Publications

There is no deeper and more fascinating survey of Camden Town’s history. Extensive fresh research has expanded this new edition by 50%, revealing previously unseen stories about streets, buildings and former residents. The collection of eight routes walks the reader through time - from early days as a suburban Georgian new town, to the arrival of the canal and railways and past often fondly-remembered shops and institutions. The routes let you imagine the thriving and rowdy entertainment venues of Edwardian times, the clanking trams, the busy dairy and the constant aroma of baking bread.

Newly acknowledged is Camden Town’s era-defining music scene, from its roots in post-war Irish folk through the 60s, punk and Britpop to the present. The walks also reveal an enviable legacy of artists and architects to add to writers, poets, scientists, actors and politicians.

Why not have a meal where the Pogues wrote their songs, or shop where the Clash had their beans on toast? [More…]

By Marianne Colloms and Dick Weindling. This book tells the history of every street in the NW6 area south of the Jubilee line and the part of Kilburn within Camden. Geographically arranged, it also provides biographical sketches of the many notable people who have lived in the area – including a pioneer of moving pictures, inventors, and internationally famous writers, artists, actors, film directors, and musicians. This is the second of two new books describing the area, the other being Streets and Characters of West Hampstead and Cricklewood.

By Dick Weindling and Marianne Colloms, this new book is first of two describing West Hampstead and Kilburn. Geographically arranged, the book recounts the history of every street in the NW6 area north of the Jubilee line and the part of Cricklewood within Camden. It also provides biographical sketches of the very many notable people who have lived in the area – including two Nobel Prize winners, a valiant soldier awarded a VC in WWI, and a woman many considered to be the greatest British soul singer.

This updated and completely revised edition is packed with extra historical detail about an area that has been transformed over the last two decades. In nine walks we explore the original heartland of St Pancras around its ancient Old Church. We take in two spectacularly rejuvenated railway termini, and behind them the many acres of once derelict and inaccessible railway land now redeveloped into vibrant King’s Cross Central. To the west, we walk the still largely residential streets of multicultural Somers Town, once a haunt of radicals and European refugees; and the Euston area, currently in the throes of widespread demolition to make way for HS2.

The historic manor of Blemundsbury, which became the Duke of Bedford’s estate, plus other streets north to Euston Road, is covered in seven walks. We start with Bloomsbury Square, the first part to be laid out in the late 17th century, and work our way gradually northwards in line with the district’s development. Much of Bloomsbury’s Georgian architectural grandeur survives [More...]

Fitzrovia is a fairly recent name for a district that was mainly developed well over 200 years ago. We describe it in five walks, between Oxford Street and Euston Road, including Tottenham Court Road and an area to the east dominated by University College Hospital. Virginia Woolf and the so-called Bloomsbury Set were just as much denizens of Fitzrovia as they were of neighbouring Bloomsbury. Aside from writers and artists, this once impoverished district has also been a hotbed of social revolution, with a Communist Club visited by Lenin and Stalin. [More...]

Highgate has long been split between different church and local administrations, now between Haringey and Camden and this book focuses on the area within the latter. Six long walks start with Highgate’s historic core, developed from the 14th century by the gate into the Bishop of London’s park. Highgate has attracted the wealthy from late medieval times, and we chart its development from aristocratic retreat to exclusive residences for lawyers and merchants in the 18th and 19th centuries and for the rich and famous of more recent times. [More...]

Winner of LAMAS first prize. Ten walks take the reader through Kentish Town (east of the Overground railway line) and Dartmouth Park. Although most of the streets date from after 1830, Kentish Town developed from a roadside medieval village into a Georgian country town famed for its healthy air. It then became a Victorian industrial suburb blighted by the grime and smoke from its factories and railways. [More...]

Eight walks traverse the area from Chalk Farm to Euston Road, between Primrose Hill in the west and on the east the old medieval route that Hampstead Road and Camden High Street follows.  The residential area that is Primrose Hill is described, as is the Crown Estate within Camden on which Nash’s grand terraces overlooking Regent’s Park were built and the service areas behind. [More...]

