival of the Underground (subway) in the shape of the Hampstead Tube; now part of the Northern Line. The 1930s saw the introduction of trolleybuses, whose network of overhead wires was removed in the early 1960s.

After World War I some large businesses closed. New smaller businesses included electrical instrument manufacture, and car bodywork; one business tried to sell aeroplanes. Carreras’ Black Cat cigarette factory was a new major source of employment. The piano industry declined because of foreign competition and with the advent of the gramophone and wireless for home entertainment. Although housing deteriorated, with inadequate cooking and washing facilities, many houses were rented by private landlords to middle-class tenants. Shortly after WWI, the Pratts sold off their land in two big public sales, creating many individual rentier landlords, while the Ecclesiastical Commissioners (as successors as to St Paul’s) kept their terraces. Camden Town was not much damaged by bombing during World War II. In the 1950s, the then St Pancras Borough Council bought the failing Church of England-owned terraces, and choosing not to refurbish them, replaced them in the 1960s with blocks of flats surrounded by communal grass and play areas.

Communities arriving from elsewhere, including Greek Cypriot, Irish and Portuguese, lived in private-rented housing, opened restaurants and pubs and engaged in trades such as dressmaking. Industry declined in the area, but mews properties became attractive for architects and craftsmen. A change in the law for leaseholders allowed privately-owned house to be sold and improved. Conservation Areas helped preserve the character of Camden Town’s surviving Georgian streets. On the western side of the High Street, the 19thcentury terraces were retained in private ownership and became homes for professional and literary people.

Television and film companies were attracted to the area around the Regent’s Canal, while around the North London Railway line, the old streets have been demolished for blocks of private housing, and shopping/restaurant malls beside the canal at Hawley Wharf. Nearby, in the 1970s, small workshops for arts and crafts opened in the disused railway properties beside the canal, and at night-time there were small music and comedy clubs. A larger second-hand market developed on the former railway sidings and horse stables. Shops lining the road from the Underground station to the market became psychedelically decorated and given over to selling leather jackets, boots, jewellery and posters. Camden Market today is a lucrative complex of markets with over 1,000 stalls and shops, where traders sell goods from all over the world to tourists from around the globe.

At the foot of the High Street is a statue, unveiled in 1868, to the radical MP Richard Cobden. The plinth relates that it was part-funded by the Emperor Napoleon III in gratitude for his having negotiated a trade treaty between Britain and France. Napoleon III lived and died at Camden Place, Chislehurst, where the original William Camden had once lived.

Camden Town street and pub names

More than thirty present-day Camden Town streets bear names or titles related to Lord Camden’s ownership. Of family members or their in-laws: Camden Street, Road, Square, Terrace, Mews, High Street, Park Road and Gardens; Pratt Street and Mews; Bayham Street and Place; Brecknock Road and Brecon Mews; Jeffreys Street and Place; Murray Street and Mews (after Harriet Murray, wife of the 2nd Marquess); Rochester Road, Mews, Terrace, Place and Square (after her father, the Bishop of Rochester); Georgiana and Carol (once Caroline) for daughters of the 1st Marquess; and Marquis Road (historic spelling of the title); Greenland Road, Street and Place recall the 1st Earl’s agent, Cantelowes Road the old manor, and Randolph Street, St Augustine’s Road and St Paul’s Crescent the Cathedral lease. Once, Molesworth Terrace and Place in north Camden Town were named after the wife of the 2nd Earl. A public house called the Marquis of Camden no longer exists, and the Camden Arms has been renamed; but a Camden Head pub, claiming to date from as early as 1787, still trades in the High Street with its original name (having been known as ‘Liberties’ for some time).

Camden Town, the musical heart of London

Camden Town is internationally associated with live music and has nurtured an un-paralleled concentration of era-defining bands that includes The Clash, The Damned, Blur, Oasis, Coldplay, Amy Winehouse, Madness, Motörhead and the Pogues - many of whom lived in Camden. Camden’s music scene grew from the many packed late-night folk music sessions that entertained Irish labourers in the mid 20th Century.

Ground-breaking events in the 1960s at the Roundhouse, (a circular building originally for rotating steam engines), made Camden a focus for cutting-edge culture by hosting challenging film, philosophy and theatre along with legendary music acts such as Hendrix and Pink Floyd. Cheap residential and business rents in the 1970s brought creative people, music businesses, artists and artisans to Camden and saw the launch of pioneering record labels and iconic music venues.

