I’ve written lots about Notting Hill Carnival over the years, and always wear my heart on my sleeve about how much I love it, often to people who simply cannot comprehend why I’m so inexhaustibly excited.

That’s usually in the run-up to the event though, not afterwards, as the peak late summer madness of an August Bank Holiday Monday quickly subsides, with a back-to-school bump down towards a swift a refocus on reality.

By the Tuesday (usually wet and miserable) morning, the streets have miraculously been scrubbed back normal, so the whole thing feels like it was some overwhelming sequinned, feathered and rum-soaked fever dream – at least until the same time next year.

The reality is that Carnival is one of the UK’s (and certainly is London’s) biggest cultural events, so it’s no surprise that it’s also a culture war favourite, too.

Therefore, regular as clockwork, the algorithm outrage junkies and know-nothing commentators kickstart the same, shrill, annual ‘debate’ about crime stats, Policing costs, overcrowding and the rest.

No matter the temptation to wade in with a few choice counterpoints, I’m usually too busy basking in the afterglow of a long weekend spent dancing outdoors, and remembering hundreds of joyful encounters with ebullient strangers, to waste energy duking it out online with assorted idiots, bots and racists.

It’s my policy not to engage, and to let them stew in their prejudices, knowing that me and two million(!) others had a very nice time, but thanks for your concern, guys. This year, I’ve resisted the comments trap again, however I thought I’d write something here, removed from the combative scroll madness.

And I have to say that, despite the rolling out of all the usual tropes; the lazy Glastonbury comparisons; the ridiculous calls for it to be moved to Hyde Park or even cancelled and the pearl-clutching on themes of sex, piss and violence; I do sense the online discourse is finally shifting, just a little.

This is both for good, and for bad.

On the bad side, the overt racism of some of the angry keyboard-bashers has gone fully mainstream, where the spewing of disgusting prejudice on billionaire-owned media platforms seems to now be a competitive sport. As a microcosm of how tech has twisted certain individuals, it is utterly shameful.

It’s also depressing to see how Carnival is such an easy win for a hot take du jour, that everyone from politicians to comedians can’t help but join the fray, where many really should know better than to poke the bear just to oil their engagement metrics.

But, there is also more love, respect and heartfelt celebration for London’s biggest bash than ever, too. Just check out Misan Harriman’s poetic tear-jerker on his experience of taking photos there.

He says “I’ve never felt so safe in a mass of human beings as I do in Carnival.” That may sound perversely counter-intuitive to those raised on a diet of horror-stories, but I honestly agree with him. Yes, there can be nasty flare-ups, but to me, that swell of humanity overwhelmingly feels like a great big London hug.

For many years, I think Carnival enthusiasts were resigned to having their favourite weekend fall under a shadow of inevitable stabbing stats and the bile of opportunist opponents like failed Mayoral candidate Susan Hall - so we basically stayed quietly grateful that it had even happened again at all.

Then, as with nightclubs, after the shutdown of Covid, there’s been a gradual societal shift with the realisation of just what we stand to lose if we let our remaining opportunities to cut loose simply wither and die.

So now, whatever the very real concerns are over crowd crushes, violence and assorted anti-social behaviours, there’s also a confidence in simply saying out loud how good it is – regardless.

Most of the sane commentators will talk of the history of struggle that birthed this Carnival (and others all over the world), they will focus on the cultural importance of having traditions like Mas and Jab Jab on the streets of London, and the right for our Windrush citizens and their descendants to occupy space in streets that have long since priced them out.

What I see less of, is a description of quite why it feels so damn special, and worthy of more funding, support and cultural respect. Why the multi-sensory noise, madness and spectacle of a visit has such power to move our collective souls.

It’s hard to put a finger on one thing, but I’d say it’s most likely the tension release that comes from subverting the norms of daily life. That’s why its setting on the road (not the bloody park) is so vital. That’s why the vanishingly rare unticketed open-access ethos is essential. And that’s why it royally winds up those who stand to lose if the shaky structures of modern oppressive capitalism crack – if only for one weekend a year – to reveal the shared multicultural joy and liberation that is all too possible.

Their discomfort at the idea of seeing women of all shapes and sizes squeezed into - and occasionally falling out of - wild costumes, while dancing provocatively, misses the fact that the outrageous shock of all this IS THE WHOLE POINT.

Women absolutely own Carnival. Men may whine and flirt and leer and posture, but the delicious subversion here is that the ladies, in celebrating their bodies and their autonomy so unashamedly in the sunshine in the middle of Ladbroke-bloody-Grove, are owning the place.

Moaning that shops have to be boarded up, that there’s rubbish piled high, that there’s a touch of lawlessness after dark - the edgy chaos of it all IS THE WHOLE POINT. Carnival was not invited to be here or to grow like this, it emerged through protest, and remains massively political behind the hedonism, so it damn well can make a noise and a mess and put comfortable homeowners noses out of joint, because that is exactly what it is supposed to be doing.

I’m not of Caribbean origin, but I am of London origin, and have totted up well over six solid weeks-worth of my life pounding West London streets through the beer cans and the basslines. I feel an immense proud ownership of what we all do every August Bank Holiday, simply by turning up en masse, whoever we are and wherever we are from.

It is simple, radical and emotional. Black traditions cut in the capital’s unique cloth. Londoners should all feel that pride at what goes on here, so its sad that the naysayers are so vociferous in their blinkered objections as to why this is so.

What they miss in their negativity, and by reducing the whole thing to law and order headlines or morality offences, is that Carnival leave millions of us with hearts filled right up with beauty, tolerance and an energy that lasts for the rest of the year.

If you can’t see that that is what’s worth preserving and promoting at all costs, instead of simply policing and protesting, then you really are missing the point - and missing out on all the benefits, (so ultimately more fool you).

Long live Notting Hill Carnival, no matter what anyone says.

📊 This week’s One-Click Poll

How vital is it for a city to have a ritual gathering where things get a little crazy, like at a carnival?

Very! We all need a chance to let our hair down occasionally, to help to deal with everything else

Kinda! I’m glad it happens, but I’m not particularly bothered about participating

Not really! The mess, cost and trouble isn’t worth it

As ever, do leave your comments after voting, or even better, drop some thoughts in the Camdenist Community, under this post where it appears there.

📊 Last week’s results

Last week, when posing a few big questions about the unexpected repercussions of drugs legalisation, UBI and humans creating alien intelligence, I asked: Which do you think will happen first?

So few jobs we’ll all need to be paid a universal basic income
🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 12%

A complete rethink of recreational drugs prohibition
🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 19%

AI challenging human exceptionalism and changing pretty much everything
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 69%

And some of your comments…

🗣️ “The power and features of AI will change behaviours as people discover them; nothing else is needed. Both the other options will require government intervention and thus a democratic discussion and decision-making — both of which rightly require time and process”

🗣️ “The key factor here is that if certain drugs were legalised and controlled, the supply could be taxed. This would then have a dual benefit of adding funds to the Exchequer and reducing the millions/billions that otherwise goes into the black hole of the illegal supply of drugs. Any legalisation would need to be aligned to a campaign of drug education and rehabilitation. Drug related deaths would decline because one of the main factors that causes drug deaths isn’t the core drug itself, but whatever it’s cut with. Therefore, as the government will control the supply, they’ll also be able to control how the drugs are produced and what goes into them.”

🗣️ “UBI is good and exceptionalism re-thinks structural in equality.”

🗣️ “There’s every possibility that large numbers of humans start to worship AI like a deity. If people are able to truly believe in fantastical centuries-old scripture seemingly so out of place today’s world, they are going to be really sucked in by an intelligence far beyond our own - heaven help us!!”

🗣️ “Thank God I am no longer a teenager!”

🗣️ “BIEN are interesting to look at regarding a future with UBI. I feel this IS the future but we’re going to suffer the ravages of AI before the power holders/duty bearers put something in place to support us, the collateral damage. I look forward to volunteering, creative practice and life-long learning on tap for all! ”

The Community is now open to all subscribers

If you’ve not signed up yet, it’s 100% free, and you get the final chance to enter into a draw for 2 x free passes to the HowTheLightGetsIn Festival (see below) this week if you post a hello in the #meetyourneighbours channel before midnight on Mon 7th Sept.

Join the Camdenist Community

FESTIVALS

Incoming gatherings that could bring almost as much joy as Carnival

🥳 We’re spoilt for street parties in Camden, but that shouldn’t mask the fact that they are a major effort to put on. After a semi-fallow year in 2025, the York Rise Street Party roars back in full fettle this Sat 5th Sept, with a full day-into-night of stalls, activities, community vibes and three stages of entertainment. Look out for musical highlights including dreamy local live electronica from Kinobe, globetrotting DJ Mr. C on the Dig It stage, and a group singsong with Massaoke outside the Dartmouth Arms as darkness falls.

🎼 A series of live performances, pop ups and talks centred around music and culture take over St Giles’ famous music street on Sat 5th Sept as Denmark Street Sessions returns for a second year. You’ll find live performances and vinyl DJ sets from diverse artists including alt-rock, blues, punk, boogie-woogie piano featuring The Dash reunion, Pink Juice, Henri Herbert, blume, Eaves Wilder and more, plus talks and interactive events in the music shops, bars, clubs and record store from lunchtime into the evening.

🚣🏼 Celebrating its 40th anniversary on Sun 6th Sept, the Angel Canal Festival, just down the water at the City Road Basin promises loads to do on and off the water - from paddleboarding to Morris dancing, and puppetry to street food, in honour of the many things to discover all year round on Regent’s Canal.

HowTheLightGetsIn Camdenist tickets exclusive

We may still not have any interviews or guest editors to run, but we’re nevertheless really looking forward to another cerebral workout up at Kenwood at the HowTheLightGetsIn Festival. It boasts a thought-provoking line-up of philosophy, politics, science, art, comedy and live music on the weekend of 19th-20th Sept, and we’ve got a code that will get you a tasty 20% OFF tickets…

Just enter CAMDENIST20 at the checkout and the discount will automatically be applied. But hurry, as it looks like they’re selling out soon…

CAMDEN CURATED

We have a diverse bunch of inspiration for you this week…

FILM 🎞️ This Sat 5th Sept sees the last in a mini-season of EcoCounts Mystery Film Screenings, where you get a chance to see unannounced award-winning documentaries or classic movies, with people and planet themes, and followed by a facilitated discussion afterwards. The film is announced on the evening, which takes place up at St Luke’s Church in Hillmarton Rd, and there’s even popcorn for sale.

PHOTOGRAPHY 📸 To mark the 20th anniversary of Amy Winehouse’s iconic Back to Black LP, the next free outdoor exhibition on the benches at Granary Square and King’s Boulevard (pictured above) features classic and previously unseen images from the Camden-based singer’s life and career. Runs to 15th Oct.

YOGA 🧘🏼‍♀️Delve in to the transformative practice of Pranayama breathing as Kentish Town-based We Breathe Yoga begins a new annual cycle of foundational breathwork suitable for all levels on Sunday mornings, from Sun 13th Sept. You’ll be led by trained yogi and psychotherapist Sara, exploring the relationship between body, breath, mind and the stories we carry with us.

MUSIC 🎸 Local festival and gig promotion Camden Rocks has brought back its legendary rock ’n’ roll all-dayers monthly at the newly relaunched Barfly, with Septembers edition including Danny Wildheart & The UK Reprobates, The Priscillas, River Hounds, and Midway Still on Sat 12th Sept.

FOOD 🌯 Cult chicken ceasar wrap merchants CZER have opened a second outlet on Brewer St in Soho, doing just a classic or picante wrap, with a lobster special to catch in the coming days if you can, and promise of a veggie version soon, too.

DRINK 🍸Following a stint bringing their high energy soundtrack, cocktails and clobber to a bar space at Buck Street Market back in 2023, before it became Camden Boxpark, fluro rave clothing dons Cyberdog have taken over the lovely rooftop at North Yard’s defunct Dark House to relaunch their Cyberdog Rave Bar. Expect sunset cocktails on the area’s best suntrap rooftop and Cyberdog energy from the staff and DJs.

📺 Video of the week: Artist eviction threat

See ITV’s coverage of the plight of over 230 Camden-based artists, as a change in regulations means their meanwhile-use studios in the eventual path of HS2 construction may have to be closed early…

As is my habit around this time of year, I’d hoped to hand over guest editorship this week to someone like the best locally-based Labour PM we never had, or this beloved TV personality, OBE and mental health advocate herself, ahead of the annual gathering of such minds at 2026’s HowTheLightGetsIn Festival.

However it hasn’t quite worked out like that, at least yet.

I do however have an exclusive discount code that will get you a tasty 20% OFF tickets to the epic, thought-provoking 2-day line-up of philosophy, politics, science, art, comedy and live music, taking place at Kenwood on the weekend of 19th-20th Sept.

Just enter the code CAMDENIST20 at the checkout and the discount will automatically be applied.

Across the weekend, you’ll have the chance to hear from Nobel physics laurate Roger Penrose, cult documentary-maker Louis Theroux, Odyssey translator Emily Wilson, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, feminist pioneer Sally Haslanger, former Irish PM Leo Vardakar and Succession star turned cultural provocateur Dasha Nekrasova, among many others.

Here’s the full line-up, so take a look and then head over to the new Camdenist Community and let me know who you’d like me to try and speak to to lead next week’s email. I can’t promise we’ll get Michael Gove discussing his favourite Camden nightspots, or the theoretical physicist Sabrina Pasterski - hotly tipped at ‘the next Einstein’, who built and flew her own airplane solo, aged 14 - blowing our minds about the application of AI in her work on quantum gravity, but we’ll certainly see what we can do…

Unexpected consequences of the welcome/unwelcome kind

Modern life raises a lot of mind-boggling questions for our poorly-acclimatised human brains, and it doesn’t exactly look like that pressure is going to ease off.

We get ourselves in a right old bind over key issues; our very humanness often the obstacle to agreeing a common sense approach, with all our inherent tribalism, fear-avoidance and pattern recognition proving unhelpful in navigating the modern world.

And its not only us. Many of our established systems are creaking under the weight of their irrelevance as time marches onward, at pace.

While it might make you want to hide under a pillow much of the time, it can be quite inspiring to poke your head out and hear the latest thinking on our biggest collective conundrums, (which is why I’m always keen to partner with HTLGI, as per the above).

Looking back, I spotted the 2024 Camdenist interview with with SOAS professor and UN labour economist Guy Standing about the possibility of all being paid a Universal Basic Income (UBI) if work has been outsourced to our robot overlords - or perhaps even if it hasn’t.

AI has had two more years to threaten our job prospects since then, and while the situation does feel that much more precarious, some of the more doom-laden predictions have not yet come to pass. The truth of the matter may actually end up being we’re left working even harder and even faster…

With the arrival of such disruptive tech at global scale, unforeseen repercussions of all stripes are pretty much all we can guarantee. Despite what Standing says about UBI’s reduction of stress levels, the revaluation of unpaid roles such as caregiving, volunteering and creativity for the joy of it, and the possibility of all kinds of exciting little micro-businesses, dishing out cash would surely also bring some wildly unpredictable negatives, too.

Trials seem to have disproved the idea that we’d all just sit around playing video games and getting high, though, but I bet some people would. Of course, some people very much already do.

While the tech oracles like to tell us we’ve got 18 months until we’ll all be out of work/luxuriating in free time to indulge in whatever vices or pursuits we please, by them having moved fast and broken things, gifting cash to make up for the mass layoffs would need to be carefully sourced. We’d need to avoid a massive potential redistribution of public wealth up into the hands of the energy companies and assorted billionaires who run the very job-erasing systems themselves, anyway.

That would hardly feel like progress, even if Elon Musk seems to have worked it all out via some kind of robot tax.

Meanwhile, at some point, we’re surely going to have to address the glaring harms that the ‘war on drugs’ reap, the status quo being so clearly unfit for purpose, and stuffed full of examples of the unintended consequences of prohibition.

But what will it take to attempt the honourable aim of harm reduction in a radically different way? The decriminalisation favoured by the Greens, and even eventual degrees of legalisation, would certainly stop lots of people getting locked up pointlessly, hugely easing pressure on the prison system and freeing up the Police for more vital work, while raising valuable tax revenues. It would also stop scary adulterants like fentanyl, or synthetic creations like spice causing overdoses and deaths, the existence of which prove just how badly current policy performs in terms of actual public health.