St Giles was once a by-word for poverty and disease, notorious for its slums – the Rookery and Seven Dials. Yet the parish also included the grand houses around Lincoln’s Inn Fields and Great Queen Street.  This historic area of contrasts is explored in six walks. In Drury Lane we walk in the footsteps of Boswell, close to the Saxon trading port of Lundenwic. In Shaftesbury Avenue we are by the site of the medieval leper hospital of St Giles, where the settlement grew up. [More...]

The old French name Bel Assis, from which we get Belsize, means beautifully situated. Today’s estate agents would say this is still true. Ten walks lead through this smart suburb stretching from Primrose Hill to Hampstead, which now shows few signs of its pre-1800 estates. While some of its 19th century mansions have also disappeared we describe the many visual treats in its leafy streets. [More...]

The first edition of this guide to Old Hampstead appeared in 1972 and was the first in our series of Streets volumes. It was written by the noted Hampstead historian Christopher Wade, who stressed that much of Hampstead’s history is associated with its hill, its heath and its healthy air and water. Six walks describe the area, where the oldest surviving buildings – in the so-called village – date back to the late 17th century. [More...]

The south-eastern corner of the Borough of Camden abuts the City of London and also has a rich and varied history dating back to Roman times.  Powerful statesmen built palaces here in the Middle Ages. Lord Chancellors were bred in the two Inns of Court and Tudor and Stuart courtiers enjoyed their great houses until the area became fully built up. Part of Holborn, particularly near the noisome River Fleet, became so crowded with insanitary buildings that the Victorian drove great thoroughfares through these slums. This history is described in seven walks. [More...]

In six walks through Gospel Oak and the western reaches of Kentish Town, this volume describes the history of an area that was green fields until the 19th century.  It tells of abortive plans for middle-class villas, Victorian terraces that deteriorated in places into slums and the comprehensive redevelopment of the 1960s – so comprehensive that the original street layout is in places no more. There are however pockets of surprising architecture on these streets not least some remarkable churches.  [More...]

Ten walks lead us through an area stretching east from Southampton Row east to the borough boundary along Farringdon Road and from High Holborn in the south to Euston Road in the north.  Though sometimes considered part of Bloomsbury, historically that lies to the west. The area here developed gradually over fields - from the start of Red Lion Square in 1684 to the completion of the Battle Bridge estate by King’s Cross over 150 years later. [More...]

Leigh Hunt in the Vale of Health

The rise and fall of the Southampton Estate

Early observations of Camden Station

B.B. Evans, Kilburn’s premier store         

‘A Penny for a Brick’: Lyndhurst Hall, 1891-2006

‘The Euston Square tragedy’: a St Pancras man in Broadmoor

A great rents drama? – explaining Camden Town Hall’s political battle of 1972

2022

Virginia Woolf’s Bloomsbury: facts and fictions
William Benjamin Carpenter: making ‘religion scientific and science religious’
The sad demise of Eliza Fenning, domestic
Sir Thomas Maryon Wilson: victim or villain?
R D Blackmore, Clara Vaughan and Tommy Upmore
Camden: a fantasy history

2021

Unrealised railway schemes for Camden Town and Primrose Hill
Belle Bilton: the show girl and the Earl
A ‘Whirligig World’: the Camden connections of Samuel Wesley, organist and composer
T S Eliot: people and places in Bloomsbury
The ‘High and Ham’ – the story behind a local paper
R D Blackmore: the Camden years of the author of Lorna Doone

2020

The Holborn Restaurant site
Frances Molesworth, Marchioness Camden
The West End Fair riot
The moving of Cane Wood Lane
Annie Lowin & the Idris strike
Coram’s Fields: their social context

2019

Ernest Estcourt builder and motorist;
George Jacob Holyoake and family;
North End memories 1889-1901;
The Tammoland campaign;
Rowland Holyoake. artist;
Lyne’s academy and Charles Dickens;
St Pancras sesquicentennial.

2018

Invaded by smallpox: the 1880s outbreaks in Hampstead & St Pancras;
The Kaiser’s spies in Camden;
Paul Pry in Camden: local victims of gossip in a penny paper of 1849;
Municipal corruption in Holborn: the downfall of Henry Corbett Jones;
Shirley Waldemar Baker: missionary, prime minister & unsung son of Camden Town.