Camden Town’s creative culture has combined with the proximity of record companies and accommodating venues and pubs to continue to create new artists and catalyse new music scenes for more than six decades. It is most famously responsible for the birth of UK Punk, and 90s Britpop, but also movements like Two-Tone and New Romantic. Camden was the chosen location for special moments in music history, such as an early debut from Madonna and secret gigs from Prince. In 1993 Bob Dylan went walkabout in Camden Town when making his promotional video for the track Blood in My Eyes. The music industry continues to thrive and Camden’s many live venues fill with people from all over London and the world.

London Borough of Camden, NORTH LONDON

Population 210,100. Contribution from Camden History Society.

A heterogenous borough, socially and ethnically diverse, Camden stretches some four miles north to south, from the leafy heights of Hampstead and Highgate, through largely residential areas with a mix of private and social housing, and into central London.

Not to be confused with Camden Town, the London Borough of Camden is a modern creation. In local government reorganisation in 1964-65, the three Metropolitan Boroughs of Hampstead, Holborn and St Pancras (dating from 1900) were combined. The new, larger borough needed a name. Soon rejected was a suggestion it be named either Tyburn or Fleet, after one of the ‘lost’ rivers that flow, culverted, beneath it; but there were objections to naming the borough after what were effectively sewers, and Tyburn also had unfortunate associations with London’s historic gallows. Various portmanteau names were suggested, combining syllables from the names of the former authorities, such as Holstead, Panborn and Hamcras, and, clumsier still. Penhamborn and Bornhamcras.

Eventually ‘Camden’ was chosen, reflecting the central position of Camden Town within the new borough. The idea had reportedly occurred to the Town Clerk and Leader of the Council while riding together in a taxi through Camden Town.

The logo designed for the new Council, and still in use today, comprises four pairs of hands clasped in friendship and co-operation.

The area that is now Camden has a long history. Holborn, the City of London’s first suburb, developed in medieval times beside the old Roman road to the west. The Knights Templar had a temple there, and provincial bishops their London ‘palaces’. By the 15th century, two Inns of Court, Gray’s Inn and Lincoln’s Inn, had been established to accommodate a fledgling legal profession (both Inns still centres of legal education). In the 17th century development began in St Giles-in-the-Fields, earlier the site of a 12thcentury leper hospital and later to become, in part, a notorious ‘rookery’. The 1660s saw the creation of London’s first true Square and the beginnings of Bloomsbury, where house building, on land mostly owned by the Duke of Bedford, was completed only around 1840. Institutions founded in the Georgian period include the Foundling Hospital (an orphanage, 1739), British Museum (1753), Royal Free Hospital (1828) and University College (UCL, 1826). Constructed as a bypass in the 1750s was the New Road (now Euston Road), under which now runs the world’s first underground railway, the Metropolitan line opened in 1863. North of the road a new suburb, Somers Town, was begun in the 1790s, quickly becoming a haven for French émigrés The district now known as g Fitzrovia, fully developed by 1800, was built partly on land owned by the FitzRoy family.

The built-up area expanded ever northwards, and in the course of the 19th century absorbed Camden Town [4.3], the historic rural village of Kentish Town, and the hilltop villages of Highgate and Hampstead whose suburban villas were populated by the better-off. The inner districts to the south, typically with terrace housing and a more working-class populace, were a hive of industry in the Victorian era. Industries of many kinds developed over time, whether in small workshops or purpose-built factories, and engaged in everything from brewing, gin distilling and coachbuilding, to the manufacture of instruments both scientific and musical, jewellery, furniture and false teeth, and all manner of other specialist trades, some surviving into the 20th century.

In the commercial area of Holborn, grand headquarters buildings were erected for major insurance companies. Three major rail termini, Euston (1837), King’s Cross (1852) and St Pancras (1868), were built along the Euston Road, behind which the railways took vast swathes of land for their goods and coal depots and sidings. Local transport was provided by horse-buses and later horse-trams. Many new churches and chapels were built, and new parishes established. Small private schools, often run in the homes of their proprietors, educated the children of affluent parents; others were taught in National (Anglican) or British (Nonconformist) schools. After the 1870 Education Act, these were complemented by the new elementary schools built by the London School Board.