But can you also begin to imagine all the unforeseen negative societal ripples, too? Now, they may actually end up being worth it compared to the current shitshow, but the established black market might well simply go on co-existing alongside the more expensive legal one, while corporate profit-maximisation and lobbying could well make the new legal intoxication barons quickly look and act a bit like Big Tobacco before them.

And without the constraint of the law, would far more of us be getting legally wasted more regularly, with all the downstream fallout on on our work, relationships and mental health?

Consider a near future that sees both a pressing need for UBI and the long-overdue rethinking of drugs prohibition. This may result in an intersectional a hellhole of permanently frazzled sofa-centric wasters, but equally, the poverty that drives both the sale and the overuse of drugs may be alleviated, and hedonism become more mindful, as opposed to mindless self-medicating in its practice. Who knows? But it’s fairly certain that we’ll soon need to try out some things that currently may seem wildly out there, and then manage the many ramifications - the good and the bad.

The unexpected consequence of developing AI that I think could be most disruptive (among the many) towards breaking established human norms is the potential that we essentially create an alien mind, forcing humanity to rethink everything from our gods to our geopolitical nonsense to our dominance of the planet.

What if an impending alien first contact is not with little green men from outer space, but something we have created and let become wildly superior to our own flawed little human minds?

I know the AI bros like to frame their creation in quasi-religious terms, and I don’t want to play into that, but when you are looking at the big shifts societies are going to have to make soon, reframing everything via a completely new lens like ‘the aliens of our own creation’ sure gets the synapses a whirring. Or perhaps the pillow back over your head.

Pondering a strange utopia of alien-designed, non-toxic, tailor-made altered states and spiritual experience-on-demand to fill our previous working hours is what you get from me this week, in lieu of hearing (something similar?) from a visionary HTLGI speaker.

Now, what do you think?

📊 This week’s One-Click Poll

Which do you think will happen first?

So few jobs we’ll all need to be paid a universal basic income

A complete rethink of recreational drugs prohibition

AI challenging human exceptionalism and changing pretty much everything

As ever, do leave your comments after voting, or even better, drop some thoughts in the Camdenist Community, under this post where it appears there.

📊 Last week’s results: we are officially a Borough of canal lovers! ❤️❤️

Last week, when impassioned by a long walk home following our urban waterways, I asked: How much do you use or visit London’s canals?

Regularly - I love the waterways and use them to get around all the time
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 57%

Occasionally - I enjoy a visit, but can’t say they are part of my regular life
🟨🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️ 40%

Never - they feel scary/dirty/old and whatever else so I’m not tempted
⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 3%

And some of your comments…

🗣️ “I’m only an occasional visitor to London—bringing American students to live and study each January. But I use and visit the canals as much as possible. One year, I had mild Covid and was banned from the class activities for 5 days. I masked up and walked all over, including from Hackney to King’s Cross (and yes, terribly confused by the sudden detour at Islington). One of my favorite experiences. I love the diversity of people, architecture, and concessions along the way. ”

🗣️ “Two decades ago I commuted to work on the Isle of Dogs and the journeys were often the best parts of my day. They are too crowded to cycle safely now but are still a wonderful asset when I have the time.”

🗣️ “The Regents Canal walk from end to end is extraordinary, accompanied by the fantastic little walkers book “The Regents Canal” by David Fathers. London Zoo (Snowdon aviary), Hitchcock’s bust, Limehouse itself and the Limehouse Cut up to Three Mills are gems and there are so many others. As the London canals get gentrified at an ongoing rapid pace it is worth exploring far and wide to see and feel the history that remains before it is transformed into the zing of the modern city. ”

🗣️ “As a born and bred Camden boy, my go to answer whenever anyone asks me for recommendations for what visitors to London should do is a walk down the canals. Start at Upper Street, grab a coffee/beverage of your choice from one of the many establishments there, head for the towpath and walk along the canal down to Little Venice- you get to see King’s Cross, Camden, London Zoo and Regents Park, with Little Venice right at the end. A highlights package of North West and West London, with the ability to get out and explore further at any of the spots you wish to do so, plus the ability to go through to Paddington or Hyde Park at the end. It’s also a walk that suits whatever weather- in the hot, the towpath has plenty of shade and the canal helps alleviate the temps, and in the cold, you can bundle up warm.”

🗣️ “My daughter is too impatient to queue for the free Everyman screen by Coal Drops so she bought herself a small inflatable dinghy and watches the films moored up by the towpath with a glass of wine.”

The Community is now open to all subscribers to Camdenist!

If you’ve not signed up yet, it’s 100% free, and you get the chance to enter into a draw for 2 x free passes to the HowTheLightGetsIn Festival (see above) if you post a hello in the #meetyourneighbours channel this week.

Join the Community

FESTIVALS

We are truly spoilt, for weeks to come…

It’s the apex of the summer season, with all kinds of bank holiday pop-offs to enjoy, taking place all over the country. Personally, I’m aiming for a 3-day Notting Hill Carnival bonanza, as regular readers will know it is my absolute favourite event of the year. Read more about that obsession, alongside an insight into the competitive world of the weekend’s street art one-upmanship, as told by last year’s guest editor and most prolific of Carnival spray can (and fly poster) artist, ABOTZ.

In other festivals news, hot on the heels of last week’s flagging up of hot King’s Cross-based festis for the late summer - AVA London and Vision Festival - comes news of the Knowledge Quarter’s annual The Future of Knowledge, a 1-day conference that brings together the wealth of locall-based innovators in science, technology, education and more to cut through the sectors and see what comes of it. The panel and breakout workshops can all be explored on Tues 10th Nov at the British Library. Tickets go live on Tues 1st Sept.

Future Forum hosts an inaugural summit for cross-sector thinking on tech, culture, environment and more with 150 key names from big institutions speaking, hands-on studio sessions and plenty of special satellite events across 13th-15th Oct in King’s Cross at Town Hall by Bottaccio and into Soho.

But first up, just up the road, it’s the return of the new indoor incarnation of Camden Inspire on 26th & 27th Sept held at Camden Collective, with eco-focused workshops, panels, poetry and podcasting, plus all manner of making, from printing to weaving, to be enjoyed at this community-focused event tackling all the big global themes.

CAMDEN CURATED

Even more local festivals, Fringe and outdoor merriment to go to

FRINGE: 🎭 For a Fringe finale, try L.O.V.E / L.A.S.K.O., an interactive performance blending dance, theatre, live music and audience participation, in the form of a late-night talk show exploring how we experience love, intimacy and connection. The production premiered at the Prague Quadrennial and now comes to London for two performances only at The Courtyard Theatre tonight 28th and tomorrow Sat 29th Aug.

Remember, the Camden Fringe Agent is available until the end of the month to help you to search and find more Fringe shows you might love before the season is over…

DISCOVER YOUR PERFECT CAMDEN FRINGE SHOW HERE

EVENT: 🕺🏼Camden Council’s own Inverness St Block Party is back on Sat 29th Aug with Camden Town’s disco house dancefloor legacy being celebrated by DJs including the inimitable Brandon Block, Ricky Morrison, Matt White, Janice Vee and loads more all day.

EVENT: 🔊 The final outing for Jazzie B’s Back II Life Café at Hawley Wharf is an all-dayer for the whole fam, with music by the man himself and a selection of special guests, too. Expect locals to gather once more to whine their way intro the bank holiday weekend around the slick purpose-built stage.

EVENT: 🥳For a more sedate Sunday than a trip to Notting Hill, the Natural Aspect Summer Concert marks the end of the Parli Hill bandstand season this Sun 30th Aug with local guitar hero and John Etheridge and internationally renowned soul singer Vimala Rowe alongside The Boheme Hot Club gypsy band, ska reggae blues fusion crew Peace & Love and local #DJ ledge Dan Carrier, alongside loads of family activities all day.

Once a summer, I elect to walk back from our offices at The Wick, (the other London title we publish), which is on Fish Island, just across the River Lea Navigation from the Olympic Park and Stratford.

The journey takes a good couple of hours or so - even with pace-setting techno cranked up on the headphones to keep the metronomic footsteps stomping - but is always incredibly rewarding.

Why? Because it’s possible to get back to Camden entirely by canal towpath, bar the short emergence to cross Upper St forced by the 878m-long Islington Tunnel.

In today’s culture, we’re up to our eyeballs in self-help inspiration, productivity hacks and quantified optimisation of health. So I really don’t want to evangalise about this like another vapid wellness wannabe, elbowing my tuppence-worth into such crowded media space.

It’s just that, as well as clearly being good for the heart, the environment, the step-count metrics and the rest of that self-congratulatory blah, it really is properly inspiring. So…

If London life is ever feeling like a grind; the shit bits outweighing the good; a feeling things are ‘not what they used to be’ etc; I’d like to proffer that walking through four boroughs alongside defunct early 19th Century transportation infrastructure should prove quite the tonic.

A feast for the senses, such a route (and there are, of course, many more), reveals oft-overlooked truths about our city that can’t help but restore lost faith in how great this place is, its people are, and yes, this time in history is, despite the converging permacrises.

The solidity of the urban waterways, carved out of the clay by long-deceased men; the scored grooves in bridge ironwork where generations of narrowboat ropes once rubbed; the repurposed warehouses, where storage for timber, coal and raw metals has been replaced by new industry - of restaurants, architects studios and tech startups.

Each imparts a degree of permanence that us mortal individuals can never match, while also demonstrating the unsettling, ever-shifting nature of the city all around. It is comforting and melancholy all at once. That friction is the special bit.

You get to marvel at the endurance of great ambition from earlier industrial revolutions, but shorn of its original teeming animation: the horses, blacksmiths and navvies. Calm has descended as the freight and associated hubbub has hit the roads, rails and air, making way for bohemian boat-dwellers sipping generously-poured sundowners, while all the cliches of modern London pass through.

Beardy guys walk small dogs, Lululemon-clad jogger-gaggles approach in a blizzard of perfume, gay boys on hot dates make furtive glances over small talk preludes on well-appointed benches.

The city is alive and well down here, the canal an instant oasis from its excesses, and yet so much is going on. Headphones now off, the soundtrack is a muted cacophony of shouts, faraway crashes, splashes, laughs and gentle urban thrum.

The canal route home is cut straight towards the lowering August sun, gleaming off the water to give everything a shimmery little filter. Such a walk is an all too rare activity in that it’s 100% free, yet stuffed full of boundless value.

Bethnal Green’s gasholders loom into view (main pic above), the shells of posh flats going up inside their cylindrical embrace have sprung up since I last came through this way. Des-reses may have saved the structures from demolition, but their impact on the skyline drama is sadly diminished.

History and its memories appear juxtaposed against relentless change. But in fact, history like this is the relentless change. Feeling fully part of a living, morphing cityscape is the point. Being reminded of that is where the daily niggles and worries evaporate in the awe at London’s humanity, industry and story.

Hackney’s studio-filled wharfs melt into Islington’s waterfront pubs and otherworldly tunnel entrance. It’s magical.

But I’m sure some will fail to agree - or even perceive of - my optimistic take on these scenes of urban decay and displacement, and yes, things certainly can be rough and tough on the towpath, too. Yet as the more familiar, scrubbed-up King’s Cross homeward stretch arrives, the uplifting power of the waterways is truly, loudly, being celebrated, so I know I’ve not drifted too far up my own narrative, more than two hours in to this strenuous endeavour.

Films are being showing on the steps, there’s live music on a stage just beyond, and the fountains that invite screaming exploration (all those are also 100% free to experience, it should be noted). Set in these reimagined railway goods yards, it’s the epitome of all the thoughts that have filled my mind, inspired by the people and places that line the water from Tower Hamlets to here, and indeed onwards right through to Paddington.

I know I said I wouldn’t drop into wellbeing babble, but this hot-foot commute really does feel like a practice of gratitude for London, and one which delivers plenty of emotional uplift in return, if you like that sort of thing.

So I just couldn’t resist wanging about it this week, basically. If you agree, or don’t know what the hell I’m on about, I’d love to hear your views over on the Community pages…

📊 This week’s One-Click Poll

How much do you use or visit London’s canals?

Regularly - I love the waterways and use them to get around all the time

Occasionally - I enjoy a visit, but can’t say they are part of my regular life

Never - they feel scary/dirty/old and whatever else so I’m not tempted

As ever, do leave your comments after voting. Camdenist is going to be covering more canal-based topics so it’s really interesting to find out what locals feel about them

📊 Last week’s results & comments

Last week, when writing about why the ‘banning pints’ story missed Soho’s real travails, I asked you: Who is to blame most for the current travails of licensed premises and other high street businesses?

Local government
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 43%

Central government
🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 17%

Global elites/tech billionaires
🟨🟨🟨🟨🟨⬜️ 39%

And some of your comments…

🗣️ “So sad not to be able to find somewhere eat in Soho on a Thursday night coming up to 10pm... Independent venues like the Blue Posts on Berwick St employ lots of young people, give performance space for new artists whilst catering for a broad section of the community. It’s not all bad - but we need to support what we’ve got and encourage new blood.”

🗣️ “The sky high cost of doing business has emptied out Britain’s high streets while American giants such as Amazon pay a fraction of the taxes on their warehouses.”

🗣️ “Sometimes I despair at the calibre of people put in charge of decisions like licensing. We need and should expect EXPERTS, and often (bless ‘um) councillors elected by a few hundred aging members of the local electorate are just not the right people to be effectively holding sway over whether London has a thriving late night economy. Grrrrr.”

🗣️ “The high street -at all hours of the day- has been hollowed out by multiple factors, but whereas we can’t do much about rapacious tax-dodging globalists, we can choose our local government, and I think after COVID the pendulum is swinging in favour of social spaces over everyone being tucked up under the covers feeding more money to tech companies on their damn phones”

The Community is now open to all subscribers to Camdenist, after the initial VIP launch, and it’s fantastic that well over 200 of you have joined in the last week.

We have received a few responses from people having trouble registering or with confusion about the prompts to download a web-app to your phone homescreen. You can always respond to these newsletters if you have an issue, but now it’s open for everyone, it’s as easy as adding your email.

Join the Community

⚠️ In my invites last week, I mentioned that all signing up to the Community would be entered into a draw for tickets to the HowTheLightGetsIn festival that’s returning to Kenwood 19th-20th Sept, however I realise that not everyone keen on being part of this new forum may actually want/be able to attend the philosophy, music and comedy weekend. So, rather than have 2 x pairs of tickets risk going to waste, if you’d like to be in the prize draw, please use the #MeetYourNeighbours channel to introduce yourself and state that you’d love to be included in the draw. We’ll pick winners at random in a couple of weeks time :)

💡Got an upcoming event or offer that you’d like to share with locals? Add that to the #tipoffs channel. For my part, you’re welcome to join me at two events we’re running out east (canal walk optional). Firstly, tonight we’re celebrating the launch of the summer print edition of The Wick magazine at The Gun pub in Well Street (Homerton Overground) with drinks and convivial chatter from 5pm. Or join us next Wed 26th Aug from 4pm aboard The Milk Float in Hackney Wick for a discussion about nightlife and how to support it to thrive in a fast-changing city. Info on that is here, it’s also free, with similar events due to start in Camden for our Community members soon, so stay tuned…

FESTIVALS

Festivals that deliver for the mind

We may be approaching the apex of the summer festival season with annual bashes like All Points East, Notting Hill Carnival, Camden’s own block party and the rest coming up soon, yet September is shaping up to be just as tasty if you’re a fan of more cerebral big events.

First up, the aforementioned HowTheLightGetsIn brings great guest speakers, well-curated live music and stand-up to Kenwood on the weekend of 19th-20th. Look out for our special Camdenist ticket discount code next week (and see above for the prize draw, too).

Then, AVA London brings together cultural leaders in electronic music for three days of debate and nights of dancing, centred around The British Library from 24th-26th. Featuring Moby, Oklou, The Avalanches and loads more TBA, they’ll come together to discuss challenges from the climate impact of touring to the changing face of queer nightlife.