Bonnie Prince Charlie in London; 
The legend of 14 remainders; 
Blondin, the world's greatest tightrope walker; 
Unwelcome neighbours: Eley’s ammunition factory in the Gray’s Inn Road; 
The poultry maid of Monk Barnes: Elizabeth Watts and her Belsize home

(2016)

Bloomsbury blitzed: Graham Greene; ‘Dallas’; and the Jewish tragedy in Alfred Place;
Camden’s Vestry and Town Halls: Vestries, Councils and Ratepayers;
75 years ago this year: Salvatore Breglia and the Arandora Star Tragedy;
Orwell in Camden;
The death of John Dickens and the fate of his widow.

(2015)

Who cares? – St Pancras workhouse children, 1830-1870;
The design of Hampstead Public Library (1964);
The Kentish Town Tragedy;
A tendency to deprave and corrupt in Chalk Farm?;
Oh! Calcutta! at the Round House;
The curious history of Thomas Cooke’s dissecting room:
The Russian tenant of Kenwood.

(2014)

Baby farming, nurse children & infanticide in Kilburn;
Gower St to Euston Sq.: a local history of the Underground;  
‘Old Wyldes’ and ‘Wyldes’: a short history of two houses;
Jerome K Jerome’s residences in Fitzrovia & Bloomsbury;
Donald Nicoll – Part 2: land and railway speculation;
The Albany Street gas explosion of 1848.

(2013)

The cow with an iron tail: the Great Westminster Dairy Company and the Express Dairy
No.1 Chester Place: a Dickens house that time forgot
Glimpses of C17 Hampstead, from the Manorial Court Rolls
Charlie Ruffell, Olympian
Donald Nicoll, tailor, speculator and bon viveur – Part 1: the tailor, the politician, and the Vale of Health Hotel
The Hampstead bank holiday crush of Easter Monday 1892
Dollie Radford and Anna Wickham: radical Hampstead poets

2012

Religious change & controversy in early-C18 Holborn & St Pancras: Rev. Nathaniel Marshall & his contemporaries
The fall of John Sperni, Mayor of St Pancras 1937-1938
Invasion of residential Queen Square by institutions in the C19
Misplaced: Vivienne Haigh-Wood [Mrs T S Eliot]
John Pritt Harley (1786-1858), actor, of Upper Gower Street
The Cumberland Basin Horticultural Society and allotments

2011

Edition 34 is no longer in print but is available as a pdf.
Please download it to your computer within 24hrs of receiving your emailed link.

Investigation into the foundation of the St Pancras Almshouses
Edith Gissing: the madwoman in the asylum?
‘Underwoods, opposite the Cemetery’: a family of stone masons
Homes of Hope in Regent Square
The Abbé Morel and St Mary’s, Holly Place
Horse trams in Camden: the London Street Tramways Company

2010

Southwood Smith: his extraordinary life and family
From Southwood Smith to Octavia Hill: the family in Camden
Archibald Campbell Barclay and the Catholic Apostolic Church
Penrhyn Lodge and ‘the Napoleon of crime’ [Adam Worth]
Highgate Men’s Pond: a short history

2009

Drs John Radcliffe, Hans Sloane and Richard Mead: natural sagacity and natural sciences in Bloomsbury 1700-1750
Henry Walter Bates (1825-1892), explorer, Darwinian, geographer and family man
The Women’s Hospital Corps & Endell Street Military Hospital
Perkins & Co.: four generations of steam and heat engineers
Howard Candler, MA FRSL (1838-1916), schoolmaster, educationist and polymath
100 years of the Kingsway Tram Subway

2008

Isaac Snowman, artist, and the Snowman family
Honourable members: Camden’s past MPs
‘Pop-guns can’t fight cannons’: Liberals and the Highgate library, 1903-06
Eva Gore-Booth & Mæve de Markiewicz in Hampstead
Red Street, left of Labour and north of Holborn Bars: the radical history of Gray’s Inn Road
The great St Pancras civil defence revolt of 1957/58
The artists of West Hampstead Studios

