A Guide to North London’s Most Neighbourhood-y Neighbourhood
Kentish Town: Camden’s Less Famous Neighbour Who Gets More Done
Kentish Town is the neighbourhood that sits between Camden to the south and Hampstead to the north and has benefited enormously from proximity to both without fully belonging to either. It is where Camden people move when they want a garden. It is where Hampstead people go when they want a pub that does not charge Hampstead prices for a pint. It is, in other words, a genuinely functional north London neighbourhood that has an actual high street, actual residents who use it, and an actual sense of community identity that has not been packaged and sold to a property developer yet. This is remarkable. Visit while it lasts.
The Forum: The Venue That Punches Above Its Postcode
The Forum on Highgate Road is a mid-size live music venue in a converted 1930s cinema that holds approximately two thousand five hundred people and has hosted artists at the exact moment of their transition from promising to essential: Nirvana played here, Radiohead played here, PJ Harvey played here, and the list of acts who performed at the Forum in the year before they became too big for it reads as a reliable index of British music from the 1990s onward. The Forum continues to book artists at precisely this moment. Following its programme is one of the better ways to identify which acts will be playing arenas in eighteen months and cannot be seen this intimately again.
The High Street: Genuinely Useful
Kentish Town Road runs through the neighbourhood as a working high street of the kind that inner London is steadily losing: independent food shops, a post office, a hardware store, a fishmonger, several charity shops of the good variety where people from the surrounding streets donate things worth having, and enough independent cafes and restaurants to serve a neighbourhood of people who have developed opinions about coffee through proximity to Camden and expectations about food through proximity to Hampstead. The result is a high street that is both useful and genuinely enjoyable without being curated in the way that Marylebone is curated. This distinction matters. Kentish Town is a place people live rather than a place people perform living.
The Pubs: North London at Its Best
Kentish Town has a density of good pubs that reflects its position as a neighbourhood where working and professional north Londoners have always lived without quite enough money or inclination to move to Hampstead. The Oxford on Kentish Town Road is a large Victorian pub that does a reliable pint and food of the kind that does not require a reservation. The Pineapple on Leverton Street is a smaller, more characterful neighbourhood local that operates as the kind of place where the bar staff know the regulars and the regulars are worth knowing. Both serve the neighbourhood they are in, which is the correct function of a London pub and is harder to find than it should be.
Green Spaces: The Railway Lands and Beyond
Kentish Town’s green spaces are of the functional rather than spectacular variety: Kentish Town City Farm on Cressfield Close is a free urban farm in the middle of north London that keeps pigs, goats, horses, chickens, and a variety of other animals on a site beside the Overground railway that has been operating as a community farm since 1972. It is the sort of institution that London produces occasionally — quietly extraordinary, entirely practical, free to enter, and beloved by the community around it in a way that does not require external validation. Go on a weekday. See a pig. Feel briefly that cities are capable of making the right decisions.
Parliament Hill on Hampstead Heath is accessible from Kentish Town’s northern end and offers one of the best views of central London from high ground in the city — a panorama that takes in the Shard, the City towers, and on a clear day extends to the North Downs. Hampstead Heath is free, open daily, and worth the fifteen-minute walk from the tube.
Getting There
Kentish Town station (Northern line) is the primary approach. Kentish Town West (London Overground) serves the western residential streets. The neighbourhood is also accessible on foot from Camden Town (fifteen minutes north) or from Tufnell Park (Northern line, five minutes). The walk from Camden Town up Kentish Town Road is the correct way to understand how north London changes character with each postcode.
Final Verdict
Kentish Town does not need to be on your itinerary unless you are interested in what London actually looks like when people are living in it rather than performing it. If that interests you — and it should — Kentish Town is one of the better examples available. Go to the Forum. Have a drink in the Pineapple. See the farm pig. Walk to Parliament Hill. This is north London at its most honest.
SOURCE: http://prat.UK