And our friends over the road at Town Hall by Bottaccio have just announced their inaugural Vision Festival, taking over their own venue (pictured above) and various other spots throughout King’s Cross over the weekend of Fri 25th- Sun 27th. Director of Programming, Michael John Harris, is no stranger to big events in the area, having run the Guardian’s Live programme and also the editorial direction of the ambitious CogX festival previously. For over a decade, he’s been wanting to bring back a modern twist on the original St Pancras Arts Festival, which started in the 1950s, and filled the streets with music, opera and poetry for many years.

“For three days this September, we will bring one of the world’s richest concentrations of culture, science and ideas into a single neighbourhood-wide programme,” he says, of the plans. “The festival invites you to move from laboratories to libraries, studios to stages, galleries to performances, all within a ten-minute walk.” Vision Festival is keen to get locals involved, and has launched an open call for participation that you should take a look at.

Highlights of year one include the OffScript’s careers and community summit, aimed at 16 to 25-year-olds and their parents, to offer practical skills and realistic optimism in pathways to employment, and a special evening with The School of Life.

CAMDEN CURATED

What else to do this week and beyond…

FRINGE: This week’s Camden Fringe highlight is Caravan Tea Party which sees Sophie nosedive into the merry land of make-believe from a Nicaraguan coffee shop, as she’s confronted with more facts than fiction, old wounds are revisited as she questions what it means to be Romany. Catch it at Camden High Street’s Etcetera Theatre Tues 25th & Wed 26th Aug.

Remember, the Camden Fringe Agent is available all month to help you to search and find more shows you might love…

DISCOVER YOUR PERFECT CAMDEN FRINGE SHOW HERE

EVENT: 🚣🏼‍♀️ With all my talk of celebrating our canals, this Sun 23rd Aug sees a particularly special celebration of one of Regent’s Canal’s most venerated community organisations as The Pirate Castle’s 60th anniversary open day. You’ll find free paddlesport sessions and canal boat rides plus loads of party goings on for all ages - ahoy there!

FOOD: 🥖 Big excitement for Kentish Town food lovers (right?!) as prolific restaurateur and food innovator, Omar Shah, of local faves Bintang, Guanabana, Hoodwood, Mamasons and Belly is preparing to open yet another fusion hotspot. Bunso will be a bakery by day and a lively pizzeria by night, with a soundtrack to match. It opens next month in the former hairdressing academy on Hawley Rd, which is a large site, and formerly the group’s ice cream factory.

MUSIC: 🎶Catch the final days of King’s Cross Summer Sounds at Coal Drops Yard, which wraps up on Sun 23ed Aug with a programme of truly epic choirs belting out everything from West End musicals to rock and soul specialist choirs, too.

MUSIC: 🎤Slip into KOKO this Sun 23rd Aug for an altogether more laid back dancefloor experience, as KOKO Jazz Club sees Aretha Franklin sung by Vanessa Haynes, with table service, a la carte menu and the hits of the Queen of Soul sung by a vocalise best known for her work with Incognito, but has also performed and recorded with the likes of Van Morrison, Chaka Khan, Billy Ocean, Lulu, Anastacia and Dave Stewart.

You’ll no doubt have caught some of the breathless commentary in recent days, reacting to reports of a planned ‘ban’ on ‘vertical drinking’ by Westminster Council.

What was quickly revealed to be a rather traditional Silly Season newspaper conflation crashed headlong into today’s attention-hungry, instant outrage machine, with predictable agenda-shoehorning gusto from all concerned.

Of course, this ‘news’ - which essentially references existing licensing policies of over 20 years standing - comes hot on the heels of residents’ group The Soho Society being roundly pilloried as ‘killjoys’, NIMBYs’ and ‘curtain-twitchers’ for their ridiculous opposition to any growth in the late night economy in what was once London’s cultural epicentre.

Sensing the obvious social media gold, and keen to keep that storyline developing, everyone from indignant influencers right up to the Mayor, and to a certain extent the new PM (who we know from earlier in the year loves to show off his nightlife-loving DJing man-of-the-people persona) duly waded right in.

Next, Council leaders chirped up with a series of overly-defensive (if true) statements, that a ‘ban’ on drinking without sitting down in/outside pubs had never been proposed, and the Guardian in turn had to tone down their original soaraway headline to read ‘limit standing’ instead.

As a staunch supporter of all things hospitality and nightlife, I could easily have joined the fray with some glee, however, generating ragebait, confecting conflict and then driving it all forwards for the metrics is exhausting, vacuous stuff, and I’d much rather dig in to the nuance of a story, which is where the interesting bits always reside, anyway.

So I reached out to Jackie Clode-Dickens, who heads up hospitality consultancy DVO, sits on the Board of the Soho Business Alliance, and I’ve known for a very long time since her days managing all things marketing at Camden Market.

“The irony of the past week’s coverage is that many of the journalists and commentators driving the debate know full well that this isn’t a new Westminster City Council policy,” she says, right off the bat.

“Restrictions around so-called ‘vertical drinking’ have formed part of Westminster’s licensing approach for decades. No one is suddenly proposing to ban people from standing in a pub with a pint – despite what some of the headlines might suggest.

“The real story sits beneath the clickbait. Our concern is Westminster’s wider approach to licensing and its lack of ambition to support hospitality businesses to invest, innovate and grow. Licensing is one of the biggest factors affecting whether businesses can succeed, particularly in Soho.

“Headlines suggesting that Westminster is ‘banning pints’ are obviously unhelpful and don’t reflect the reality. But if they succeed in drawing attention to the wider challenges facing bars, pubs, clubs, restaurants and music venues, then at least some good can come from all the noise. We welcome the spotlight on the challenges facing our members, but what the industry needs is measured, evidence-based discussion and genuine collaboration between businesses, residents and the Council. We’ll get much further by working together than by talking past one another.”

The uncompromising extremes of a handful of highly vocal, yet silence-loving, (yet Soho living), residents aside, it feels to me like everyone jousting over this topic is largely already fighting for the same thing.

Of course the Council want to promote ‘safer’ West End drinking, and have an obligation to stop roads getting swamped with vast wobbly post-work crowds (however fun all that is), and of course Sadiq and the various lobbying organisations are fighting to support successful, growing businesses and a thriving 24-hour cultural scene in the centre of the capital.

Therefore it’s a bit of a distraction to all be spending time and energy up in arms over some fantasy return to Covid-era table service and banned interacting at the bar (memories of that performative anti-social/anti-business circus also loom very large in this debate).

There’s plenty of more important, if less viral, stuff desperately needing that degree of attention. And Jackie is right; issues can only ever get resolved by working together. Westminster slapping ever-increasing regulation on operators doesn’t magic away the problems, but it certainly does create plenty more.

Draconian things like blanket curfews, limitations on outdoor trading, table service requirements reducing capacity other creeping pressures have pushed many hospitality businesses to breaking point, especially in Soho.

“Businesses here are already constrained by historic buildings, narrow streets and an outdated public realm,” says Jackie. “Add all these restrictive licensing conditions and you’re effectively capping businesses’ ability to increase capacity, generate revenue and reinvest.

“We’ve reached a point where these businesses are increasingly expected to fill gaps left by underfunded public services. Hospitality operators are already investing heavily in security, welfare, first aid, street management, cleaning and crowd control—responsibilities that aren’t expected of most other sectors. I’ve even heard suggestions that businesses should contribute towards funding the Night Tube. At some point, we have to ask whether that expectation has become unreasonable.”

In their robust pursuit of improving some of the darker sides of Soho’s longstanding afterhours infamy, Westminster Council seem to have slowly, and now very rapidly, lost control of their own narrative.

Despite the latest uproar not being rooted in too much truth, it’s now going to take years shake off the belief that those entrusted with this beloved best bit of the West End are entirely responsible for ruining it. That’s a shame, as clearly the issues are multiple and complex. They shouldn’t ever fit into a single angry tweet.

Jackie blames a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach to licensing across the Borough, that inevitably struggles to meet Soho’s needs when bundled in with the likes of Marylebone and St Johns Wood.

She also challenges the ‘accepted wisdom’ that underpins many of the most fraught debates, “the assumption that more licensed premises automatically lead to more crime, when the evidence tells a very different story.”

Often, in an attempt to reflect the apparent wishes of their constituents, I see councillors all over London revert to the most basic of knee-jerk headline fodder for guidance. That logic seems to have it that a little clandestine pissing in a doorway requires the shuttering of a popular and historic music venue, or the ‘disturbance’ of knives and forks chinking on plates plus occasional bursts of laughter require that outdoor tables must out of bounds after 9pm, (on nights at hot as these, for goodness sake).

It’s ludicrous to entrust licensing decisions to people who may often have quite literally zero experience of the afterhours economy and its unique safety and regulatory needs, and yet we do it time and again.

Now that the nation fully believes that Westminster Council and The Soho Society are hellbent on seeing a flat, cultureless West End, where mindless consumers are compelled to sit down for pre-9pm drinks, not interact with strangers, and then toddle off to bed without any hint of revelry or street-based bonhomie, it’s surely, urgently, time to break bread with the pros and concoct some more suitable, 21st century policies.

Down under, Sydney’s infamously overzealous ‘lockout laws’ effectively decimated that city’s nightlife, yet the shocking economic and cultural loss proved a wake-up call that is now yielding a world-leading turnaround in approach.

It shouldn’t have to take that degree of failure to reinvigorate Soho for a new era, but it will definitely take more than attention-grabbing posturing and ever more regulatory squeeze.

It’s high time for everyone concerned to sit down and work together more - before standing up, going outside and sharing a pint, of course.

📊 This week’s One-Click Poll

Who is to blame most for the current travails of licensed premises and other high street businesses?

Local government

Central government

Global elites/tech billionaires

This week’s poll is obviously far too broad for a single click answer, so do please leave a bit more detail on your choice in the comments, and if you are a member of the Camdenist Community - head there now to chew it over with other locals…

📊 Last week’s results & comments

Last week, following some pushback against our use of tech to search for unexpected theatre shows, I asked: What are your first impressions of the experimental Camden Fringe Agent chatbot?

Seems like a practical, time-saving tool for navigating overwhelming show listings
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 60%

Well-intentioned for promotion, but unnecessary in a human-centric industry like the arts
🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 20%

An unwelcome intrusion that devalues human recommendation and risks misinformation
🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 20%

And some of your comments…

🗣️ “There is no loss in creativity in providing a quicker search for something you are looking for, it just saves time, and maybe opens your eyes to more opportunities.”

🗣️ “I voted it’s a good use (relatively speaking) but worry that your article wholeheartedly accepts the tech determinism argument - LLMs hallucinate (make stuff up), use a lot of energy and water (check out the stats on how much more power we need to generate to keep the data centres alive), and are incredibly addictive. All the LLM creators are currently running at a massive loss - their plan is to have us hooked so when we have to pay per use for anything like the actual cost we won’t have an alternative.”

🗣️ ““I didn’t try the tool last week because I’d already walked into my local venue in person and picked up a hard copy of the Fringe guide. On the back of that I’ve booked a couple of shows (and wanted to book a third but it was cancelled). That said, I’ve just tested out the AI tool and it came up with a couple of good suggestions that I hadn’t spotted. But it didn’t come up with the ones I’ve booked, one of which was something I wouldn’t have looked for but it caught my eye in the guide.”

🗣️ “In polls, AI is increasingly hated as time goes on. There isn’t a single age group today that has a net positive view of AI. This is generally unusual for a new technology, especially one that has been so widely used so quickly. However all the things it is good at, and all the things it’s bad at, share a common feature: theft.”

🗣️ “Can’t believe you are getting stick. It is a great tool and led me to a show I’ll actually go to rather than sifting through shows I have no interest in and might dissuade me from hunting further. Congratulations on your innovation and anyone who thinks these “discovery engines” won’t be a permanent and highly personalised fixture is living in a dream world.”

🗣️ “Using AI to help people actually go to human events with real creative people seems a positive use to me. Especially if it helps surface the shows that are more hidden, can’t afford advertising etc (though inevitably this is negated if paid advertising is embedded in the service)”

🗣️ “This tool will mean I can quickly see the range of shows I might be interested in. It will save me a lot of valuable time, and I will get to buy tickets for more Fringe Productions than I normally go to these days. Thank you Camdenist!”

🗣️ “For me, AI has emerged as a massively more efficient search engine that seems to consistently cut through and streamline a lot of the sponsored slop that’s polluted Google search results for years now. And I really don’t see why it’s an either/or. Those who distrust (as they should!) the accuracy of AI results and recommendations should then take them to Google and do some good old fashioned human verification. It certainly works for me. ”

🗣️ “Your willingness to talk to your critics moved everything forward. We have to continue the conversation.”

Try it out for yourself:

DISCOVER YOUR PERFECT CAMDEN FRINGE SHOW HERE

Today we’re going to send out a new batch of invites for more of you to join the new Camdenist Community following the first VIPs, so look out for that if you’ve not already seen one, and we’ll see you on there…

Meanwhile, actor and writer, Alison Foster, who’s show, Musings of a Serial Dieter, starts next week at Camden Fringe, (see listing below) saw last week’s AI debate, and believes that AI in now having a psychological impact on the serial dieter. She got in touch to quote directly from the show…

“We are so being fed, on social media platforms. Algorithms camouflaged in the background, listening for vital intelligence, so to bombard you with products, morning, noon and night. I’m fed up of being treated like a large vacuous retail target that needs filling up with countless products. Maybe the only health kick we need is, a deep cleanse. For our computer algorithms, IOT devices, surveillance recordings and data aggregation, which is somewhat aggravating to think that. Big brother is watching you. Yeah, not Skinny or Little brother, as he is too busy collecting data, and has no time to go to the gym!”

Find your perfect Fringe show here

⚠️ We’ve added more tasty local food and drink deals to the #tipoffs channel this week, which seems to be a popular one to check in these early days. If you’re a local food stall, bar/pub, restaurant or pop-up and would like to add your own offers to the channel, reply to this email with a request and we’ll send you a Community invite too - it’s free.

🤝 Speaking to one of our Business Network members this week, we were plotting the start of a private channel for all such SMEs and freelance creatives, alongside launching a regular B2B meeting run by Camdenist in the near future. Interested? Reply to this email and I can tell you more…

CAMDEN CURATED

Al fresco turntablism displays lead this week’s big local highlights

POP-UP: 🎧 Back in 1989, I can remember having Cutmaster Swift’s DMC World Championship-winning mix on heavy Walkman rotation (check it out above, as it’s still mind-bending), and remember the transitions and scratches like it was yesterday. And this Sun 16th Aug, the great man is performing at Stables Market Amphitheatre at a free event to mark the official Launch Party for the DMC41 competition. He’ll be alongside UK legend DJ Pogo, and host MysDiggi, with free entry all afternoon. Then look out for the World Finals at KOKO, 12th-14th Nov.

ICE CREAM:🍧Primrose Hill’s super-stylish Arvo Cafe have opened up a brand new Gelato by Arvo spot right across Regent’s Park Rd from their popular cafe. You can imagine what it specialises in, and there’s really no better time of year to have launched to draw in the strip’s hungry brunch, pub and park crowds.

DRINK: 🍸Bloomsbury’s Imperial Hotel has had a massive revamp, which include the attractive rooftop, which opens today as Arcus. Expect brunches and small plates, following by cocktails into the night.

FRINGE HIGHLIGHT: 🎭 Musings of a Serial Dieter sees Alison (see the Community section above) take you down the rabbit hole of endless dieting attempts and enduring the purgatory of never being content with the results. She’ll making her way through key Fringe venues, starting at the Courtyard Theatre on Tues 18th Aug, then at the Etcetera Theatre Wed 26th Aug and finally at the Hen & Chickens Theatre 28th-30th Aug, exploring food confusion, stirring in a mixed medium of music and mayhem, then serving it all with a fat dollop of humour.

MUSIC: 🔊 It’s Back II Life Café time again later this afternoon with the inimitable David Rodigan joining Jazzie B at the tent for a locals dubplate hoedown in the Hawley Wharf square.

COMEDY: 🎤 Catch the Roundhouse Comedy Festival in full swing this Sat 15th Aug with Sara Pascoe & Friends, who include the all-star stand-up gang of Nina Conti, John Kearns, Harriet Kemsley and Michael Odewale.