2007

The humblest beginnings: Robert Blincoe’s St Pancras years
The man who lived in my house: Frederick Tatham (1805-1878)
A watershed in NW5: Kentish Town Baths 1901-2006
The Regent’s Park Manufactory and two steam pioneers
David Laing, Scotsman in Camden
World War II: the salvation of the Metropolitan Boroughs?
The Saville Theatre, Shaftesbury Avenue

2006

Grave omissions [from The Good Grave Guide to Hampstead Cemetery, Fortune Green]
Olaudah Equiano, a slave in Camden
Henry Cole in Hampstead, 1879-80
Youth House, an international community in Camden Road
Robert Stephenson, Dionysius Lardner, and an intriguing Hampstead ratebook entry
The Boydell family and the strange case of John Elliot
A naval review: Camden’s naval past

2005

Eleanor Palmer’s Gift Charity in Barnet and St Pancras
George Gissing’s London residences, 1877-1891
Florence [Upton], Claude [Debussy] and the Cake Walk, or, The case of the nameless nursemaid
The genesis of the Camden Square Environmental Area
Quackery at King’s Cross: James Morison and the British College of Health
A most remarkable vicar: the Rev. Yearwood, the Plague and the Confederates
A Horne duet: the Rev. Silvester Horne & his son Kenneth
Dr William Gibbons of Burgh House

2004

Septimus Buss and his sister Fanny
Drinking fountains and horse troughs (Hampstead & St Pancras)
The Trewbys of Fenton House, Hampstead
Clothing & class in Primrose Hill: shops & shopping, 1855-2003
Loyalists in Highgate
Ernest Milner, architectural photographer
Carreras: family, firm and factory; [and] Working for Carreras

2003

‘Soft’ and ‘hard’ fascism in Hampstead 1945-1949
The Anti-Apartheid Movement in Camden 1959-1994
History of Euston Fire Station
The mystery of the ‘Woodehouse Journal’: criminal deception or Victorian parlour game?
Eating out in Primrose Hill, 1856-2002
Golders Hill Park
A parish divided: the Liberties of St Andrew Holborn

2002

Mabel Quiller-Couch in Downshire Hill
Bollards in Camden
‘Without parallel in the known world’: the chequered past of 277 Gray’s Inn Road
From stones to ohms: the history of electricity in Hampstead & the Central Supply Station, Lithos Road
The school for sons and orphans of missionaries in Mornington Crescent, 1852-57
A short history of Oak Village
The Irish in Kilburn, and the Church of the Sacred Heart
Provident and non-provident dispensaries in Camden
Architectural details on Hampstead houses
A history of a late-C20 development: Kingswell, Hampstead
Keeley House (Keeley Street) and its predecessors
Rise and fall of the Aerated Bread Company

2001

Schools for the ‘New Middle Class’ in Camden, 1850-1890
Holborn’s Church of Humanity, its roots and offshoots
The Governesses’ Benevolent Institution: care of aged governesses in Kentish Town and Kent
The rise and fall of West End Fair
‘A very large speculator in building’: double life of E J Cave
Baroness Castle of Blackburn, formerly St Pancras Councillor Miss Barbara Betts
Camden buildings and people in fire insurance records
‘Matters of susceptibility’: ... St Pancras Civic Society
The women’s suffrage movement in and around Camden
Kentish Town Congregational Church and the Congregational churches of Camden  

2000

Upwardly mobile in Bloomsbury, 1920-1940: from Herbrand Street School to British Museum Keeper’s chamberpots
The Chislehurst connection: Camden Place & Camden Town
Coal-hole covers in Camden
Fear of crime in 18th-century Hampstead
A light at King’s Cross: the ‘Lighthouse’ Building
The North West London Synagogue in Kentish Town
‘Playing Hitler’s game’ from Fitzroy Road NW1: J B S Haldane and the deep-shelter controversy
The destiny of Bower Cottage [St Margaret’s Nursery]

1999

History and future of the Jews’ Free School, Camden Town
The mayoral regalia of the London Borough of Camden
Bombs on Holborn in the Second World War
The Forsyths of Finchley Road
Before Camden Town, 1745-1795
Slogans on bricks: advertisements painted on buildings
The Marylebone and Finchley Road Turnpike 1820-1850

