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Maiden Lane residents recall the cattle drovers |
When cows ran amok
THE residents of Camden New Town always knew “a dangerous lot” of cows were coming when the cattle drovers made a line across Market Road.
Children quit their games and ran home; doors and windows were hastily shut.
Even so, some cows would still get inside the houses in Maiden Lane – now known as York Way – wandering along corridors and into bedrooms, perhaps dimly aware of the brief reprieve they had won on the way to the slaughterhouses in Caledonian Road.
Getting them out was another matter. There are still people on the Maiden Lane estate who can tell you from first hand experience that cows cannot walk backwards.
The cow story is one example of how much life in Camden has changed over the years – and how much it will continue to change – from Unwrapping the Present, a series of films, live performances, art exhibitions and workshops at the 176 Gallery in Prince of Wales Road next weekend.
The events are a collaboration between Transition Belsize and No.1 Camden Park Road, an umbrella term for several different community groups. While Transition Belsize concentrate on the future, a collective called the Camden New Town History Project have led the looking back.
Maps from the early 1800s show little but fields where Camden Square stands; it was only when the Marquis of Camden, John Pratt, brokered a deal with the Great Northern Railway company that the area mushroomed.
Alongside a historical slide show projected onto the gallery walls, the project has also compiled a list of all the shops on certain Camden New Town streets through the ages.
“It’s a part of history that normally gets forgotten,” explains John Cowley, 69, a former history and politics teacher at City University and former editor of the Camden Tenant, who has lived in Stratford Villas since 1969.
Alongside sewing, book-binding, slow cooking and screen-printing workshops, four films from the project will be screened. The aforementioned Memories of the Caledonian Cattle Market is flanked by reminiscences about the Coronation and one man’s long journey through the army to sleeping rough in Lincoln’s Inn Fields.
SiMON WROE
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Your comments:
The Lenkiewicz exhibition is stunning from the remarkable St Eustace sculpture to the drawings featuring unicorns, tigers and Elvis! The skeletons and skulls were my particular favourite along with the octopus drowning the Titanic. The surroundings are fabulous; the Pite architecture lends itself so well to the mood. I admit I have a particular fondness for
the building having worked there for 26 years.
J. Trend-Hill
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