MUSIC: 🎶I was out in the sweltering tropical setting of Coal Drops Yard last night for the opening of King’s Cross’ popular annual Summer Sounds free open-air festival fortnight. Secret headliners The Molotovs smashed out their punky staples alongside assorted Bowie tributes, which gave a nod to the ongoing show about the pop icon, David Bowie: You’re Not Alone that’s running at Lightroom, just up the stairs. Over the coming days, expect everything from jazz ensembles to Afro-Contemporary dance, queer beatboxers, choirs and Middle Eastern melody as the area’s big hitting institutions contribute music on the free central stage and a few satellite show venues too, day and night. Runs to Sun 23rd Aug. Check my footage later on Insta

This week, I’m humbly going to try and change your view about Artificial Intelligence. Just a little.

Not that I know what you think about this hot topic du jour, but I’m pretty sure you have ‘an opinion’ on it, if only to be able to participate in all the impassioned chitter chatter it brings to most social interaction these days.

I’m equally confident that the vast majority of us don’t - can’t - really comprehend the broad implications this complex technology careening towards us will to have. But the next industrial revolution sure is gonna be a challenging one as, for the first time, it involves tech that supersedes our thinking, not just our doing.

In the midst of this epochal moment, I thought it might be a fun idea to experiment with one such tool, as a new way to help readers navigate the mind-boggling array of Camden Fringe shows on at this time of year.

With my inbox currently deluged with messages from most of the 450+ different productions, all hoping for previews and reviews, I thought applying a little tech might be one way to solve this impossible promotional equation.

Our Camden Fringe Advisor launched to the public last week, alongside an offer emailed back to any show who might want to advertise around it. It’s essentially a chatbot trained specifically on Fringe listings data, meaning it can theoretically reveal unexpected shows to delight people after a brief conversation about themes and topics they might fancy seeing.

What I hadn’t quite factored for was how this would land, plunging me deep into the groundswell of negative feeling bubbling around all things AI in the performing arts community right now.

Among the anonymous user conversations I saw last week, one person opined to the chatbot ‘automating this kind of thing is an insult to life itself’, to which the Fringe Agent replied, in a typically LLM turn of phrase, “Oof, I feel you, and honestly that punch lands… It’s like, if the art is supposed to be a living, breathing exchange, then automation for the sake of automation turns the theatre into a spreadsheet with lights.” It then went on to recommend it’s ‘top bet for a show that fires up that anti-machine, pro-human energy.’

Ah. My plan was for a kind of souped-up, hyper-personalised Google search through the listings, but this dialogue was already veering off piste, and email responses to the ad offer seemed to imply that the tool might even do Camdenist reputational damage.

‘The amount of AI things that are creeping into this publication is gross,’ stated one. ‘The new Camden Fringe ‘agent’ squeezed in between all of the ad spots is the cherry on top. Massive insult to the arts and creativity as a whole.’

This was not the reaction I had predicted when spending hours speculatively building a free tool aimed at improving show discovery and directly promoting ticket sales. It seems absolutely inevitable that such an AI engine will be powering the Fringe’s own, and most other listings websites, at some point in the near future. I certainly didn’t feel like I’d crossed over to The Dark Side by dabbling with it.

In fact, I wanted to point out to the detractors that, as a lifelong cultural journalist who has seen my entire vocation upturned and devalued by repeated waves of technological disruption, we’re very much on the same side. Which is why I can actually really understand the angry emails and chatbot backchat.

I don’t agree with them, though.

So I picked up the phone for a chat with one independent Fringe producer, Griffin Jenkins, who offered to explain his own position on this issue, as someone who’s written several AI ethics and use policies for arts organisations.

“I’m not against a lot of AI tools that we see already implemented in existing software,” he said. “But I do find generative AI and LLM technology very objectionable. The problem is that everything is getting lumped together.”

He’s right. the backlash against my discovery engine (which is the carefully sanitised, non-triggering way I’ll be describing the bot from now on) clearly contained all the quite justifiable fury we can feel at the gung-ho way certain Silicon Valley bros seem to be inflicting their productivity playthings on society, to the potential detriment of all the creative pursuits we love and earn a living from. They’re ultimately coming for the stuff that makes life worth living, and no, we don’t want that, thanks.

Griffin then revealed some very specific ways that gen AI has infiltrated his profession for the worse, which were fairly eye-opening for me.

“I see quite a lot of casting calls now where people are supplying an AI generated image,” he said. “It immediately puts people off, and it erodes trust as well. I feel that every time you use ChatGPT or whatever, you’re actively depriving yourself of some form of knowledge of skill. I loathe to say it contaminates the whole work, but when I see yet another gen AI poster, that’s a creative skill someone is never going to develop. Then people say to me ‘how else would I make this poster?’ and I’ll say ‘er, I don’t know, perhaps do what you did in 2023?’”

He also had wider concerns over keeping data safe as a producer, the massive plagiarisation of creative work for training LLMs and the way over-reliance on these tools is hardwired in by the ways we’re nudged into used them all the time.

It’s not going to go away though. So, ultimately, a bit like not staring brainlessly at your phone when sitting with a friend, it’s clear that we all need to adopt our own ethical framework as to just how and when we choose to use this tech, and when we don’t, too.

Some uses should rightly begin to frowned upon as beyond the pale, while others can be absolute godsends, and we should roundly and proudly celebrate those. What doesn’t work for me is the blanket Luddite-lite approach: declarations that ‘I hate AI’, or ‘I refuse to use it’, and ‘how can you be doing something that uses so much water!?’ (Data suggests you’d need to ask a chat tool like the Fringe Advisor somewhere between 5 and 7 million queries to match the water footprint of a single beef burger.)

“If I get into a debate about this with some people,” says Griffin, “inevitably someone will say ‘but what about AI that’s being used to find a cure for cancer?’ I think that’s an argument in bad faith, because we are all aware that this is an example of how the technology should be used. And I’m obviously not talking about that.”

There are indeed masses of quite brilliant uses of AI all around us right now, so lumping all of our fears and resentment about its more tawdry and dehumanising uses isn’t doing anyone any good. The sooner we stop using the blanket term ‘AI’ for all chip-based innovation, the better.

As ever, nuance is totally lost, (something we can rightly blame AI’s algorithms for encouraging, of course). Instead, let’s call out any practice that pushes synthetic facsimiles of real human curation, hold the tech overlords ferociously to account, and kick back at unwanted automation where we see it.

But let’s not simply write off ‘AI’ in casual conversation. Please don’t confuse a listings search experiment with an insult to all creativity.

I’ve had moving recent conversations with people who have accessibility needs, and for them, AI signifies a radical improvement in their daily lives. Perspective is everything.

And, while I hope today’s rant might just have moved the needle slightly on your own declarations about AI, I’ve certainly had my own thinking healthily challenged at times this week, too.

This new industrial revolution may well end up being far more about radically and frequently challenging our rapidly-outdated assumptions, than it ends up being about doing us all out of creative careers.

On that note, do take the Fringe Agent for a spin, join the debate in the poll below, and if you already have access to the Camdenist Community, post about it there - it sure is the hot topic.

DISCOVER YOUR PERFECT CAMDEN FRINGE SHOW

📊 This week’s One-Click Poll

What are your first impressions of the experimental Camden Fringe Agent chatbot?

Seems like a practical, time-saving tool for navigating overwhelming show listings

Well-intentioned for promotion, but unnecessary in a human-centric industry like the arts

An unwelcome intrusion that devalues human recommendation and risks misinformation

As ever, do leave a comment with your vote, some of which will be included next week, and join the debate in the Community pages…

📊 Last week’s results & comments

Last week, I asked: If you get an invite to the Camdenist Community, which of these early channels would you be most interested in reading/ participating in?

Tipoffs - a place to share any local offers, freebies and deals you’ve spotted with others
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 38%

The Hive Mind - where we question, debate and plan exciting new things for Camdenist
🟨🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️ 30%

Social Perks - special events and favourite places for us to meet-up in real life
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 32%

And some of your comments…

🗣️ “All of the above really but I’m always keen to know local offers.”

🗣️ “I love the way you start a debate in your opening article, and would enjoy more opportunities for us to do this with you....maybe in person?!”

🗣️ “I would trust other readers of Camdenist and feel we are like minded and local to boot”

🗣️ “I really like the collaborating, I’m not so far away after all, thank you for all that you’re doing.”

🗣️ “Whichever channel I send up partaking in, I would hope that it have very clearly outlined rules of engagement and a strict moderation policy that would stop it turning into an offshoot of virtually any comment section - which I’ve seen so often happen online. I would strongly consider invoking a no politics rule - at the very least when recommending independently owned businesses.”

The launch week of Camdenist Community has been really impressive to watch unfold, with 53 of the 100+ VIPs I sent a special invite out to having signed in already.

What’s it like? Well, we’ve shared news of 100 free pints of beer, a £2 deal on oysters in NW5 and a free retreat up on the Heath, plus great suggestions for where to hold the first social drinks meet-up.

Last week’s lead story on the importance of community and youth centres generated debate and interesting feedback, for example: “All this sounds so positive and clearly is in some areas BUT in a forgotten northern corner of Camden, we got all exciting thinking the new flats at Maitland Park would include a Community Centre. It did, it’s there. As a space. But it’s empty!! Either it was not negotiated as a condition to the developer that that space would belong to Camden, or for some other reason, it has remained empty for some 2 years or more. I was told it is so expensive to hire, nobody has managed to find a way to run it as a Community Centre. Maitland Park is not a rich area - it desperately needs a Community Centre. It is tantalising to see this beautiful looking space (indoors and outdoors) virtually unused when there is such a need. We have lots of youth and older people and kids - and everybody in between - in need of a meeting place. What can Camden do to put this right before it is said not to be needed (IT IS NEEDED) and is converted into yet more expensive flats and lost forever?”

and this:

“I love your weekly postings and just wanted to draw to your attention to another great local Community Centre providing a range of services to a very diverse community. This is the Queens Crescent Community Centre off Queens Crescent Market. I suggest you might take a look at their website to see all the wonderful activities they provide.”

Look out for more tipoffs on local deals and ongoing discussion of AI issues, no doubt, in the days ahead…

Want to get early access to the Camdenist Community?

Share this newsletter with a friend - when they sign up to receive it free each week, you’ll both be sent VIP invites to join 😉

Share the newsletter

CAMDEN CURATED

Your #1 source of more curious things to try this week, right?

FESTIVAL: 🎺 Thursday evenings this month up at Lauderdale House see the Open Air Summer Season bringing live music to their Tea Lawn. On Thurs 13th Aug, DJ and trumpeter Jay Phelps performs his live mashup Future Beats, Afro House, Baile Funk and Soulful House, the type he’s played on stage with the likes of Wizkid, Amy Winehouse and Wynton Marsalis over the years.

INSTALLATION: 📷 Award-winning community arts organisation Pinhole London is running a walk-in camera obscura at Alexandra Palace daily until Sun 9th Aug. You’ll see a glistening panorama of London landmarks, plus the people walking around outside, all tipped upside down (photo above) in this immersive nod to the earliest days of film and photography.

DRINK: 🍺 Covent Garden’s Guinness Open Gate Brewery London, is celebrating International Beer Day 2026 all day today, Fri 7th Aug, and offering the first 100 customers through the doors a free pint. They open from 11am, so you might need to call it ‘early lunch’.

MUSIC: 🔊 To celebrate last month’s release of the remastered David Bowie album, Earthling, King’s Cross Lightroom and my dance music compadre from back in the day, DJ Ben Gomori, are bringing one of his acclaimed Pitchback Playback listening sessions to the immersive basement venue. You’ll hear the complete LP in the dark on Lightroom’s powerful audio system, and get the chance to catch the show David Bowie: You’re Not Alone afterwards, ideally with a newfound appreciation for his musical mastery.

MUSIC: 🎤 Camden Crescendo is brining up-and-coming live artists and DJs back to the amphitheatre in Camden Market’s North Yard on Saturday afternons, with this week, Sat 8th Aug, showcasing the likes of Isidora, Plumm, Louis Culture and Knats, all for free.

FRINGE FREEBIES! 🎟️

We’ve teamed up with the lovely lot at John Lyon’s Theatre, City Lit - a brand new addition to the growing list of Camden Fringe venues for 2026 - to offer free tickets to their debut shows over the coming days.
These are:

Who Cares -Dennis is recovering from hip surgery in a retirement village when a battle of wills quickly becomes an unexpected friendship. Sat 8th Aug

We Love and then we Drown - a thrilling new play that encourages us to think the unthinkable: to save the world as we know it, and how much we are each prepared to sacrifice to do it. Fri 7th - Sun 9th Aug.

Pilgrims - which dramatises the conflicting attractions of freedom and belonging, and interrogates assumptions about gender, storytelling and nature. Wed 13th & Thurs 14th Aug.

If you’d like to be in with a chance to attend any of these exciting performances for free, hurry and email drama@cityli.ac.uk with your choice of show - the first emailers ‘out of the hat’ will be notified, and they’ll have a ticket waiting under their name on the door - go!

Community centres are a rare thing - sadly in more ways than one.

Firstly, pretty much everyone agrees that they provide something really special, that’s massively beneficial for all the people who use them.

And yet, they are also becoming vanishingly rare in terms of their survival. The long shadow of austerity cuts since 2010 suggests that 1,243 youth centres have shut down, 1,168 children’s centres have also closed, with over 800 libraries and civic spaces gone, too.

It’s an almost unimaginable societal betrayal, especially now we’re beginning to be aware of the damage the stay-at-home lure of apps and consumer-tech have done to our social capacity and mental health.

But this is not a rare bad news edition of Camdenist, I promise. Because right at the heart of Camden Town sits a cherished example of one such hub with solid support, which is thriving and excelling at providing all kinds of measurable social good, plus masses more, besides.

Yes, Castlehaven Community Association celebrates a fantastic 40 year anniversary with a suitably big free party this Sat 1st Aug. 40Fest sees a bumper crop of exactly what you’d expect: live music, great food and drinks, workshops and kids fun, craft stall and all the rest, spilling out across their fantastic park and surrounds all afternoon.

Back in 1985, the current rolling green hillocks of the park, its enviable sports pitches, horticultural gardens and the main boat-like multi-use buildings were little more than a derelict piano warehouse beside a WWII bomb-flattened piece of land, known all-too evocatively by locals at the time as ‘the tarmac’.

The organisation that carved out a home here has managed to navigate the dire austerity challenge through a mix of Camden’s enviably diverse set of funding sources, plus the total dedication of generations of local residents. One look at the green space, the top facilities and busy regular sessions taking place there reveals the real world impact of whole lot of love.

Such provision should be the right of every community, everywhere, and the fact that it’s is so often missing or hollowed out does not reflect well on the priorities of Late Stage Capitalist governments one bit. It is encouraging to see the new PM immediately pledging a proportion of his salary to a social facility rather like this up in his new Makerfield constituency, but it’s going to take a whole lot more work.

Author Emma Warren, who I spoke to recently at the new Museum of Youth Culture which is just down the road from Castlehaven, has become one of the UK’s most vocal advocates for these physical grassroots spaces. She sees them as having been the engine rooms for British culture, particularly where working class and immigrant communities had formative chances to make new music, dance together or simply hang out in a blessedly unstructured way a few times a week.

As her book on the subject, Up The Youth Club, (released this month in paperback) reveals, just as teen identities are being forged in these places, diverse groups are thrust into close proximity, which has undoubtedly helped to birth some of the UK’s globally celebrated culture, hybrid fashions and music such as drum & bass, UK garage and grime.

Without such space to meet others, today’s online silos risk stifling or at very least blanding out future cultural production, let alone robbing young people of some of the simple, non-transactional pleasures of the fleeting, idle days youth.

These centres are also a natural home for now all-too-rare intergenerational interactions, as those up at the other end of life’s fragile spectrum can also be encountered in healthy number, too. As first books, then the fall of organised religion, the coming of computers, and now AI increasingly serve to devalue the status of our elders - the wise women/men previously respected as the keepers of all the knowledge - it feels vital that younger people get a chance to chat to them in a respectful and potentially eye-opening way. We really do need to hold that space.