1998

The political philosophy of Bernard Shaw & St Pancras Vestry
A light that failed: the Camden Literary and Scientific Institution 1835-1839
The needle’s eye: Christ Church, Hampstead Square
‘Oh, what a tangled web we weave’: historical fiction
Sir William Job Collins of Primrose Hill
The Orphan Working School, Haverstock Hill 1847-1939
Mission and suspicion at King’s Cross: the London Cabmen’s Mission, 1871-c1910
Repton’s 1793 ‘Red Book’ for Kenwood
Old St Pancras Church and its fields

1997

‘A tinge of pink’: the Isokon Flats in Lawn Road
Sir Samuel Romilly of Russell Square and his descendents
Luxury living for the lower classes: Metropolitan Buildings
‘Low neighbours and bad drains’: Oliver Heaviside FRS,
Charles Dickens and Camden Town
Tobacco pipe makers of Little Clarendon Street, Somers Town
West End House and the Beckford scandal
Scala Theatre, Charlotte Street: long-lived but not always lucky
Fifty years of the Hampstead Music Club 1946-1996
Butcher’s shops in Kentish Town
Spreading the gospel in Gospel Oak: All Hallows, The ‘Cathedral of North London’
Chronology of cinemas in Camden   

1996

25 years on: the Jubilee of the Camden History Society
Where was the Great Hollow Elm of Hampstead?
Percy Dearmer, Vicar of St Mary’s, Primrose Hill
The Hampstead by-pass that never was
The Gees of Fenton House
Matthew Forster of Belsize
Gambling in wartime: William Geere (1589/60-1652)
John Keats, ‘mostly at Hampstead, and about nothing’
Claire Clairmont’s Camden connections
The representation of Labour in local government: St Pancras, 1894-1922
‘The Alhambra of Camden Town’: the rise and fall of Sickert’s dear old Bedford
Recollections of Euston and St Pancras [stations]

1995

Boys’ Home Industrial School: from Euston Road to Chalk Farm
The Royal Mail and Railway Carriage Works, [Gough Street]
A Belsize map of 1762
Cultural finds in Finchley Road
A tale of [chemists] Hofmann and Brooke
The industrious Edward Walford: compiler, of Church Row
University College, London, and the Gower Street Bar

1994

The Round House, Chalk Farm, as a theatre, until 1983
The Eton College Estate: property development at Chalcots
A month in Hampstead: the journal of a visit [in] 1833
The man who made King’s Cross: Stephen Geary
The King Alfred Society and its Hampstead school: 1897-1901
A publisher’s daughter in Hampstead: diary of Mary Nichols
The Royal Veterinary College: 200 years of veterinary care

1992

Metamorphosis of Highgate Cemetery: ‘a place of despair has become a place of hope’
The Museum Tavern in Bloomsbury
Pitt’s house in Hampstead: the history of Wildwoods
Charles Fitzroy at the wars: military career of the first Baron Southampton
Family bakeries in Camden: recollections from Soho
Air raid precautions in St Pancras 1935-1945
Where was Capper’s Farm?: a query from rural Bloomsbury
Elizabeth Malleson and the Working Women’s College

1989

Little Italy in Victorian London: Holborn’s Italian community
Shepherd’s Well: Hampstead’s early fresh-water source
Population in the parish: a demographic approach to the Hampstead parish registers
London’s first northern by-pass: urban development and the New Road from Paddington to Islington
Seals in the Vale of Health Pond?: a 60-year-old mystery
Dickens in Camden: local associations of the great novelist
The Langfier Court photographers [at] 343 Finchley Road
An eminent Bloomsbury pharmacist: ‘the excellent Mr Morson’
Hampstead’s first historian: Thomas and John James Park

1988

The Camden Theatre: north London’s challenge to the West End
Romney’s house in Hampstead [on] Hollybush Hill: its fate
Banking in Bloomsbury: savings bank at 30 Montague Street
The Highgate halfpennies of 1667 to 1760
Incident at Highgate Infirmary: alleged management corruption
Bloomsbury Market: a unit in the Earl of Southampton’s pioneer town planning
John Linnell [Camden painter] and his changing metropolis