Bomb damage during World War II was most severe in Holborn, which suffered the highest per capita casualty rate in London. Post-war Council-built social housing estates helped compensate for the lost homes. Over more than two centuries, incomers from abroad have settled locally. In early Somers Town French émigrés fleeing the Revolution and later Spanish refugees; Irish navvies came to build the canal and railways; from the 1840s poor Italian migrants found a home in Holborn’s ‘Little Italy’; and in the interwar refugees from Europe (many of them Jewish) settled in Hampstead and West Hampstead. The post-war era has seen the arrival of many people from the Indian subcontinent and various parts of Africa. In 2011, 61.9% of Camden primary school pupils had a first language other than English.Today, Hampstead and Primrose Hill are highly sought-after areas with some high-profile celebrity residents. In recent decades disused railway lands north of King’s Cross have been comprehensively redeveloped, retaining some of the old railway buildings, with housing, shops. and offices including a new UK headquarters for Google. Bloomsbury, with its famous Squares, contains a host of hotels for tourists, and is otherwise dominated by educational and medical institutions – the British Museum, University College, Senate House and other parts of the University of London, along with their student halls – all part of a wider area dubbed the ‘Knowledge Quarter’. Its several hospitals include University College Hospital and the world-renowned Great Ormond Street Hospital (for Children).

In nearby Fitzrovia, once noted for its Bohemian lifestyle, the most prominent landmark is the 1964 BT (Telecom) Tower, 620 ft (189 m) tall and topped by a currently non-functioning revolving restaurant.

Many films and TV dramas are filmed in the borough. Hampstead Heath, at 790 acres, is Camden’s largest green space, saved from house building and preserved for public use by an 1871 Act of Parliament. Regent’s Park and Primrose Hill also lie partly within the borough.

The notable people who have lived in the present borough over time are far too many to enumerate here. Celebrated residents have included four prime ministers; naturalist Charles Darwin and psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud; railway engineer Robert Stephenson; Edward Jenner, promoter of vaccination; William Friese-Greene, cinematography pioneer; feminists Mary Wollstonecraft and Emmeline Pankhurst; Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, pioneer of women’s medicine; Italian patriot Giuseppe Mazzini; anti-slavery campaigner Olaudah Equiano; Marx and Engels; artists from Constable to Whistler and Sickert; architects George Gilbert Scott, Richard Norman Shaw; Edwin Lutyens and Ernö Goldfinger; poets from Milton, Shelley, Keats, Coleridge and Wordsworth, to Yeats and Auden, Dylan Thomas, John Betjeman and Ted Hughes; novelists from Fanny Burney and Mary Shelley via Dickens and H.G. Wells to D.H. Lawrence, Graham Greene, George Orwell and Agatha Christie; Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Set; playwright George Bernard Shaw; actors Sarah Siddons, Charles Kean and Ellen Terry; composers Joseph Haydn and Edward Elgar; and popular musicians Elton John; the Sex Pistols and Amy Winehouse.

Among American residents have been Benjamin Franklin, Edgar Allan Poe, Paul Robeson and Sylvia Plath. Highgate Cemetery contains the graves of such celebrities as Karl Marx and George Eliot.

Founded in 1970, Camden History Society has – perhaps uniquely – researched the history of all 1,300 streets in its borough, publishing the results in a series of 15 books drawing on the excellent resources of the Camden Local Studies & Archives Centre.

Parish of Camden, CAMBERWELL

In 1796, a group of Camberwell worshippers broke away from the parish church of St Giles, disliking the doctrine of the new vicar. At their own expense they built a new chapel in Peckham Road, on land called Camden Row Field – whose name suggests there were early terraced houses nearby called Camden Row. The new place of worship was named Camden Chapel. When the Bishop refused to license it, they registered it as a Dissenting chapel and it opened in 1797 as part of the Countess of Huntingdon's Connexion. In 1829 it was belatedly licensed as an Episcopal (Anglican) chapel.

As a District Church from 1844, it attracted some eminent preachers to its pulpit. A new apse, added to the church by Sir George Gilbert Scott. The full name of its territory, the Parish of Camden Church, was routinely shortened to ‘Parish of Camden’. Badly damaged by bombing during World War II but continuing to function, the church was demolished in 1956. Nearby roads named Camden Avenue, Grove and Street, gave way to the social housing of Southwark Council’s Camden Estate, completed in 1976. The short-lived estate was swept away, along with four others, as part of a huge regeneration scheme initiated by the Council in the mid-1990s, so that the Camden name has now vanished from Camberwell.