How is it even comprehendible that such vast cultural value has been stripped bare by the cutting of over 70% of funding in a mere decade and a half? What on earth have we lost? And, perhaps the more important question: how different would our creative and social landscape look right now if grassroots spaces were bestowed with same kind of riches and ambition as the industries they ultimately sustain?

But all this just makes the pockets of community centres that survive today that much more impressive and important.

This Saturday at Castlehaven will be a celebration of community spirit in the face of the numerous ongoing challenges out there. It’s also testament to the way that gathering together to learn things, play things or simply do nothing much in particular, will always land a massive positive impact - if it just has the simple resources required for these human essentials to be nurtured and to take place at all.

🎭 Camden Fringe show choice dilemmas? Help is at hand!

The epic month of 440+ exciting new shows in venues right across the borough has just kicked off, raising the question: how on earth do you sift through all that talent to find something guaranteed to delight you?

We’ve (hopefully) solve it here at Camdenist - by introducing the Camden Fringe Advisor, a knowledgeable chat service where you can input a theme you enjoy or mood that takes you, perhaps a favourite venue or a wildcard topic that might open your eyes to something exciting and new.

The agent then scans through all the shows in a flash and makes recommendations tailored just for you. Then go deeper into conversation to find out more, and when you’re done, hit the link for tickets direct from the official Camden Fringe website. Let us know what you think…

ASK THE FRINGE ADVISOR ANYTHING HERE

📩 Did you get a Community invite?

If you read Camdenist regularly, interact with the polls and links, or are a premium supporter, you may well have received a VIP invite to be among the first people to join our special community experiment. Check your inbox!

Once the early founders have helped shape the experience, we’ll open it up to a few more of you at a time, giving you access to special offers, social drinks invites and the chance to have a real say in how we celebrate and enjoy culture here in the Borough.

Meanwhile, here’s a question for all of you…

📊 This week’s One-Click Poll

If you get an invite to the Camdenist Community, which of these early channels would you be most interested in reading/participating in?

Tipoffs - a place to share any local offers, freebies and deals you’ve spotted with others

The Hive Mind - where we question, debate and plan exciting new things for Camdenist

Social Perks - special events and favourite places for us to meet-up in real life

As ever, do leave a comment with your vote, some of which will be included next week…

📊 Last week’s results & comments

Last week, ahead of sending out the first invites, I asked: Do you think being part of a more active online Camdenist community might be an exciting new way to engage with people and place?

Yes! I’d be keen to sign up and be an early adopter
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 45%

No! I’m quite happy sticking with just the weekly newsletter
🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 17%

Maybe! I’d be curious to see if it feels useful/rewarding and fun to use
🟨🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️ 38%

And some of your comments…

🗣️ “I really like your idea and excited to see what it could be, anything that fosters belonging in our fractured and disparate times is welcome in my book! ”

🗣️ “I really like the collaboration of this newsletter, and being or becoming deaf blind, and recent years it makes me feel like I’m part of Camden again I’m not so far away after all thank you for all that you’re doing.”

🗣️ “I think Camdenist is great, and would be delighted to be an early adopter as it will hopefully mean more involvement for me with it’s constructive, positive energy.💫”

🗣️ “I do love the newsletter, and I fit in reading it with a coffee in my Friday morning break. I’m not sure if I’ll get the time to probe deeper, it depends a lot on what subjects are raised.”

🗣️ “I have long been a fan of ultra local on-line groups, they have the potential to bring people together and build community. During COVID I set up a street WhatsApp group - it is still going and our road has become the friendliest place I have ever lived by some margin. The difficulty is stopping it becoming another Nextdoor which has become a cesspool of negativity. My suggestions would be to have local subgroups (possibility based on ward boundaries) with local admins and experiment with local events like pup socials to enable people to connect in the real world. I would be happy to input into this project!”

🗣️ “Let’s see where this takes us...”

🍭 Limited edition lollies and an intergenerational climb are all popping-up at King’s Cross

I took a trip to Lewis Cubitt Square yesterday to see their rather fun mid-summer pop-up, which offers something to do that’s free, arty and good for you, plus a little treat to try afterwards.

First designed for the Venice Architecture Biennale to address issues around urban space provision and access for children (interesting in the context of today’s lead story), Playframe has also been to the Glastonbury Festival in the years since, and now arrives in King’s Cross throughout August.

It gives climbers - of any age - a chance to scale its beguiling bars, upwards towards a kind of crows nest platform on top, offering an unusual aspect for peering into the windows of Meta HQ and down upon the al fresco tables of Mare St Market.

When you’ve got thoroughly sweaty doing that, look out for the next multisensory attraction available from the stall selling special limited-edition sculptural ice lollies, by artisan ice cream maker Araw.

I tried the purple ube and cheescake variety, (pictured in the lead image above) which is shaped like Coal Drops Yard’s ‘kissing’ roofs, and is a decadent little flavour-bomb on a stick, with a buttery finish. It was hard to say no to trying another one, especially as it offered the equally exotic flavour combination of pandan and mango trifle. I love pandan, and this was heavily infused with it, without any unwelcome over-sweetness from the mango either, resulting in a brilliantly refreshing and unexpected little snack - shaped like a dinosaur from the neighbouring Lightroom’s current prehistoric creatures show, to boot.

Araw’s founder, Keziah Manluctao, was on hand to serve the iced creations herself, bringing the flavours of the Philippines, Singapore and Malaysia to the fore in place of the usual mint choc chip or rum and raisin selections. They are a welcome reason to travel there this coming month, (and look out for an announcement of 100 free lollies up for grabs one day soon, which will be flagged up via the KX socials)…

King’s Cross was absolutely jumping in the blazing sun, even on a weekday lunchtime, with kids splashing on the Granary Square fountains ‘beach’ and all beanbags firmly occupied at the Everyman’s free cinema screen on the canal steps. We’ll be back for the kickoff of the beloved Summer Sounds concert programme in a couple of weeks too.

CAMDEN CURATED

Things I think you’re going to find particularly rewarding to try out this week

FESTIVAL: 🎺 Our friends at Save Our Scene and the Music Venues Trust are helping the legendary venue Ronnie Scott’s put on a totally free Street Party on Frith Street, on Sat 1st Aug. Two outdoor stages will showcase the likes of Blue Lab Beats, Daniel Casimir Big Band, Shae Universe, Guvna B, Summer Pearl, NEONE the Wonderer, GRAMN. and masses more.

STAGE:🎭Camden residents whose experiences of loneliness and temporary accommodation inspired a new play will take to the stage to perform it themselves tonight, Fri 31 Jul-Sat 1st Aug, alongside professional actors. Dragonflies is the latest show in Hampstead Theatre’s ENGAGE programme launched after Camden’s 2024 State of the Borough Report found that 36.3% of adults experience loneliness some, most or all the time - the highest rate of any London borough. The play explores grief, resilience, belonging and the importance of the places that bring communities together.

FESTIVAL: 🌏 It’s the fifth edition of Regent’s Roots festival on Sat 1at Aug, bringing together the melting pot of cultures based around Euston’s Old Diorama Arts Centre for performances including Ukrainian folk songs, a ukulele band, majorettes, a South Asian heritage parade and masses of stalls with advice, things to do and food from Drummond Street’s many brilliant restaurants.

FOOD: 🍞The prolific spread of new branches of Sourdough Sophia shows no sign of abating, with the latest just opened in lovely urban oasis Neal’s Yard, in deepest Covent Garden. They’ve taken over what was previously The Barbary Next Door.

FESTIVAL: 🏛️ It’s the fabulous little Cally Clock Tower Festival on Sun 2nd Aug in Caledonian Park, celebrating the amazing heritage of the park and the livestock market that was there before it with tours, live music, bars, a dog zone and a woodland amphitheatre for classical music.

MUSIC: 🔊 There’s An Afternoon of Indie unashamed hits at the outdoor Camden Courtyard (behind the ‘Leccie Ballroom) on Sat 1st Aug for an over 30s crowd keen to relive their years of 70s punk, 80s new wave, 90s Britpop and beyond. Feeling Gloomy & Old School Indie DJ go back-to-back through until 9pm.

NIGHTLIFE: 🪩KOKO is the place to celebrate influential label Rhythm Section hitting 15 years old with founder and in-demand spinner Bradley Zero manning the turntables all night long tonight, Fri 31st Jul.

ART: 🧑🏼‍🎨 The Free Will Prison are behind the latest show at the Farsight Gallery, Beyond The Third Wave bringing together twelve leading contemporary artists whose work has become central to the conversation around politics, media, and visual culture in Britain, from Peter Kennard, to Cold War Steve, and Council Baby to Melville, the exhibition examines the visual and emotional landscape of the country in the aftermath of successive political and social crises. PV is on Thurs 6th Aug and the free show runs to 24th Aug.

CINEMA: 🎞️ Summer screens are seemingly everywhere, but a special one looks to be the Council’s own free open air silent cinema pop-up, slap bang in the middele of Camden High St on Thurs 6th Aug. Of the three films being shown, of most interest to culturally-minded locals will be Shane Meadows 2008 comedy-drama Somers Town, which is on at 6.50pm.

As his short tenure in the top job comes to a somewhat terse handbrake stop, here’s a snap of Camden’s own Sir Keir taken in happier Prime Ministerial times; opening Google’s local AI Campus, back in 2024.

The pace of change these days might best be described as ‘fast-and-only-getting-faster’, with our penchant for churning through leaders just one such manifestation of today’s dizzying clip. (How long do you give plucky newbie Andy, then?)

Among the very few things everyone agrees on right now though, is that the accelerant for this hyper-transitional and polarising rollercoaster is largely down to the latest tech. Specifically, the exponential growth of all things currently badged under the catch-all moniker of ‘AI’.

So, just as the beaming (and back then newish) PM ushered in a long-awaited governmental focus on boosting the UK‘s adoption of such technologies - stating, quite rightly; “we stand in the foothills of a revolution” - it has swiftly come to pass that today’s relentlessly-forwards, attention-lite, tech-driven AI hyper-momentum may well have inadvertently done for dear Camden Keir himself.

Who knew that the white-collar career killer AIs would be coming for those in the very top jobs, too?

And yet, the scare story that these bamboozling-yet-mind-expanding platforms and plugins are going to leave us all twiddling our penniless thumbs due to the lack of meaningful work (in just a few short months from now, apparently) is, I hope, a sales-driven misreading of what today’s next-level industrial revolution is really going to be about.

Why? Well, earlier this week, I went to the swish Town Hall by Bottaccio to see my 18-year-old daughter speak at her graduation ceremony as part of the very first cohort of Google’s Keir-endorsed AI Campus, which is based in Somers Town. It’s been genuinely inspiring for her to have completed this weekly course while at sixth form, [proud dad moment claxon📯], potentially setting the scene for all she goes on to do next.

The nascent programme is, for now, a uniquely Camden opportunity offering free training and barrel-loads of potential to local kids from all backgrounds. In doing this, Google are essentially being good neighbours, improving chances for success for young residents across the swathes of Camden in which the global business has so significantly landed. This outreach, its scale, ambition and impact, is an exceptional thing. Imagine growing up with all that a short walk away.

There were emotional words of thanks given to the Google and Camden Council/Learning teams and their supportive staff for delivering such an ambitious project and - no matter how you might feel about the societal twisting, warping and bending that comes with this new tech - also a genuine positivity around creative/industrial applications of new AI tools, too. We need to hear more of this stuff, as the inevitability of our AI transition trajectory won’t benefit from people resisting, fearing and effectively heading off-grid, off-banking, off-truth and more.

Melanie Eusebe, Director of AI in Society for Google DeepMind, then delivered a sterling speech, revealing her failings as a young student, leading to a dose of parental intervention and how she could not have possibly envisioned her current role back then, as none of it had been invented.

“It’s so hard sometimes,” she said, addressing the students, “as the world has so many stereotypes, tropes and expectations that you’re going to run up against, yet you’ve had no place in defining. I am here to tell you that those are not for you. You are to define your own journey, and to define your own success.”

She was also keen to bring humans to the forefront of this largely bot-centred hot dinner party debate topic. “It’s not just about the technology,” Eusebe carried on, “which is just an enabler of our humanity and the communities in which we form. For everything that you code and for every problem that you solve, remember the human face that is going to feel every single one of your decisions.”

Such rousing sentiment is a far cry from the alpha bravura of the usual Silicon Valley bros, extoling the virtues of automating jobs and erasing human overheads via their all-conquering robot tools. You could, of course, say Melanie has merely imbibed the corporate Kool-Aid. However, events like this one do provide a rare positive lens through which outsiders can view the massive cultural shift ahead of us, and I think that’s hugely important for anyone who doesn’t want to get left behind, forever wallowing in dated digital legacy nostalgia.

Wider, exciting AI can then be revealed as creatively valuable, time-savingly efficient and far less threatening to adopt, rather than just being sneered at as a vehicle for spitting out bland emails responses, terrible LinkedIn updates or generic job applications.

Seeing how much completing the course meant to the students and to the staff who’ve conceived and delivered it, it was impossible not to be moved and enthused by all that goes on here, at the cutting edge of Camden’s Knowledge Quarter. Times may still be damn hard out there, but there really is still so much to go and do - no matter who you are or where you’re approaching this from - if you dive in to opportunities like the Campus.

Refined learning of AI theory, building and prompting practice are the kind of skills everyone will soon want/need, yet now each year, selected Camden school kids get the chance to learn directly from some of the world’s tech experts, for free. What a time and place this is (which is why we celebrate it via this newsletter every week, of course).

The AI Campus project is the kind of tech-led takeover of the near future we should all be behind and proud to have in the area. A model currently being trialled, designed and improved right here, for the benefit of us locals, but with truly global implications. And with Platform 37 on the way later this year, expect more hands-on, eye-opening AI explorations to come for more than just school-aged people, too…

📊 This week’s One-Click Poll

How much does having the likes of Google delivering engagement courses on our doorstep genuinely improve the life-chances of locals?

A lot! There are so many free initiatives and trainings and we are so lucky to have all that here

Not much! Most people see the shiny buildings but don’t really feel they belong inside

A fair bit! Everyone should sign-up to something and learn new skills in AI or anything else. Maybe I will...

As ever, do leave a comment with your vote, some of which will be included next week…

📊 Last week’s results & comments

Last week, when speaking with the founders of 100% independent festival Campo Sancho, I asked: Do festivals really unite us?

Yes! They are a reminder of how much joy humans have together when removed momentarily from the daily grind
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 80%

No! It’s only a temporary feeling, probably an intoxicated one at that
⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 8%

Maybe! But England winning the World Cup? That would be properly unifying
🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 12%

And some of your comments…

🗣️ “It’s no surprise to me that the Acid House generation still want to spread joy. Put your phone down and join in. See you up there!”

🗣️ “Having just come back from one of the few independently owned festivals over here in Spain, I can attest to their unifying and soul restoring powers 😉”

🗣️ “Campo is a magical, small but perfectly formed festival- great lines ups, friendly happy people and great vibes!”

CAMDEN CURATED

What we’d pick to go out and do this week

MUSIC: 🔊 Dutch DJ duo Sunnery James and Ryan Marciano take over KOKO tonight, Fri 17th Jul, for an all-night bash entitled Mid-Summer Part Pt.2 [House & Techno], so you know what to prep for.

DANCE: 💃🏼 It’s been a weekly Wednesday sight at Coal Drops Yard for a long time, but the Cuban dance classes by Rueda Libre have been told they are no longer able to run things in their iconic post-industrial courtyard space. A new direction and ownership of this part of the private KX estate and some strict legal types have put everything on ice, meaning that this week’s event took place directly outside King’s Cross Station (and was suitably epic), where it’s likely to remain until the issues with King’s Cross can be resolved.

FESTIVAL: 🪷 London’s true Carnival sprit drops a few weeks early this Sat 18th Jul as DJs Norman Jay & Melvo Baptieste drop the sunshine arms-aloft selection up at Tileyard Studios all day long, with beer and BBQ from the onsite Two Tribes Brewery.

ART: 🖼️ A thoroughly unusual high-street retail emporium, Transactionland is popping up on the Regent’s Park Estate with a special launch party on Wed 22nd and then daily to Fri 31st Jul, (plus at the Regent’s Roots Festival on 1st Aug). Looking at both ‘The Economy’, and the many other economies, small and large, we interact with every day, it aims to be a brave space for exploring alternatives and having some tongue-in-cheek fun, hosted by artist-turned-shopkeeper Rachael Clerke.