1986

3 Holly Mount: the history of a house
Thomas Norton Longman [publisher]: his house and garden
An affair of honour: the fatal duel at Camden Town, 1843
4 Parton Street: the story of a left-wing bookshop
Spencer Gore, painter: notable leader the Camden Town Group
St Pancras Coroner’s Court: problems in its design & building
Balloons over Camden: illustrations  

1985

Bloomsbury gates and bars: the maintenance of
   tranquillity on the Bedford Estates
Introducing children to primary source material
Dido Elizabeth Belle, a black girl at Kenwood: a protégée of the first Lord Mansfield
W Flint, ironmongers of Kentish Town: an interview with the last of the 129-year-old firm
The rise and fall of the St Giles Rookery
Napoleon’s first invasion threat: the proposed northern line of defence round the capital
Hampstead and the general election of 1885: unusual candidates at Hampstead’s first general election

1984

Pepys and Camden
Humphry Repton at Kenwood
The romance of the Fleet River
Who chose Chalcots?: family and social structure in 1851 Hampstead Heath survey, 1680
Shopping in Camden: Camden & Kentish Towns; Hampstead  

1984

From Camden Town to Crest Hill: H G Wells
Hampstead Catholics of the Georgian age: St Mary’s Holly Place
The Hampstead and Highgate Citadel: defence plans against Napoleon
A family undertaking: memoirs of funeral director (B Leverton)
Fight for Fortune Green: W Hampstead battles for open space
The Vale of Health revisited: census studies
Colonel Fitzroy’s rustic villa: Highgate’s Fitzroy Farm
Camden schooldays: Tremarth; and The Hall School

1982

A romantic house in Hampstead: Admiral’s House
Five per cent philanthropy: model homes for the workers
The end of the Cock and Hoop: a West Hampstead tavern
Shakespeare &Garibaldi on Primrose Hill: day of demonstrations
The man who saved the Heath: John Gurney Hoare
How Cobden came to Camden Town: the story of a statue
Camden at war: [Hampstead during WWII] 

1981

A Hampstead Victorian: R B Dockray, designer of Round House
Robson of the Olympic: a great comedian in Camden Town
Seventy years of rain in Hampstead: meteorological survey
Improving the minds of Highgate: the Lit & Sci’s centenary
Time of terror: a Camden view of the Gordon Riots
A nest of gentle artists: the Mall Studios in Belsize Park
The tiger’s lair in Gray’s Inn Road: Katherine Mansfield and John Middleton Murry
Working in Camden: Printer’s pie at Mount Pleasant; 
A Kentish Town grocer’s in the Great War

1980
St Pancras block names

The Gilbert Scotts and Hampstead: an association of architects
Superior villas to Sinister Street: vice & temptation in late Victorian Camden Town
The Downshire Hill Triangle: census studies
The militant architect of Fitzroy Square: [Robert] Edis
West Hampstead’s railway invasion: birth of a commuter suburb
The Russells of Bloomsbury: [and] some Holborn street names
Hampstead characters: childhood recollections
The St Pancras map mystery: a cartographical investigation
The street of good intentions: the heyday of Endell Street
My street: Queen Square, Bloomsbury
Owners and occupiers of Lauderdale House, Highgate

1979

Old Chalk Farm Tavern, a centre of life (and death)
The Spanish quarter of Somers Town, 1820-1830
The spiritual strength of Kentish Town: Methodist chapels
The Holfords of Hampstead: a leading local family
Holborn’s All-Provider: a hundred years of Gamages
The appeal of Burgh House: a Hampstead museum?
Above the fields of Kentish Town: drawings
Doctors of Fitzrovia: eccentric Dr Kitchiner; obstetric Dr Davis
The beggars of West Hampstead
Henry Holiday, eminent Hampstead Victorian
Frank Ward, the laughing policeman
Camden manuscripts in the British Library - II

1978

[George] Romney’s two Hampstead houses
The younger [W M] Teulon: profile of a Camden architect
Jubilee fever: Hampstead’s celebrations in 1897
From Gower Street to Frognal: a short history of UCS
Adventures in Old St Pancras: ... a Georgian childhood
Camden’s industrial archaeology: Focus on factories; [and] King’s Cross Goods Yard
The lady of the Hampstead halfpenny
Emma Hamilton in Bloomsbury
Camden at war: Civil War fortifications; the Grand Duke at Kenwood in WWI; memories of a Hampstead childhood; bomb stories of WWII
Camden manuscripts in the British Library

