So there isn’t really a theme to this post, it’s just “other stuff we did in London when we saw Hamilton”. Also I’m very aware that I was intending this blog to be proving the point that there are places to visit from Oxford that are not London, and yet here I am writing about London again (with another post to come). Rest assured next week’s post will not be about London. After all, I’ve said the word “London” too many times just in this paragraph. London.
Date of trip: Tuesday 12th June 2018
Journey time: approx 1h10 (by train to Marylebone)
Fare: £20.55 (Off-Peak, with 16–25 Railcard, including Zones 1–6 Travelcard)
So yes, here is another description of north London, starting with Primrose Hill. If you’re a regular reader, you might be think I wrote about Primose Hill last week, and you’d be right, I wrote about the park called “Primrose Hill”. But, confusingly, the residential area near the park is also called “Primrose Hill”. This is about the second one.
Not that there’s a huge amount to say: it’s pretty, and pretty expensive. Honestly, it took us a while to find somewhere in-budget for food, but the place we did find was a cool little American-style café called Sam’s, with writing on the windows, and a jukebox and booths on the inside. Also, my travelling companion swears she saw a famous actor in there, whom I will not name so this blog doesn’t become the online version of Now magazine. (But see next week for this summer’s hottest diet tips and how to copy celebs’ outfits on a budget!)
Also amazing, and reasonably-priced, is the Primrose Hill Bookshop, which looks like an attempt to break the Guinness World Record for “highest density of books in a room”, and is therefore heaven. I increased my count of books on the London Underground by one.
It’s not a long walk from Primrose Hill to Camden. Camden, is of course, famous for its markets, and I’m now very, very aware that I’m writing about a topic on which several of my regular readers are significantly more knowledgable than me, so this could go badly. Because, as it will not surprise you to learn, Camden is not really my part of London.
This especially goes for what I think (someone’s going to correct me, aren’t they) is the northernmost of its markets, the Stables Market. It’s a strange mixture of things that are sold here: genuine antiques, antique-looking new things, breakfast cereal¹, t-shirts. And a shop called “Cyberdog”, with large robots outside.² I don’t profess to understand.
The next one is Camden Lock Market, which is still trendy, but less alternative and more hipster, and I felt less like I’d taken a wrong turning somewhere. Last time I was here I got a liquid nitrogen ice cream, and would have done the same this time, which would have been a good thing to review. Unfortunately, we couldn’t find it, and I assumed it had closed. It hadn’t. This was, therefore, an entirely inconsequential paragraph.
What we did see was the usual range of hipster food outlets, hipster clothing stores, hipster gift shops, and so on. (Incidentally, I’m sorry if you like it there and are insulted by the common negative connotations of the word “hipster”. I make no comment on the connotations being implied by the author here.) There was also a little not-particularly-hipster second-hand bookshop. At one point someone just wandered in with a large cigar, ignoring the no-smoking signs, the law, and the fact that putting fire near large quantities of paper that you don’t intend as kindling is a terrible idea.
Camden Lock Market is named after the Hampstead Road Locks on the Grand Union Canal, the watercourse mentioned last week. These are rather interesting in themselves: they were the site of an experimental (and ineffective) hydraulic boat lift, which was eventually replaced by a pair of locks, where, to save water, the emptying of one pound was used, in part, to fill the other. The pair of locks is still there, unlike at other sites on the canal, but they now operate separately. But what I want to tell you about is the kingfisher.
Standing on the edge of the canal, cool as you please, was a kingfisher, staring at the water. This was next to Camden’s branch of Wetherspoon’s, and indeed people were sitting at the adjacent table—they were not particularly rowdy, but not particularly quiet either—who did not seem to be bothering the kingfisher remotely. I managed to approach very close to it and take pictures, which was a cool experience.
There’s a story to this. The member of Spoons staff who came over to clear tables as I was taking the picture seemed genuinely delighted to see this bird, and got quite emotional about it. This response makes sense: apparently, according to the staff member, last year a drunken idiot decided to set the bird on fire. (Yeah.) It was assumed that the kingfisher hadn’t survived this attack, but it seems that here was the same bird, who had not only survived but returned this year. You could just about see its family over in a far part of the canal. Eventually, after posing for an amazingly long amount of time, the bird flew off and landed on the other side of the canal, under the footbridge.³
I should have kept that story for last, really, because everything else is going to be fairly underwhelming. But I have two more things to describe before I move on. Firstly, next to the canal but across the road, is “Breakfast Television Centre” as was, which was the home of Britain’s second breakfast television programme, TV-am. After that lost its ITV franchise, it was sold to MTV, who still own it. It’s been extensively redeveloped, but there’s still a nod to its early-morning past, in the form of eggcups along the roof facing the canal.
The other thing is “The Camden Market”. This sells t-shirts. It is not hugely interesting, but does say “The Camden Market”, and is the closest market to the Tube station, so the first time I visited I thought that was it and didn’t get why everyone raved about Camden. Indeed, I might have given the impression that I still don’t get it. I do. But, if you know me, imagine me somewhere blacklit, wearing trendy hand-drawn sneakers, ripped jeans, and a softly-glowing t-shirt, and tell me that’s not an incongruous image.
Let’s get back to safer ground—buses. We needed to get from Camden Town tube to Victoria, for the theatre. Ordinarily this would be Northern line to Warren Street, then the Victoria, but my travelling companion does not like the Underground. So we got a bus.
I can’t recommend this enough, even if you don’t get to travel on one of the fancy new London ones. Because if you want to see a lot of sights of London in a short space of time, you can’t really do much better than the bus, and a normal red London one is much cheaper than a sightseeing bus. (Although actually Megabus now run sightseeing tours for £1 plus booking fee.) Anyway, the 24 is quite fun. It takes you through the West End, and then through Trafalgar Square, down Whitehall, and past the Houses of Parliament.⁴
It’s hard to summarise this post. Let’s go with: what have we learnt? Primrose Hill is expensive, but you can find some reasonable things if you look carefully. Camden is trendy, and I should not go there. People are sometimes dicks to waterfowl. And sometimes, though it pains me to admit it, sometimes the bus is better than the Tube.
¹ I’ve actually been to the Cereal Killer Café, on a different trip. It’s rather like going to G&D’s and getting a sundae with all the trimmings, except you’re getting a bowl of breakfast cereal instead. So, I guess, not that like going to G&D’s at all. You get an old VHS case as your table number. It’s all a bit odd.
² I’ve also actually been to Cyberdog, on the same day I went to Cereal Killer. It’s underground, in one place doubly-underground (because they have to put the sex toys somewhere, apparently?), and blacklit. I was mildly disorientated by the experience.
³ I can’t find this anywhere on the internet, so I might genuinely be the first person to publish this, which is mildly exciting. Unless whoever has published it already shares the same attitude to covering birds that this blog does, and so, like my post, it doesn’t come up on a Google search for “Camden heron”.
⁴ But only if your bus is on diversion, which normally they won’t be. We were probably the only people on board to appreciate the fact that the bus was taking a more circuitous route. By “we were” I mean “I was”.
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