MUSIC:🏯 Japanese pop, jazz, rock, punk, and hip-hop influenced band ATARASHII GAKKO! are set to bring unstoppable energy and boundary-pushing performances to Roundhouse this Sat Jul 19th with high-octane choreography, inventive visuals, and a fearless blend of pop, punk, and Japanese influences.

STAGE: 🎭 Book now to catch one of the four special theatre performances celebrating the local heritage of those who have lived or live in the area at the upcoming Kilburn High Road Festival. It starts on Fri 31st Jul and over 16 days there will be loads of art, live music and performance on Kilburn High Road as well as the new plays at the Kiln Theatre.

ART: 🧑🏼‍🎨 The second edition of the Camden Biennale sees art from every school in the Borough on display at Granary Square’s Lethaby Gallery, plus a 2D sculpture park out front and series of workshops, fairs and activations running through to Sun 26th Jul.

MUSIC: 🌳Composer Graham Fitkin invites ticket-holders for the London premiere of his brand-new project, Treeline, the culmination of his 2,500-mile pan-European cycle tour from Romania back to the UK. There will be an exclusive pre-concert talk, hosted by Ella Lee with Thomas Boughton from City of London’s Epping Forest Charity, all this Thurs 23rd Jul.

FOOD: 🥐 Fast-growing freshly-baked roll, matcha and smoothie outlet Cinnamood have opened their latest spot next to Boxpark on Camden Hight St, serving their celebrated pastries, colourful drinks, desserts and coffees to the crowd heading up the main drag.

Despite what the swivel-eyed political power-seekers and terminally online keyboard warriors might try have us believe, the country can still feel united in a glorious sense of shared multi-layered identity - and I’m not just talking about the football, either.

For this is the season when actual millions of us will go outside and enjoy some version of ‘the festival experience’ - looning it up over a long weekend, probably bedecked in preposterous spangly clothing and definitely getting all kinds of over-excited sharing brilliant, loud music together with strangers-turned-brand-new-friends.

Not all festivals are created equal, of course, and their popularity (over 600 music-focused festis are due to happen in the UK this summer) means the corporates have muscled in on large chunks of the industry, causing much consternation with their extractive practices, which drain a fair bit of the magic out of proceedings in the pursuit of ever-greater profits, a bit like FIFA.

Luckily, unlike the World Cup, such monopolistic operators are far from the only game in town. We still have the option to swerve those fields dominated by vape brand activations, with their lineups skewed in the image of major label priorities.

I have a long, fond 30-something-year history of collaborating with the Sancho Panza party crew, stretching back across the many glorious years they ran one of Notting Hill Carnival’s most lively, lovely soundsystems.

Their annual Campo Sancho festival takes place across the weekend of 23rd-26th Jul, and is still 100% independently-owned, built and run by people you’ll also find out on the dancefloor. It’s only for 1,500 of the very best intergenerational party people, and takes place at a fantastic location surrounded by woodlands, that’s close enough to London to make getting a cab there and back a viable and sensible option.

This week I spoke with founders, DJs, and those aforementioned guys you’re also just as likely to see rigging up the tent as getting in amongst the ravers, Matt Brown and Jimmy K-Tel, about their dedication to creating life-affirming moments of peak summertime joy for their lovely crowd.

Despite the obvious financial and operational challenges, they relish their independent status, for the total creative control it gives them to ensure the event truly delivers - with love.

“Doing carnival for 20 years, we were always trying to get sponsorship and work with various brands to help cover our costs, with mixed success,” says Matt. “For me, the experience tainted working with any kind of outside intervention, because ultimately they want a lot from you and they don’t want to give you much. They cheapen your event, suck the soul out of it, which is always part and parcel of getting involved with a corporate company.”

So instead, they opted to retain full responsibility for launching their own festival back in 2016. It’s a notoriously risky proposition, with all your eggs in one annual weekend basket and where some bad weather, (let alone a cost of living crisis, pandemic or multiple other stress factors), can leave organisers nursing huge losses.

And yet, over the turbulent years since, Campo has gradually grown and thrived. Retaining creative control is undoubtably where the most joy comes from for the guys - and in turn, their loyal crowd. The site is full of people who’ve been raving together for going-on generations, plus plenty of wide-eyed newbies drawn by the incredibly tasty, DJ-heavy lineups.

“I see some of the bigger festivals today as being like shopping centres in the park,” laughs Jim. “They’re brutal in monetising it all, whereas by us being genuinely independent, we’re just focusing on all the things we love. And it’s basically what humans have essentially always done, right? Gathering in the fields to drink gallons of mead and dance in the middle of summer is something that goes back hundreds of years.”

Matt is also happy to point out that keeping things small and manageable works on many levels. “It’s really important for us that we enjoy the event as much as anyone else,” he smiles. “I’ve been to enough big festivals to know that if you have too many stages, the grass is always greener and you end up traipsing about a lot, which doesn’t interest us. More stages also means you have to sell more tickets, the infrastructure costs go up and you’re into a whole different ballgame.”

That said, they introduced a popular third stage to their site last year, Upwoods, a woodland clearing where the mighty party, A Love From Outer Space, lands for a 9-hour immersive session as one major highlight for 2026. It has also allowed them to dabble in including some live shows, when previously the event was all about the DJs.

The DJ duo and their trusted team build up and break down the entire site themselves each year, too, “it’s one of the best bits!” reveals Matt of the camaraderie. “It’s very much part of the festival and is an amazing experience for everyone involved setting the whole thing up. The pack downs are not quite as much fun, but we know all that from the years at carnival. This is just a bigger version of doing our stage there.”

Alongside booking the artists themselves too, its where the creativity at the heart of the operation can shine through, in the little touches of art and fun that pepper proceedings across the weekend.

Their carnival sound, and now Campo, are also renowned for being where premium speaker manufacturer Funktion One debuts their latest kit, with legendary owner, Tony Andrews, often to be spotted getting equally as armpit-deep in fine-tuning the rig as Matt and Jim are in building the infrastructure. This is a place where people fully dedicated to their creative impulses come to shine.

I suppose that’s why I’ve always been so drawn to their unbelievable carnival stage, never-ending stream of Thames boat parties and now the growth of something very special in the fields. There’s something about all this that requires unusual locations, spaces that can be utterly transformed for collective euphoria, which always eventually leads us back into the fields, as ever it was.

“We’ve done warehouses, streets and boats, and had club residencies,” says Jim, “but we’ve never been that motivated by running club nights.” Instead, they can draw upon the likes of international DJ royalty like Laurent Garnier (returning this year to play a special disco set on the Saturday night), or the Balearic all-star gathering of Pete Herbert, Nancy Noise, Phil Mison and Andy Wilson at the Music for Swimming Pools curated stage, simply because everyone knows the festival is going to be honest to the pure spirit of raving.

In our secular times, such gatherings have a particularly vital significance, one that shouldn’t be corrupted by cash in the way the big herd events inevitably do. Here in the trees is where you’ll find that magic in plentiful supply.

“We’re offering day tickets, to make Campo as available to everyone as possible,” says Jim, about the ability to drop in on the day/night of your choice, too. “We don’t want to make any aspect of it feel prohibitive.”

And as Matt adds, “you come out of the weekend feeling good about humanity again, which is really important. It’s tough financially for everyone out there, as we well know, but that’s got to be worth a few quid.”

Having been to the first few Campos with my then young kids in the early years, a dastardly series of covid and clashes have resulted in a gap, but I’m beyond excited to be heading back this year (with the kids now helping as part of the team).

Back when we launched Camdenist as a one-off post-lockdown print edition (remember that?) we also ran a very popular ticket competition with the festival. So let’s do that again - and I look forward to dancing with the winners in a field just an hour’s drive away from Camden in a couple of weeks time 🙂

Win 2 x tickets to Campo Sancho 2026

To be in with a chance of scooping 2 x free adult camping tickets to the festival, valid from Fri 23rd - Sun 26th Jul 2026, all you have to do is reply to this email saying in one sentence why you’d love to be there. We’ll pick a blind winner from the answers on Thursday 16th July.

Prize value is not transferable and does not include travel. Over 18s only. Usual Camdenist Ts&Cs apply. Good luck!

📊 This week’s One-Click Poll

Do festivals really unite us?

Yes! They are a reminder of how much joy humans have together when removed momentarily from the daily grind

No! It’s only a temporary feeling, probably an intoxicated one at that

Maybe! But England winning the World Cup? That would be properly unifying

As ever, do leave a comment with your vote, some of which will be included next week…

📊 Last week’s results & comments

Last week, when reflecting on the increasing number of people provoking scenes to video for their socials, I asked: If you see a fight or argument on the street, do you film it?

Yes! The footage can be useful if things turn nasty and it democratises news if the story is important
⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 6%

No! It’s ethically dubious to reach for a phone, especially if it’s done for viral clout or money
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 82%

Maybe! With CCTV and things like smart glasses, we’re all pretty much on camera all the time anyway, so what does it matter?
🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 12%

And some of your comments…

🗣️ “It’s ethically dubious. But that is because I am ‘older’ and know that it is not in our interests to be hoodwinked by silicone valley and all that it entails... ”

🗣️ “When will we all re-learn not to view every event through our camera phone and just live?! I fear that so-called ‘smart’ glasses are going to make this worse, when pretty much everyone is filming everything all the time - how boring can so much extreme navel-gazing and creepy perma-surveillance make us before we kick back?”

🗣️ “Videoing people fighting on the street can be dangerous. It risks prompting them to attack you.”

🗣️ “It’s already a case with CCTV that so much of our mundane moments are being recorded I don’t really see this as anything different, it’s those people creating fake or even AI content just to go viral that need to be shamed into stopping, but I don’t think they will.”

CAMDEN CURATED

Free parties, football & local theatre

Mikey Dread of Channel One Soundsystem

FESTIVAL: 🎶 This Sat 11th Jul the mighty free Somers Town Festival returns to Chalton St and surrounds with the legendary soulstress P P Arnold the musical headliner on a massive bill of local and international talent across 4 stages. There’s also a big South American dance parade, Irish and Bangladeshi dancing too, DJs and street food stalls at one of the borough’s best summer bashes.

MUSIC: 🔊 Grab one of the final tickets quick if you love earth-shattering dub and reggae, as the Electric Ballroom’s Camden Courtyard outdoor space is back with a special appearance by the Channel One Soundsystem this Sat 11th Jul all afternoon, with top Caribbean food traders doing the firey BBQ business.

FOOTBALL:⚽ Saturday’s big quarter final is showing everywhere, of course, but some venues have the power to augment the experience in more attractive ways than others. So if you fancy decent air con, a proper big screen and celebrating (🤞🏼) to the sound of classic indie anthems before and after the match (until 3am, in fact) then the joyfully reborn Barfly is hosting a free World Cup screening and indie disco takeover Sat 11th Jul.

DANCE: 💃🏼 After many lively years on Brick Lane, Cuban dance class supremos Rueda Libre now bring their Sambroso Sundays to Chalk Farm’s The Dark Horse every week. This Sun 12th Jul you can learn the steps from 4pm with their talented dance instructor Maikel Mota, and then it’s cocktails and DJ Javier La Máquina De Cuba all night long.

FESTIVAL: 🪷 It’s also the return of Camden Mela in the local free community festis calendar this Sun 12th Jul, showcasing the Borough’s proud far-reaching diversity once again, this time with masses of South East Asian foods, live entertainment, arts and crafts and kids activities at the lovely oasis of Coram’s Fields.

STAGE: 🎭 Book now to catch one of the four special theatre performances celebrating the local heritage of those who have lived or live in the area at the upcoming Kilburn High Road Festival. It starts on Fri 31st Jul and over 16 days there will be loads of art, live music and performance on Kilburn High Road as well as the new plays at the Kiln Theatre.

VIDEO OF THE WEEK

A few months back I did an Instagram live interview with Laurent Garnier, who plays at Campo Sancho’s Snare & Hi Hat tent on Sat 25th Jul right after the equally fabulous selector Luke Una. So the two of them having a similar digital exchange this week makes for a great watch in the spirit of this week’s focus on the festival. See you there….

We all agree that urban life is made bearable, no desirable by the quirkier independent spots, right?

The places that ooze so much character you get a little jolt of excitement whenever you walk past, and are guaranteed a wholly satisfying cultural experience whenever you venture in through the doors.

But, beloved as these places are, we’re really not very good at protecting them. Their existence in today’s market-driven economy is always precarious, (at best), and all too many have been lost, even after putting up a good fight.

Looking back, I realise I’ve written about threats to the survival of MAP Studio Cafe for 15 years, now. From licencing issues to spiralling maintenance costs, Covid to post-pandemic crowdfunding, the challenges - and the valiant muddling through - have rarely let up.

As a result, hundreds of musicians have continued to cut their teeth there despite it all; a place which offers them space to rehearse, record and then play live to a room, often for the first time, and often before going on to achieve great things as their careers take off.

As visionary owner Chris Townsend reeled off to me this week, MAP has helped launch the likes of Nubya Garcia, Ms Dynamite, Roots Manuva, Dawn Penn, Wet Leg, Sam Smith, Geordie Greep, Sorry and masses more; is a home for new DJ talent at the hip hop station Itch Radio, and has worked with literally thousands of young people over the decades to fire up their creative instincts.

Perched on a corner in deepest Kentish Town since 1990, MAP is the epitome of the kind of vibrant, authentic community hub that is the envy of numerous anodyne neighbourhoods elsewhere.

And yet, at it’s latest annual free street party profiling local bands last Sunday, the signs with QR codes leading to a Change.org petition revealed that this anchor of live music and social interaction is threatened once more.

Camden’s licencing officers have requested 10 conditions need to be met, 8 of which Chris says he can absolutely manage. It’s the cost of significant soundproofing and refurbishment requirements that are simply not an option in the current stretched climate.

So an all-too-familiar story is playing out. According to the CNJ, one particular neighbour has lodged no less than 42 noise complains about the venue in 12 months.

The sound of jazz wafting out over the roof terrace and the hum of excited chatter of people catching a breath outside give me joy whenever I encounter them, walking to my own nearby home. But the cheek-by-jowl nature of London living is still weighted heavily towards residents that do not like that one bit.

In the same month the Mayor of London set his sights on fighting the Soho Society’s ludicrous blanket opposition to any new or extended licencing in what was once the heart of the capital’s nightlife, the battle is still being fought at the coalface elsewhere.

Over East in our sister publication, The Wick, I’m currently writing an ongoing series about the threat that the thousands of additional residents about to populate new-build developments pose to the established nightlife venues that sit right next door. And ways things might be done differently this time around.

The Mayor’s own Nightlife Taskforce have recommended that the much-vaunted but still fairly toothless ‘Agent of Change’ principle - which should prevent incoming residents threatening existing nighttime venues - be strengthened to avoid single households having the disproportionate power to shut venues fully enjoyed by thousands.

Meanwhile, MAP Studio Cafe has to navigate onerous licencing conditions as it is, such as being compelled to serve food with all drinks, and only having four people standing outside at once, a regulation that creates the bizarre ritual of audiences being held back behind a locked door, rather than leaving immediately after a show.

A previous period of temporary closure (for refurbishments in 2014) is being held up by officials as proof that the ‘grandfather clause’, which protects long-established continuous operations in venues, does not apply to MAP.

But from establishing the 20-year-old Alma Street Fair to navigating shifts in technology, music, gentrification and licensing in this very spot for more than 30 years, that argument is an insulting use of a dubious technicality.

While Sadiq Khan prioritises saving London’s beleaguered, beloved venues, other parts of the local government system don’t seem to have got the memo.

“On Friday, council officers could walk in and decide that MAP Studio Cafe’s way of operating – the same way it has for decades – is no longer acceptable,” says Chris, over the current threat.

“We’re not asking to break the rules. We’re asking for rules that actually work in real life. And asking us to limit to four people to outside isn’t really human, it’s not really functional. You can make it up as a rule, but it’s just nonsense. It doesn’t work.”

The studios and facilities continue to thrive, but losing the cafe and the intimate live venue would be a proper hammer blow for so many different sections of the community, and financially could, in turn, cripple the rest of the 30-year-old operation, too.