1977

A maverick of Victorian art: Arthur Boyd Houghton
Where was the house that Bruges built?: Kentish Town mystery The golden age of Lauderdale House
The battle for the Heath & Thompson’s Hampstead history
Georgian Camden
   The building of Bloomsbury
   A family of architects: the Inwoods of St Pancras
   Prinny’s last fling: Eliza Chester and Keats House
   Benjamin Franklin in Holborn: a bicentennial retrospect
   The humanity of the Hampstead Workhouse, 1729-79
   An amazing flow of spirits: pleasure gardens of St Pancras

1976

Plentyfull sprynges at Hampstede Hethe: the story of the Hampstead Water Company
Hogarth and The March to Finchley
The struggle for Pond Square: ... in Victorian Highgate
The Hoares of Hampstead: a family story
Dickens in Camden: the novelist of London
Musick for beaux and belles: the music of Hampstead
Wells and Belsize House, 1701-30
Postcard crazy
With Wellington in Belsize Park: [sculptor] Alfred Stevens
Victorian Camden:
 The Black Hole of St Pancras: the workhouse & its inmates
 How different from us! Miss Buss and the North London Collegiate
 ‘Till death through ripe old age’: Hampstead’s first MOH
 The Rifle Volunteers of Camden
The blue plaques of Camden

1975

The St Pancras affair: a battle for a Select Vestry
A service bright and brief: Boy’s Home, Regent’s Park Road
The Bloomsbury of Mrs Humphry Ward, founder of the Mary Ward Settlement
Renaissance on the Northern Heights: Highgate and its schools
[Camden’s Buckinghamshire connections]
A Pre-Raphaelite in Hampstead: views of Ford Madox Brown
Edwardian Camden:
 Transport and the social scene
 Hampstead’s fairy limner: Kate Greenaway, 1846-1901
 All Hallows, Gospel Oak: ... an Edwardian parish church
 Musical Hampstead, [1895-1914]
 Revolution in Fitzroy Square: Roger Fry’s Omega Workshop
 Shoulder to shoulder: the suffragettes’ local connections
Occupants of Burgh House, Hampstead

1974

This first edition is no longer in print but is available as a pdf.
Please download it to your computer within 24hrs of receiving your emailed link.

Small boy on a Kentish Town tram: a Betjeman poem
Remains to be seen: ... industrial archaeology in Camden
The remarkable Baroness Burdett-Coutts
An ivory tower in Gordon Square: Dr Williams’ Library
Constable’s country; Constable’s Hampstead then & now
When the farming had to stop: ... C19 Highgate
St Pancras in the time of the witches: the Woodehouse Journal
It all began with J C Bach: ... piano making in Camden
Old maps of Hampstead

1973

By Olive Besagni. Fascinating oral histories, reaching back to 1850, of more than 40 Italian families migrating to 'Little Italy' in Holborn during the 19th and 20th centuries. 

By Gillian Tindall. The history of magistrates courts in Clerkenwell and Hampstead, from the 18th century to 1999.

The second book by Olive Besagni, capturing the oral histories of the 20th century inhabitants of Holborn's 'Little Italy'.

Phyllis Allen Floud, née Ford was born in Hampstead in 1886 into a family, whose income did not match their self-perception of their position in society. Looking back over her childhood from the distance of middle age, she recounts, in unusual detail and with a critical eye, the customs and lifestyle of the upper middle classes in her youth.

By Steven Denford. An evidence-based rebuttal of the allegations about Agar Town in Household Words. One of our shorter books on topics too long for an article in the Review. 

Church Row burial grounds 2nd edition 2008 describes all the tombs and monuments in church and churchyard and illustrates many of them. 20 are listed by Historic England. 

