Feature: History - Camden Society
Published: 27 January, 2011
by DAN CARRIER
After three boroughs combined in the 1960s, a history society sealed the deal
THE men who coined the phrase “Workers of the world unite” in 1848 did so from their respective homes in Maitland Park and Primrose Hill. While these words have reverberated around the globe, the smoky railways that snaked past the homes of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels have played as big a part in the shaping of our borough’s history as the political philosophy that sprung from the drawing rooms of the Victorian agitators.
The time-trodden streets of Camden have been shaped by so many different pressures, says Camden History Society chairman John Richardson, and it is for this reason that the society has such a rich area to mine.
The society celebrated its 40th birthday last week, with an event at the Town Hall that saw former Conservative group leader Piers Wauchope present a lecture on the political history of the borough.
Mr Richardson – who was a councillor when the Camden History Society was formed in 1970 – revealed that it was set up partly to celebrate the newly created borough of Camden in 1965, and that there was a feeling within the corridors of the Town Hall that a history society would help bring the three former boroughs of Hampstead, St Pancras and Holborn closer together.
“We felt it would help people stop thinking of themselves as separate entities,” he said.
Mr Richardson spoke to the borough librarian, a Mr WR Maidment, and the idea began to take shape.
“We decided to set up a steering committee and so we spoke to various organisations, such as the Holborn Society, the Highgate Literary and Scientific Institute and the Heath and Hampstead Society,” he recalls.
“Then the main thing to be done was to do some research on our history. There had been surprisingly little done.”
The more salubrious parts of the borough had featured in books and paintings – Hampstead was covered to a degree, but the real story of the borough’s parishes had not been adequately chronicled – something the society set about putting right.
“Hampstead, being a bit more glamorous, had books written about it,” Mr Richardson says. “But it was mainly about the spas and famous people who lived up there. The lives of ordinary people had not been researched.”
Publishing books was always one of the early thrusts of the society, and still is: they now have more than 50 publications on the shelves. Perhaps the highlight for John Richardson is the series of titles that take the reader down each street of the borough, pointing out its growth, architectural quirks, and the people who lived there.
And Mr Richardson says the society has, in many ways, had it easy over the years as Camden is simply one of the most interesting beats in London.
“It is a fascinating area,” he says. “Politically important, it also has so many other aspects and angles to consider.”
These range from the more anthropological development of the borough – the fact that it once sat outside London and was agricultural as recently as the 1830s, to becoming a transport hub with the growth of three of the major London stations and the coming of the canals. This led to major demographic changes which included the growth of Victorian slum conditions – the type of issues social historians use to tell us about the lot of the urban poor, a relatively new phenomenon in the scope of modern history, and through this consider how previous generations of Londoners used to live.
“Our borough has the classic story of the migration from fields to urban slums,” Mr Richardson says.
It means the stories of the railway cottages and their inhabitants are as important as the cultural centres and the scientific hubs of Bloomsbury and Fitzrovia, which gave us such literary figures as Virginia Woolf, artists and designers such as Roger Fry and within the borough boundaries scientists like Alexander Fleming, who discovered penicillin. It is these people’s lives who have been carefully recorded for 40 years by the members of the Camden History Society.
• Camden History Society, 56 Argyle St, WC1H 8ER, 020 7837 9980, www.camdenhistorysociety.org, £10 a year