Surely it shouldn’t be this hard, with all the goodwill and ambitious words finally being spoken by those in power, to ensure these unique spots aren’t always looking over their shoulder for the next existential challenge?

We’ll be watching closely, and do get in touch with your ideas, too…

📊 This week’s One-Click Poll

Who should foot the bill for grassroots venues like MAP Studio Cafe to keep operating under realistic licencing?

Grants, fundraising and/or Council support - these places run on love, rarely profit, so need help

The venues - it’s tough out there, but they need to find their own way to operate within the rules

The objectors - if you don’t like the noise but don’t want to move, become part of the solution

As ever, please leave your comments after voting (or simply reply to this email) to join in the debate in next week’s edition…

📊 Last week’s results & comments

Last week, alongside the interview with her beloved bassist and band leader, I re-asked this poll question from 2023: What do you think about the ongoing popularity of retelling the Amy Winehouse story and her place in Camden’s history?

Love it. Amy was amazing so no wonder people can’t get enough.
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 56%

Drop it. It was a tragedy but it all happened a long time ago and people are just trading on her name now.
🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 22%

Not fussed. Any celeb who gets that big gets attention, that’s just the way things are.
🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 22%

The upshot of running the poll again? Very similar results to before, but even more in the ‘can’t get enough’ camp - as the Amy torch only seemingly burns brighter with the years.

Here are some of your comments…

🗣️ “Why wouldn’t it be ongoing, she was so unique! A massive talent.”

🗣️ ““She was, and is, genuinely amazing… once stood right next to her, outside Camden Sainsbury’s… Just a legendary musical presence✨”

🗣️ “People associate Camden with Amy so it’s an unstoppable force that will bring people here for years to come”

🗣️ “OK, maybe I’m biased, as Amy lived on our street, but her amazing voice plus the genius of her songwriting ability do make her really quite unique. My favourite tracks are just her and an acoustic guitar (sorry band!), with nowhere to hide they just show how powerful her voice is. My favourite track though is her cover of Carol King’s ‘Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow’, not many covers are better than the (fabulous) original, but this is.

☀️ More hot stuff from this hot week

On the flipside of all that talk about officious Council licencing hoop-jumping, Camden is one local authority that really does know how to throw a decent party.

This year’s free Windrush Homecoming celebration was another genuine slice of what makes the Borough great. A free day out for the myriad different folks and strokes that live here, demonstrating what happily multicultural communities look like, no matter what the shouty divisive commentators might try and tell us.

When Wookie dropped UK Garage or Paulette Tajah sung Lovers Rock, respect to the lineage of these sounds was duly paid, yet you could see that absolutely every local felt ownership of the music, and the rich cultural fusion that Windrush era immigration has brought to all our lives.

🪰 Another flipside in local grassroots music venue news also happened this week, with the return of the Barfly to Chalk Farm Rd. Another day, another joyful musical celebration, as punk folk troubadour Frank Turner entertained us for an early session having just unveiled hive very own blue plaque commemorating the fact on the wall outside.

The new team behind the venue are taking it back into independent hands, bucking all sorts of trends for the better, while also being determined to carry on the small-room career-incubator legend that bringing the old name back firmly implies.

One of the co-owners is Chris McCormack, who once ran the neighbourhood-wide Camden Rocks festivals, and he even hinted to Shortlist that the venue might be at the centre of a revived version of the festi at some point in future.

❓The torturously slow mission to make Camden Town tube station fit for the modern era has already dragged on for over two decades. Meanwhile, while it does retain a certain familiarity and charm for generations of locals and gig-goers, the endless mini closures due to overcrowding at weekends are embarrassing and turn it into a virtual no-go area at times for locals.

Yet TfL has no immediate plans (i.e money) to finally uncork the infamous bottleneck, which sees Boxpark on one of the required sites until at least 2032, and Camden Collective enjoying their Buck Street meanwhile home for an unexpectedly extended period, too.

And it’s at that very address that you can find a public exhibition of proposed designs to transform at least the space outside of the station, sooner rather than later.

Make an Entrance Open Week is a four-day exploration of emerging designs, proposals and ideas for the area known as Britannia Junction, running Mon 29th Jun - Thurs 2nd Jul, with a programme of free creative workshops, talks and interactive activities throughout the week.

⚽ With football’s domination of the public discourse only going to grow in the days ahead, men’s wellbeing community org Man v Fat is looking to gauge interest in setting up a Camden chapter of their popular football league. It provides a welcoming environment for men looking to loose weight and play sport, with weekly weight loss results counting towards each teams’ points in the league, too. Register to show you’re potentially interested in bringing Man v Fat to Camden now.

🍺 With the sudden shock closure of historic West Hampstead pub The Alliance a few days ago, supporters have put together a bid to protect the site as a pub via an Asset of Community Value designation, to ensure it can’t be simply converted into flats. To find out more and lend your support to the cause, visit savethealliance.org

CAMDEN CURATED

A few suggestions from the midsummer many

MUSIC: 🫶🏼 Sticking firmly with the theme, another of our area’s big free summer parties, the annual Dig It Soundsystem Parli Hill Bandstand bash, takes place this Sun 28th Jun. It’s an afternoon affair this year, running 1pm-6pm instead of the usual sundown slot, with an afters over at the Dartmouth Arms until much later, of course. As Dig It’s Dan Carrier told me the other day, getting people dancing with wild abandon in the daytime is a whole different skill, but something he has no concern they will achieve.

FESTIVAL: 🪁 Sun 28th is also the day the Kite Society of Great Britain fly loads of kites from the top of Parliament Hill in the afternoon, so check those out while wheeling your liquid picnic over to the bandstand.

CLUB: 🔊 The life of DJ Paul ‘Trouble’ Anderson takes place day-into-night with a free party at Lockside Lounge on Sun 28th Jun. The venue, then known at HQ’s, was where Paul played over 400 Wednesday night sessions from 1992-2000 at his legendary night, The Loft. It’s being celebrated by his friends and family with an all-star line-up of DJ and live music talent.

FESTIVAL: 🌏 With current temperatures clearly defining the problems we face, the annual Earthfest 2026 community day takes place all day Sat 27th Jun at the Aga Khan Centre King’s Cross. Its a free, family-focused day that aims to inspire positive climate action via a programme of expert talks, events, and activities.

ART: 🎨 Never ones to rest on their laurels, the meanwhile gallery experts Hypha Studios have just added to their line-up of dedicated art spaces, which already include the old Palace Cinema in Kentish Town and the old Euston Tower at Warren St. The new gallery is in a vacant block between the Tate Modern and Borough Market, and opened last night.

MUSIC: 🏴‍☠️ And a final mention for the UKs glorious grassroots venues this week is a reminder to join the national Everywhere At Once initiative, taking place right across this, the usual Glastonbury weekend. For a local gig, try donning some pirate garb and listening to sea shanties, traditional folk music and pirate merriment at Aces and Eights on Sat 28th Jun with Frankie Heartless and the Heartless Rogues.

STAGE: 🎭 Nights like these really scream Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre, and you’ll find a highlight seasonally appropriate production of A Midsummer Nights Dream running there until 18th Jul - just remember the sunscreen if you are going to a matinee.

The original Amy Winehouse Band are today’s torchbearers for her live performance legacy.

Next month marks 15 years since the singer’s untimely death, and it’s the 20th anniversary of her epic breakthrough album, Back To Black, later in the year, too.

Consequently, the band have never been so busy. But Amy’s long-time musical director, confidant and bassist, Dale Davis, (third from right in the pic above) still found the time to speak to Camdenist this week.😏

As regular readers will know, I’m a little wary of the way that, in this era of indefatigable Instagram bucket lists, ‘brand Amy’ is so often reduced to a local gravy train of knockoff merch, pub cover versions, touristy tours and a queue for a photo opp by the statue.

Her legacy and stunning music catalogue deserve a better kind of reverence than all that commercial grubbing, while ‘brand Camden’ must also be careful about wistfully/lazily looking backwards to rely on safe former glories, as opposed to looking forwards, taking creative risks, and helping foster the next big musical thing, right here.

But you can’t argue with the authenticity of Dale and the rest of the band, who are genuinely continuing the thread from where Winehouse herself tragically left off.

“There are a lot of tribute acts out and they’re all trying to steal a march,” says Dale of the hungry and plentiful competition, “but they can’t take away what we have. Between us, we all knew Amy and spent a lot of time with her, and we can still give that when we play to an audience.

“When people come up to us afterwards, they’re talking to the band who’ve all had connection with Amy, which is so important for them. Then, with the younger generation, who’ve picked up on her through the Back to Black film - some of whom wouldn’t even have been born when Amy was around - our show is the closest opportunity they can get to seeing something like her own live performances.”

It’s a compelling argument, even for a slight cynic like me, and sold out annual Christmas performances at classic Camden venues Koko and Roundhouse have proved there’s still masses of love for their show, something I don’t think a simple covers band could possibly deliver at such scale.

“We still do it just as Amy did it,” Dale says, proudly. “She was very natural in the way she performed, and we like to keep it like that. We don’t use backing tracks, and we also keep the music pretty much as it was. Sure we do a few variations, but we keep to the spirit of things - if we make too many changes, we’d lose that connection.”

I ask him how he thinks that Winehouse sound might have developed, had it had the chance over more recent years. Of course, even in her day, Amy was an artist who gleefully updated and owned the sounds of the 50s and 60s, so does he think she might have followed someone like Madonna, and leapt upon musical trends emerging from the clubs and online culture, to draw upon new sounds in the quest to remain perma-relevant, too?

“That’s very interesting,” he laughs, “as the difference between Madonna and Amy is the actual musicality. You know, Madonna sounds the same on every song. But Amy just had this rare ability to captivate every time. She could sing with an orchestra, and then on her own with a guitar the next moment. She was that comfortable as she was genuinely a great musician, so I bet she’d have had the capability to sound just as good over something more electronic, if she had chosen to.”

For those local that can remember, Amy Winehouse was indeed regularly to be seen carousing through the streets and pubs of Camden Town, just as her folklore suggests. But Dale is frustrated that some of the thornier elements of her received history are just plain wrong, having been twisted into convenient narratives over the years since her death. “I suppose when someone has that much coverage, and its a difficult time for women in the media spotlight in the first place, it’s inevitable,” he muses. “However, I do think people now put her up there with the greats, alongside the likes of Bob Marley, Kurt Cobain and artists like that. Ones who’s careers were cut short, but have still had a massive impact. And that’s absolutely right.”

As the band prepare to return the North London for their first proper local festival performance, at the Kaleidoscope all-dayer next month up at Ally Pally, he also reveals a lesser-known impact of Camden’s most celebrated, tragically missed daughter.

“When she moved in to that big house in Camden Square, they suddenly cleaned up that whole area,” he says. “I remember that Square well from beforehand, and you could really see the change. I remember thinking, wow, she’s like royalty.”

Then, and perhaps even more so now.

🎺 The Amy Winehouse Band play at the Kaleidoscope Festival in Alexandra Palace Park on Sat 11th Jul, alongside Rudimental, Groove Armada, Roni Size, MJ Cole, Black Grape and loads more. Tickets and more info here.

📊 This week’s One-Click Poll

Two years ago, when the Back to Black movie dropped, with Camden Town as its atmospheric backdrop, I pondered the credibility and cliches that accompanied all the international interest - and also ran a poll about it, when returns below. Let’s see if the results have changed much in the period since, so do let me know with your vote…

What do you think about the ongoing popularity of retelling the Amy Winehouse story and her place in Camden’s history?

Love it. Amy was amazing so no wonder people can’t get enough

Drop it. It was a tragedy but it all happened a long time ago and people are just trading on her name now.

Not fussed. Any celeb who gets that big gets attention, that’s just the way things are.

As ever, please leave your comments after voting (or simply reply to this email) to join in the debate in next week’s edition…

📊 Last week’s results & comments

Last week, following my polemic about noticing kindness and courtesy I asked: How’s your faith in society/humanity holding up right now?

I’m pleased to see that a majority of readers maintain a positive outlook, which has got to be the best approach, right?

Ok! We have so many challenges, but the people I meet are generally muddling along fine🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 51%

Could be better! I’m concerned that things only seem to get more divided
🟨🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️ 41%

Shot! There’s no hope, it’s all a total mess so I’m tuning out
🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 8%

And some of your comments…

🗣️ “I just keep reminding myself that most people are kind, but many are very stressed too, so it doesn’t always show. Some are not nice, but there’s not a lot I can do about that, so I try not to worry about them.”

🗣️ “‘Trying Times’ is the title of James Blake’s new album… aptly named, but beautiful and full of hope, which is how I like to be: glass half full at all times. That said, there’s some terrible behaviour going on (and that’s an understatement). Maybe it all has to be very broken before people raise their voices, compassionately and harmoniously, to fix it… ❤️✨”

🗣️ “I’m always struck by how kind helpful people are, even in this busy city. Most people seem to enjoy being helpful, given the chance.”

Development battles - and AI developments

There are plenty of major development projects rumbling slowly onwards (and certainly upwards) in the Borough right now. And where there’s a computer rendered vision of a multi-storey tower or three, there’s also almost certain to be some local resistance, too.

I’m generally open-minded to proposals that reimagine our more underused or crumbling plots, particularly when there’s a pro-culture carrot at the end of the developer’s stick. But these projects are damn complex to deliver, and broken promises litter the landscape where commercial realities trump early optimistic glossy ideals.

It was interesting to see so many locals turn against the Camden Film Quarter - which was approved this week, but only by a strikingly close margin - once the scale of their vertical studios concept and Council-required housing units were revealed.

However, I can’t help but remain excited by the promised transformation of the dull Regis Rd area, which has cut Kentish Town in two for decades, into a cultural powerhouse of production and training. Perhaps we will end up bitterly, depressingly disappointed at some point in the future, perhaps the digging and traffic will be truly unbearable long before that, but a neighbourhood like Kentish Town has been in a constant industrial evolution ever since the Midland Railway first carved up this very land in the 1860’s.

If ambitious creative production is to be the next phase of that, well it beats the no-access triangle that we have right now. It’s right that local concerns are voiced, and pressure applied to the more problematic elements of the scheme, but my optimism isn’t dimmed.

Meanwhile, new plans for neighbouring Murphy’s Yard, (the originals of which were roundly rejected for being far too bulky and towery by vocal residents a few years back) are to be unveiled next week at a series of consultations in three nearby locations.

The customary postcard came through the door about this a while ago, but it seems to have been thrown out at our house, and when I went to look up details online to include them here, they are nowhere to be found. Even the AI was flummoxed.

Such consultations are always seemingly desperate to connect with new, younger residents, and not just the same old forums and interest groups, and yet they make it almost impenetrable for a real variety of people to even want to participate. Camden Film Quarter have been very good at their community outreach, which is certainly one of the factors that has kept me a believer in the plans.

I just spent the day with 30+ other local media organisations looking at ways AI tools can be customised by over-stretched news rooms and independent operators to help - not replace - us humans. It was one of the most positive AI-related dialogues I’ve been part of, with improving ways of finding out what the hell is actually happening on our patches one of the most popular requests.

But if things like consultations, co-design processes and the reasons behind broken promises remain so opaque online, no wonder locals jump to resist seemingly over-ambitious plans that feel like they are parachuted in and may well then fail to deliver.

Those same AI tools can and should be used to transform the creaking consultation process, and ensuring the culture carrot on the stick is central to all the bigger ones. Wouldn’t it be nice if our much-feared LLM overlords could be harnessed to make sure more voices are heard, compromises can be identified and less developer promises can ever be wriggled out from?

CAMDEN CURATED

A brand new free attraction and lots of free street festivals

After a series of faltering starts, including a rather unfortunate basement flooding incident, the Museum of Youth Culture finally opens this Sat 20th Jun. It’s a project that has toured various pop-up locations in London over the years, but this permanent home becomes a world first in celebrating the oft-overlooked but culturally pivotal history of how young people have expressed their creativity over the decades through music, fashion and shared social spaces.

