FORUM: Sold on a stroll down the towpath

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Published: 30 June, 2011
by MARK NEWELL 

No doubt, inspired by the consumption at Westfield shopping centres, Camden Market Holdings have conspired to kill the thing it loves.

The core reason for its attraction is an anathema to what it now, aspires to be. Both Camden Market and King’s Cross seem to be in a courtship to become fiscal twin souls. 

Camden’s dowry is Hawley Wharf and, as a small parcel of land, it’s a natural gateway into the market from the point of view of King’s Cross, with its canal path traversing the 67-acre redevelopment. 

Cultural despots like the Guardian and Central Saint Martins have relocated there and with it a retinue of media acolytes. 

Penthouse dwellers will be able to walk along the towpath and buy Moroccan leather satchels for laptops, complying with the vision of Roger Madelin (CEO of Argent developers) in an interview on BBC Radio 4, that King’s Cross will be “safe and gritty”. 

A new entry to define oxymoron.

This cross- pollination makes perfect business sense. However their tactic of floating this enterprise on the myth yielding grounds of King’s Cross and Camden Market is at best parasitic.

What Camden Market represents is a psychic relief from all those Westfields and Bluewaters. It has – or had – an archaic ballad-seller quality about it. You could drag up your wardrobe and sell it on as vintage chic. The rent was cheap and easy to cover. 

A little socialist labyrinth with plenty of time for chat and theories. No one was there to forge a merger. 

Just enough for a loose weekend at The Good Mixer. 

King’s Cross too, in its day, was a Lourdes for formative experiences. 

A playground to find out what and who you were. Not easily translated into profit and dividend margins.

People seeking these cadences are not fooled by the Trojan horse of the Stable Markets, clad in a faux heritage veneer. With old pine boards artfully arranged to disguise its shopping mall layout. So too with the watercolour splashings of the Hawley Wharf drawings, commissioned long before the Great Camden Fire, somewhat romanticising its actuality as a Westfield shopping centre atrium.

By attrition, these unit rents shall rise, where only conglomerates will be happy to reside, if only to invigorate their branding. 

The individual with little money and a great idea will not have the arena to flourish or fail in. The bohemian teenager in Paris on her maiden voyage to London, will head straight to Camden Market, as a matter of pilgrimage, only to find out she is too late. 

Her parents’ memories of the market where they met on their first frugal dates will be an alien vista from what she sees in front of her. 

She will know that this spectacle is lit from the terminal light of a dead star. And someone, sometime, allowed them to sell her stolen experience down the river or, as it were, the revenue torrent of Regent’s Canal.        

• Mark Newell is a community artist from NW5