Other London pub and street names

Many of these Camden namings date from the 1700s and pre-date the development of Bath and Camden Town by many years. Some still survive but others vanished long ago.

Camden Head pub, BETHNAL GREEN

On Bethnal Green Road in east London, the Camden Head (originally Lord Camden) public house was established around 1766, adjacent to a range of houses called Camden Row. The pub is still in business, although known since 2006 as the Misty Moon.

William Camden pub, BEXLEYHEATH

This 20th-century public house in Avenue Road, in the London Borough of Bexley, recalls William Camden’s 17th-century local land purchase.

Built by the brewers Whitbread in 1956, it is now owned by Greene King. Its inn sign was photographed in 1991 when the pub was under different ownership.

Camden Court, CLERKENWELL and also CRIPPLEGATE

Two London courtyards called Camden Court existed by 1747, one in Clerkenwell, an inner part of the Borough of Islington, and another off Grub Street, Cripplegate, in a old part of the central City of London, both clearly named before Charles Pratt was ennobled and so not deriving their names from him. Streets named from later in the decade clearly were named after him.

Camden Street, Camden Walk, Camden Passage and the Camden Head pub, ISLINGTON

In Islington (north London), Camden Street was built off the High Street (now Upper Street) between 1760 and 1768. Another Camden Head pub, on the corner of what is now Camden Walk, is still in business today. An adjacent passageway, built behind the High Street from 1767, was very soon named Camden Passage. Having become a squalid alleyway, it was revitalised in the 1960s as an antiques market, which today is filled with antique, vintage and contemporary shops, stalls cafes and bars.

Camden Street and the Lord Camden pub, WALWORTH

In south London, a Camden Street in Walworth now called Morecambe Street, existed by 1810, with a Lord Camden pub from at least 1825 that survived into the 1970s.

Ireland

Camden Fort Meagher, COUNTY CORK

British coastal defence fortification near Crosshaven; now in the Republic of Ireland. Though its current structures date only from the 1860s, the fort was originally built in the 16th century to defend the mouth of Cork Harbour. By 1779, when they were remodelled, the defences were known as the Ram's Head Battery. In 1795 they were renamed Fort Camden in honour of John Jeffreys Pratt, 2nd Earl Camden, the newly appointed Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. In 1880s and ‘90s, the guns were upgraded and a launching position was added for the Brennan Torpedo, ‘the world's first practical guided weapon’. Handed over to the Irish Defence Forces in 1938, the site was renamed named Fort Meagher in honour of Thomas Francis Meagher, a 19th-cenutry Irish nationalist. In 1989 the Irish Army handed the fort over to Cork County Council. It remained largely overgrown until 2010 when a group of local volunteers began restoration and development of the site for heritage and tourism purposes. Again renamed, as Camden Fort Meagher, it is now open seasonally to visitors.

Sráid Camden, DUBLIN

The well-known Camden Street (or Sráid Camden) in the Irish capital Dublin, formerly called St Kevin’s Port, was so renamed by 1778, long before the 2nd Earl Camden’s ennoblement, and so probably took its name from his father.

British Overseas Territories

Camden, Paget, BERMUDA

Locality in Paget Parish, Main Island. Standing in the grounds of Bermuda Botanical Gardens, the house named Camden (for reasons unknown) is believed to date back to about 1714. It was then bought by Francis Jones, a colonel’s son, who lived there until his death in 1796 from yellow fever. The house and 50 acres were sold in 1811 to merchant William Durham, who made major alterations, and Camden as it now stands dates to his ownership. In 1822 the financial collapse of his business forced Durham to sell ‘Camden Park’ with its 34½ acres.

The property was bought by James Henry Tucker, a Hamilton merchant and the city’s mayor for 21 years. Also an agriculturalist, he excelled in the production of arrowroot, which became a lucrative export business. Behind the house he built an arrowroot factory (today an art gallery). Camden remained in the Tucker family for almost 150 years. Since 1979 it has been the official residence of Bermuda’s prime minister, though no Premier has ever lived there; it is used instead for occasional Government functions.

Ships, heraldry and three men called Camden

Camdens in the Global South

Camdens in the US and Canada

Camdens in Australia and New Zealand