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Just rebuild it. Don't argue. Don't fantasise about some new-age Camden Lock to replace the one that went up in flames last weekend. Don't imagine architects can change their spots and design an urban stage as compelling as the Victorians did. They can't, any more than Britart can produce another Constable.
Back in the 1970s, I and others fought a fierce campaign to make Camden council save the old wharfs and stables at Camden Town from redevelopment. It was a close-run thing. The water board decided that it could make more money if it demolished the area and started from scratch. The first fruit was the bleak office block now standing next to the Round House by the architect Richard Seifert. The rest of the site was intended to go the same way.
Meanwhile, a few barges had begun trading on the lock quayside and Dingwalls was a successful if chaotic music venue. There was a bad fire in 1980 but it was mercifully not followed by mass demolition. Gradually, thousands came from across London to sample this new Latin quarter, much to the dismay of the residents.
The area generated revenue - and rents - and developers thought again. Perhaps conservation might make money, too. As at Covent Garden, old buildings and informal uses proved a match for crude redevelopment. In south London, the old Surrey Canal had no such luck. It was filled in by Labour councils under the cosh of health and safety.
At Camden Lock victory was won. Within a decade of its salvation the market area was reportedly trading at Oxford Street levels of turnover per square foot - and that was not counting the drugs. Not one building was new. German friends of mine, relocated back to Frankfurt, demanded a contract from their employers enabling them to fly back to run their stall at the Lock every weekend.
Last week's fire was described in the press - and by Amy Winehouse - as having "destroyed" Camden Lock. It did nothing of the sort. It affected only the buildings east of Chalk Farm Road next to the downstream lock, roughly a third of the area and the less historic third at that. Although some 300 traders are said to have been affected, only 30 businesses are ruined. The main part of the Lock and stables, drawing some 300,000 visitors at weekends, is untouched. What the traders want is quite simply to get back to business as fast as possible.
The one thing that could stand in the way is a demand that "modern architecture" be allowed to create a "new urbanism" at Camden. Local residents have long been eager to rid themselves of the market's casual squalor, crowds, noise and drug-dealing, and they have joined the cry for clearance. Hardpressed residents of other colourful neighbourhoods such as Soho and Covent Garden have often felt the same. There is always a tug between parish and city.
These neighbourhoods are today the most distinctive feature of London's topography, unappreciated by the planning fraternity because they are hard to define and impossible to recreate. They are safety valves for street life and alternative markets. They are zany, crazy, anarchic and vital. Most European cities have planned them into extinction. London's genius is to have retained them. Camden Lock is in a precious league with Covent Garden, Exmouth Market, Brick Lane, Borough Market, Hoxton and Portobello.
All have required battle after battle against architects and developers who despise the Victorian buildings that appear to hold the character of these places in their bones. Yet if it were not for the much-abused conservation movement, not one of these neighbourhoods would survive, not one.
Many have been lost in my lifetime, such as Chelsea's World's End, Cable Street, old Canary Wharf and most of Spitalfields. At this moment, the City of London, its lifestyle parasitic on conservation areas around its borders, is fighting to demolish one of its last surviving areas of character, Smithfield.
There is no argument over what would replace Camden Lock if the fire were used as an excuse for redevelopment. Go two miles up the canal to Maida Vale and look at Paddington Basin. This forest of glass boxes is what modern development does for canalside London.
Compare the mostly saved St Katharine Docks with the once nobler London Docks next door, except that the latter has vanished beneath the News International works.
I love much modern architecture but little of it has enhanced the character of central London. The days when the architect Terry Farrell could sensitively refashion the Comyn Ching triangle in Covent Garden seem long past. Architecture magazines are full of "icons" aimed at winning prizes, with isolated, free-standing monuments to the glory of their creators.
Some are good in themselves, such as the Gherkin or the London Eye, but they are erected without thought of context or skyline. Most are just glass stumps or weirdly shaped blobs shoved up wherever a site was empty, a profit beckoned and a mayor bamboozled.
London's remaining areas of intimacy and charm must be retained, not because they are in old buildings but for a bleaker reason. Modern architects do not know how to replace them. Their training no longer enables them to turn humane materials such as brick, stone and wood into places with the magnetism of those left us by the Georgians and Victorians.
Look at most new London buildings and you will see not a craftsman but an engineer and a computer at work. You will see harsh steel and glass. Look, if you must, at Paddington basin from the Westway. That is what architects do to London. Look along Euston Road or at Lord Foster's More London development next to City Hall on the South Bank. Each is a wilderness of ice-boxes, shards of glass falling sheer to the pavement, crushing all sense of street and defying human approach. This is the city of the living dead.
Along the canal from Camden is Battlebridge basin behind King's Cross, the largest development site in western Europe and, in part, a facsimile of the Lock area. Here behind Barlow's great St Pancras shed should be the place where architecture can redeem itself, fashioning an attractive open-air neighbourhood from London's industrial past. I wait in hope.
The truth is architecture has lost the art of creating street life, of adapting façades, pavements and spaces into a new intimacy. It dismisses such qualities as twee. It can do big but not small, atriums but not atmosphere. It can build a Damien Hirst with a trumpet on top but not paint a carnival. At Camden we must cling to the carnival.
Reader views (3)
in !978 i arrived at Camden Basin with my narrowboat Pictor loaded with bags of clay that i had transported from Stoke on Trent ,,,, i spent the next 3 months selling clay to many potters and also got to know other workshop owners , at night for security i had to tie the boat in the middle of the basin as the revelers used to climb on board ! i had a young son and dog to protect ! it was hard life but i loved it,. Kris
- kris Marriott, maldon essex, 17/11/2011 23:35
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i have such fond memories of Camden Basin i was tied up there with my narrowboat loaded with bags of clay that i loaded at Stoke on trent ,, i sold these bags to local potters at Camden ...for 3 months in 1978 ,, ,i used to have to pullout into the basin at night and tie off so the revelers from the nightclub did not climb on the boat ,! i recently some some photos from those happy days , it was a hard life with a backcabin as a home for me my young son and dog ! but we had much fun ,,,,its all so different now and i have only been back once !! kris
- kris Marriott, maldon essex, 17/11/2011 23:28
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This is a brilliant, brilliant article, reflecting my own feelings about both Camden and London at large.
This is a year on from the fire and I was looking on the net for the current state of play regarding the Market. The reason? I want to take my daughter there today, a generation on from when I first frequented the place as a student. Of course, I have been back much more recently, partly because nobody has messed about with it and been "clever" with the place. I hope that is what I will find today, too.
Tom Bower
- Tom Bower, Oxford, Oxfordshire, 20/02/2009 05:53
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