Cumberland Market, by Robert Bevan
Cumberland Basin attracted many factories over the years. A vinegar works, piano factories, gramophone record makers —-. The list goes on and on. Many servants who worked in the large houses in Regent’s Park, lived in the small, terraced houses round the basin. These were among the houses which were to become so overcrowded when the City of London was rebuilt in the 1860-80 period and when the demolition for Euston, King’s Cross, and St Pancras railway stations made so many people homeless.
Looking at the area today, it is difficult to imagine the contrast with the old, industrial past. When the branch canal was filled in with bombing debris during the Second World War, the canal trade which had been slowing down for years, finally stopped. The Basin became allotments and the whole area was transformed into a vast housing estate. Now traffic rushes past in Hampstead Road on one side and Albany Street on the other. Between the two is a peaceful mass of flats, virtually free of traffic. It is a strange, isolated landscape, like a calm oasis between two traffic corridors, with its allotments cultivated as neatly as any garden.
Walk from Portland Place Station along Albany Street, curve behind Park Village and Camden Town High Street to Inverness Market and Camden Lock and even today, you have two worlds all the way along, one on your left and one on your right. In Albany, there are blocks of working class flats and the Barracks on the right. The flats replaced dilapidated three-storey houses built round Cumberland Market – the workaday world of wharves, vinegar distillers, piano manufacturers, and servants. Today the street is wide, but its colours are drab.
Slip through one of the narrow openings on the left, go up the stairs and you find yourself in the stucco splendour of Nash’s Regent’s Park Terraces. It is like emerging from the backstage gloom of a theatre, stumbling past the rows of props and stays supporting the scenery, into a flood-lit stage of double-height plaster columns and Corinthian capitals, with a singer in centre stage hitting top C. The contrast is overwhelming. Today one can still experience the difference between the Regent’s Park palaces, built in the 1820s to be approached by horse and carriage from Westminster, along the newly built Regent’s Street, sweeping through Portland Place, round Park Crescent and so into the Park; and the working class district next door, built to house the servants.
The same contrast continues. Walk from Hampstead Road along Mornington Street and you are suddenly in the ornate stucco of Park Village, built by Nash and Pennethorne. The fact that the Village was later sliced in half by the railway makes the change even more dramatic. Half way along Camden High Street, is the narrow tunnel which used to be the side entrance to the Bedford Music Hall. Go through and you reach Arlington Street and Albert Street, larger, brighter and more expensive.
In Inverness Street Market you walk from the stalls and typical three-storey Camden Town houses, now shops and cafes, into the large stucco houses of Gloucester Crescent beloved by media people. From there on, the railway and Camden Lock divide Primrose Hill from Chalk Farm as a cordon sanitaire, as they have done for over a hundred and fifty years. In 1995 a new road was tunnelled under the North London railway from Ferdinand Street, but it never penetrated through to Primrose Hill. The contrast remains. Chalk Farm is still literally on the wrong side of the tracks.
Source: LocalLocal History