A photographic journey through Kentish, Camden and Somers Towns in the 1960s and 1970s. When it was decided in 1963 that several London boroughs should be merged into a larger one, to be called 'Camden', after Camden Town at its centre, much of the area was still scheduled for demolition under a post-war plan. Yet already its old houses were increasing in value and Camden Lock market was on the point of invention. Richard Lansdown’s photographs in this book, some of them taken over fifty years ago, document an era of contest and change, yet many buildings and street views that are apparent in these pictures are still, bar a few differences, recognisable today.

By Stephen W Job. Details of the heroic struggles between Medical Officers of Health and the St Pancras Vestry over housing reform in a scandalously overcrowded small estate off the Grays Inn Road. With many original photographs and maps. 

4th edition. Constable spent many summers renting a cottage in Hampstead in order to sketch the cloud formations over the Heath, and finally bought a house in Well Walk to live in.

By Christopher Wade. The title reproduces a quotation from the original donor in 1698 of six acres of the Heath which contained springs of mineral water that gave rise to Hampstead Spa.

By Marian Kamlish. This much sought-after artist of the late 18th century lived for a prosperous 10 years off what is now Camden High Street.

 This illustrated book provides biographies of over 200 people, of local and international interest who are buried at Hampstead Cemetery, with detailed maps to locate a particular grave. There are artists, architects, writers and inventors as well as the more unusual – an inscription in shorthand, and a ventriloquist buried with his dummy. Also included is a history of the site and an explanation of the symbolism of the motifs on the headstones.

This book describes the history of a neighbourhood lying between St John’s Wood and the southern edge of Kilburn, including the many changes that occurred post-WWII. It looks at the fascinating people who lived there, among them George Orwell and AA Milne, a duke kept in a padded room, the creator of the Mount Rushmore monument, and many famous actors and artists. Most of the original properties have been demolished but the book with its detailed maps of streets and houses, brings the area back to life.

Dramatic pictures of the devastation caused by bombing in both World Wars and some of the devices (eg water tanks) constructed to respond to the bombing. 

Follow the trail past all 18 described landmarks, or pick and choose shorter routes with the aid of the detailed sketch map. 5th Edition 2008. 

The first campaign to save Hampstead Heath was at the centre of the great 19th century conservation movement that saw the creation of the National Trust, the Commons Preservation Society (now the Open Spaces Society) and the Hampstead Heath Protection Society (now the Heath and Hampstead Society).  Extensive research has uncovered fresh information about this story of Britain’s conservation movement and the remarkable people who played a part in the battle to save London’s commons.  This book reveals the political and social upheavals, the rise of town planning and the cultural developments that led to a new understanding of the value of open space.

By Clare Melhuish. A foray into recent history with extensive input from Patrick Hodgkinson, architect of the Brunswick centre. 

A history of the St Pancras and Camden Festivals 1954-1987. By Helen Lawrence. Fascinating account of interest to all opera lovers - the festival hosted the debut of legendary singers such as Kiri te Kanawa and Joan Sutherland. 

By Keith A Scholey. From the first train into the Chalk Farm terminus of the London and Birmingham Railway up to the 20th Century. 

This paper, too long for an article in the Review, describes the meteoric rise and fall, 1820-1830, of the Scottish Presbyterian minister who founded a whole new church - whose subsequent history is described up to the present day. 

By Rosalind Bayley. The history of a mansion flat estate in Lissenden Gardens and the forces that shaped it. Residents of Lissenden Gardens, the birthplace of poet John Betjeman, took an unusual path in the 1970s, resisting gentrification through an inspiring campaign to become a council estate. Asking what made this estate different, the author discovered a founder who didn’t share the sexual and snobbish preoccupations of late Victorian and Edwardian developers, Anthony Green RA who painted life on the estate for most of his career and an Olympic record-holding diver among three generations of family ownership. On the way, how the first electricity was generated in Hampstead, the economic forces that precipitated the crisis of the 1970s and a walk-on part in the early 20th century battle against gated communities. The book is available from the Owl Bookshop or by post from the author (consult the Lissenden Gardens community website).

By David Hayes. A portrait based on an 1865 account of a young missionary encountering the area for the first time. With illuminating footnotes based on other contemporary documents. Winner of the LAMAS award 2005.

By C Allen Newbery. Winner of the LAMAS prize 2007 it shows reports of the all the civil defence services 1938-1945.