As well as a custom-built soundsystem, the first exhibitions in the fantastic new facilities (just by the canal on St Pancras Way) include one called ‘Dancing Down The High Street: Club Culture in Camden 1988–2000’ with an archive of images to define a brilliant era for local nightlife with global impact. Also look out for ‘Things I Lied To My Parents About: Mapping Youth Through Truth and Deception’ which explores stories of sneaking out to parties and glorious misadventures with friends.

I have caught a few rumblings of dissent from some Camden-based orgs and charities, who feel that a whole lot of scarce Council support has been sucked up by this one project. But the seminal eras celebrated and importance of the material in collection are genuinely special, and perfectly suited to having a home in Camden, as one of the very first youth culture hotbeds. With the whole concept of underground subculturtal production and social exploration challenged for today’s youth by phones and other tech, the arrival of this space is also a very timely reminder of why it’s so vital to get out there, make mistakes, and forge new culture in the process.

ART: 🎨 Tonight, Fri 19th Jun, sees the latest free private view at the Camden Open Air Gallery, where artist Brofoz presents Vivarium, featuring figures within constructed enclosures, where the body is both subject and specimen, observed yet unresolved. It’s a meditation on menstrual pain and failures in women’s healthcare, particularly conditions such as endometriosis, and runs to 28th Jun.

FESTIVAL: 🎶 It’s a double header of outdoor music, food and urban merry-making in NW5 this weekend, as the Council’s impressive Windrush Homecoming Celebration returns to Talacre Gardens on Sat 20th Jun, with steel pan, carnival dancers, masses of craft and food stalls. The live stage is hosted by TV model Annaliese Dayes and Mi Soul Radio DJ Matt White, plus local heroes Dig It Soundsystem will also be thumping it out at a proper local gathering all afternoon.

FESTIVAL: 🎶 Then on Sun 21st Jun, with the legendary Alma St Fair having a bit of a fallow year, it’s time for the smaller Inkerman Rd Street Party to bring six live bands, free-flowing Camden beers and street dancing outside Map Studio Cafe all afternoon.

EVENT: 🥵 This Sat 20th Jun, Somers Town Community Action are hosting Somewhere the Sun is Always Shining across their whole neighbourhood with everything related to extreme urban heat, from ice cream trucks, to cooling kits, storytelling, to visual art sessions, film screenings to craft workshops, plus academicians and researchers sharing valuable info on how we might live, cool down and look after one another as our cities heat up.

FESTIVAL: 🎨 Hampstead Summer Festival get into gear this Sun 21st Jun with the first of it’s five varied events - the Art Fair at Keats House.

MUSIC: 🎤 Tucked in between the big, beery World Cup fanzone screenings currently on at the 02 Forum Kentish Town, British-Jamaican soul singer Celeste is marking the release of her new album with a one-night-only London stop-off on her European tour on Thurs 25th Jun.

COMEDY: 😂 JK Comedy Club runs affordable stand-up shows 6 nights a week across three venues in Soho, Covent Garden and Leicester Square. They also host air conditioned afternoon gigs, including this Sat 20th Jun upstairs at Nell of Old Drury Lane, if giggles and refreshments offer welcome respite from the promised heat.

MARKET: 🍰 There’s a brand new post-work food-themed social art event being held at The Fields Beneath, right beside Kentish Town West Overground station on Wed 24th Jun. The Palette Art Market includes free fruit lino printing and watercolour portraits, alongside freshly baked treats, smoothies and wine by the bottle, all available from the café.

CINEMA: 📽️ Local summertime favourite Everyman on the Canal is back on the Granary Square steps from Mon 29th Jun where the daytime Wimbledon action will make way for movies and music into the evening. The first night opens how they mean to go on - with Jaws screened at 5pm, then the excellent DJ Yoda brings his AV show alongside a 7,30pm showing of Tom Cruise classic Top Gun. It’s all free, but you need to rock up in good time to get one of the coveted astroturf waterfront spots. Runs daily to 16th Aug.

The above legend has long been my favourite bit of local graffiti. It’s hardly worthy of that term to be honest, but it’s also not a tag in the ‘Nat Has Herpes’ or ‘I Fart3d in Yoga’ tradition, as I’ve never seen it scrawled anywhere else.

Gracing the bulging wall of the long-lost Richard of Chichester School on Royal College St, it won’t feature as a stop on the passing guided street art trails, but does have a touch of the same righteous subversion that helped turn Banksy into such a folk hero.

Another minor act of petty vandalism, but with a guerrilla public service announcement sentiment. And even a charming spelling error.

But in a week when wealthy fascists and political grifters have once again dominated the national discourse with their hateful populism, (and the meatheads have duly done their bidding and torched another neighbourhood), we sorely need quiet little daily reminders like these.

Reminders that the vast majority of people are lovely and well-intentioned, despite the stream of negativity and confrontation that is algorithmically thrust towards us, and which seems to have sucked some of the most powerful people in the country/world deep into the twilight zone of its bot-infested post-truth vortex.

And such gentle reminders are absolutely everywhere, but you do need to step back from the critical cacophony to appreciate them, since the heart-warming can easily be drowned out by the harrumphing of modern life.

In the last few days, I’ve seen a uniformed schoolgirl darting to help a parcel delivery guy navigate his trolly over a tricky step. Two burley strangers at King’s Cross Station clock each other’s Arsenal shirts, crack smiles and fall into a joyful embrace, before rushing onwards about their day.

And a guy on a packed Northern Line train instinctively grab a stranger’s head and guide it away from the closing doors, after his concerned cry of ‘watch your head!’ was not enough. An uneasy moment of urban camaraderie in the carriage ensued, as the usual adversarial atmosphere of the commute was broken, and nobody really knew quite how to react. So we all smiled.

Pitting people against each other is a scarily well-funded global political movement these days, with those persuasive little screens in our pockets reinforcing the narrative minute-by-minute. That leaves precious little room for us to notice the actual kindness, empathy and collective spirit that is the real story of our culture each day.

Right now, we have a duty to each other not be disheartened - or worse, persuaded - by the constant tub-thumping from those who seek to divide us for their own misguided power games. It’s all but impossible to avoid their noise, but resistance need not mean shouting louder to be effective.

As our mystery Camden proto-tagger suggests, just remember the mantra to ‘practice uncalled for courtesy’ here and there, as a way to shock the terminally online and politically radicalised out of their negative stupor for a hot minute - often without the need to even say a word.

So called random acts of kindness are brilliant and heart-warming, but acting with courtesy implies additional layers of respect, manners and abiding by social rules, too - all the stuff we’re being told has broken down. We all have the power to prove, with very little effort, that no, actually it hasn’t.

Nothing like the defacement of a wall to remind us of the fragile beauty of respecting a few social rules, eh?

📊 This week’s One-Click Poll

How’s your faith in society/humanity holding up right now?

Ok! We have so many challenges, but the people I meet are generally muddling along fine

Could be better! I’m concerned that things only seem to get more divided

Shot! There’s no hope, it’s all a total mess so I’m tuning out

As ever, please leave your comments after voting (or simply reply to this email) to join in the debate in next week’s edition…

📊 Last week’s results & comments

Last week, I asked: Does London benefit overall from big, glossy, techie festivals like SXSW London?

Yes! The capital has needed a lively cultural centrepiece like this for years
🟨🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️ 32%

No! It’s just another opportunity for the same names to get up on stage and isn’t accessible for most people
🟨🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️ 29%

Maybe. I’m keen to see whether it can become key to the calendar, and the music/film support is welcome
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 39%

🗣️ “I believe it’s an interesting and a great platform for talks, events, and gatherings that not only highlight important issues but also provides a space that encourages solutions and discussions. Although, I think it doesn’t have the most diverse audience due to it’s lack of accessibility. We share a world, and we share a responsibility to it, and yet we are unable share this space. Not every space is for every one, however, this is a space that should strive to be accessible to anyone who wants to be part of the conversation.”

🗣️ “As a city we need injections of new ideas, wherever they come from. Some will stay and become institutions, others will quickly disappear back into the ether, I think it is a bit early to pass judgement on this particular start-up.”

🗣️ “We don’t need imports such as this from Texas, the US Champion state for legal executions namely Capital Punishment. Cheap jibes about lefties are alien to us in London a left leaning city, and I personally support the Home Office in banning anti Semitic Yanks what ever their professed politics. They should perhaps spend more time containing Vance and Musk spreading poison globally.”

🗣️ “Yes. But they do need to find an alternative to queuing in the rain…”

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CAMDEN CURATED

Just a few of the unexpectedly delightful things on your doorstep

SHOW: 🍵 UAL Central St Martins in Granary Square is hosting its free summer shows 2026 across three floors of its studios from Thurs 18th - Sat 20th Jun, featuring innovative graduate work from courses across fine art, biodesign, performance ceramics and more. You can sip from a MA Material Futures speculative coffee machine, which invites visitors to taste historical versions of the caffeinated dark stuff and imagine how environmental change could shape what we drink in the future. Or see a jewellery collection that transforms discarded date pits into luxury pieces to investigate ideas of value and preciousness from a BA (Hons) Jewellery course graduate.

EXPERIENCE: 🚴🏼‍♂️The glorious World Naked Bike Ride is back this Sun 14th Jun with the usual local meeting place to just rock up and disrobe located in the Regent’s Park Outer Circle, with no need to book. You’ll them cycle off to join hundreds of other nude and body-painted riders converging from spots all over the city. Judicious application of factor 50 advised.

FESTIVAL: 🐶 It’s the big Highgate Village summer mainstay The Fair In The Square this Sat 13th Jun, with two live music and performance stages, a children’s tent and masses of stall selling arts, crafts, and tasty thing to eat and drink all afternoon.

ATTRACTION: ✒️As previewed last year in this very publication, The Quentin Blake Centre for Illustration has just flung open its doors for the first time in Clerkenwell. The 93-year-old Quentin cut the proverbial ribbon last week creating the largest place dedicated to illustration in the world, in the process. It’s based in a £12.5m conversion of a historic 18th century waterworks that was once the HQ of Thames Water that’s been transformed into a series of galleries, learning spaces, public gardens, a shop and café, open Wed-Sun.

MUSIC: 🎶 The highly regarded country-blues singer songwriter Elsie Franklin performs a rare acoustic set in the idyllic setting of the gardens at St Paul’s Church in Camden Square this Sat 13th Jun.

EVENT: 🥵 The Somers Town Community Action charity are one of the partners is a multi-city, multi-year project called Melting Metropolis, a Wellcome-funded exploration of how Londoners, New Yorkers and Parisians feel about heat and its impact on their health. On Sat 20th Jun, they’re hosting Somewhere the Sun is Always Shining across the neighbourhood with everything related to extreme heat, from ice cream trucks, to cooling kits, storytelling, to visual art sessions, film screenings to craft workshops and academicians and researchers sharing valuable info on how we might live, cool down and look after one another as our cities heat up.

COMEDY: 🎤 There’s free open mic comedy night Schtick this Sun 14th Jun (and every Wed and Sun night, in fact), at NW%’s classic craft beer pub The Rose & Crown.

MUSIC: 🎸 Friends of the newsletter, Naked Yoga, are back in their spiritual home of MAP Studio Cafe on Fri 19th Jun with some special guests playing meandering instrumental goodness. Revisit the hilarious milk-whisk infused Camdenist interview with the band from last year here.

🤠 Howdy, partners! I’ve spent this week roaming Shoreditch at SXSW London, (sxswmaxxing?) – the Texan-imported tech, music and film festival that everyone agrees is a pretty big deal for the capital, even if there’s an equally broad diversity of disagreement as to exactly why.

From my perspective, admittedly with all the fast-track benefits of a press pass, it’s been another inspirational and affirming deep dive into some of the very best global thinking, plus a programme of commanding live music performances ready to stumble across, all fuelled by supreme levels of coffee, pastries and beer.

But there have also been protests, heartfelt political controversies and anti-AI fury aplenty, too. Let alone loads of film screening that have sailed completely under my radar. So what to really make of it all?

Well, the overwhelm is real, so I can only report on the fraction of events that I have seen, however there have been some fairly constant themes all week, which do a decent job of summing up where we’re at as a culture, a city and a global civilisation.

Getting things started on Day 1, Islington MP and ‘founder of Your Party’ (remember that?), Jeremy Corbyn, came out in surprise defence of modern technology, stating that digital media has gifted us a pivotal moment in history, by revealing the movements of the global oligarchy via the grim Epstein Files’ digital paper trail. Corbyn encouraged everyone to look beyond the sex scandal at the way the thousands of emails show just how toxic money and associated power dynamics are when mixed in to global political and business affairs.

Later in the day, screenwriter and director, Stephen Knight, declared that UK talent is so in-demand globally on account of graduating from the ‘University of the BBC’, yet so much of that value is being extracted to the coffers of tech giants in the US (striking blows for both the Beeb and against the tech status quo in one neat soundbite).

This extractive pipeline was flagged time and again this week, with Cory Doctorow, who coined the excellent concept of online enshittification, offering up a potential once-in-a-lifetime call to arms for UK and European startups. His proposition being that Trump’s tariffs have broken the only legal disincentive for us in fighting back against Big Tech US companies locking users into their ecosystems, and preventing innovation/migration away from the platforms that we know are harmful and so attention-hungry. Could this perhaps be the greatest (or only) major Brexit benefit of all?

Biggest hitter of the week, Michelle Obama, and her almost-as-impressive brother/co-host offered some cheerily inspirational fodder around living smaller than you need financially (which we all agreed was nice to hear, whether by design or circumstance), as a way to not end up unfulfilled, overworked and unhappy.

And while the likes of Misan Harriman talking of his attempted cancellation by the right wing press continued the vaguely left-leaning cultural themes, the touchy government ensured things didn’t get too lefty, by banning US commentators Cenk Uygur and Hasan Piker from entering the UK, in the festival’s most controversial headline moment of the week.

But, polarising political point-scoring aside, everyone kept returning to the shared idea of real world connection, (“IRL not URL”), and the premium that we should be placing on human creative work and social interaction as we all continue to navigate the AI era.

It seemed a touch misplaced that yesterday’s Brick Lane protest (railing against the potential of an incongruously resource-hungry datacentre in the Truman Brewery, instead of more social housing), would try and shame SXSW delegates who, for the most part, are equally concerned with finding solutions to the pressures of Big Tech themselves.

Whether it was business influencer Simon Squibb fielding enthusiastic questions from aspirational kids or relationships guru Esther Perel packing them to the rafters on the main stage yesterday, the messaging was always around the power of working together, as a community, rather than falling back on the individualised, self-optimised swiping and productivity-obsessed norms of cold, heartless apps and systems that supposedly lead to happy-ever-after successes.

Despite the flashes of inspiration, there are still no easy answers to our many societal challenges. Yet the live music programme, whether it be chancing upon a staccato-firing Texan hip hop artist in the Town Hall or a glory-praising UK gospel choir in a Hoxton Square back room, provided the moments of joy such times urgently require.

SXSW London may not connect with everyone in the same way, but for me, as a reminder of why living in the capital remains so vital, vibrant and validating, the week has been excellent. The Mayor, Prince William and all the other big ticket attendees are right to prioritise this as a really important event for the city and the country.

Perhaps one day, more weeks for more people will be like this one, as the robots do the heavy lifting while we enjoy the discussion and dancing that make us gloriously flawed and still very much human…

📊 This week’s One-Click Poll

Does London benefit overall from big, glossy, techie festivals like SXSW London?

Yes! The capital has needed a lively cultural centrepiece like this for years

No! It’s just another opportunity for the same names to get up on stage and isn’t accessible for most people

Maybe. I’m keen to see whether it can become key to the calendar, and the music/film support is welcome

As ever, please do leave your comments after voting (or simply reply to this email) to join in the debate in next week’s edition…

📊 Last week’s results & comments

Last week, I asked: Are nostalgic social media photos of lost London an unwitting gateway to extremist viewpoints?

Yes! I see so much of this stuff being turned into an excuse for ‘send ‘um’ back’ hate speech
🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 19%

No! It’s harmless for the vast majority of us and I really love seeing the historic images
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 56%

Maybe! There’s a dark underside to pretty much everything, so let’s just indulge in a spot of reminiscing
🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️23%

And some of your many comments…

🗣️ “There are a few people who air their nasty racist anti immigrant views, but it only takes a few of us to let them know they’re not wanted on board.”

🗣️ “This may be a slightly biased response, based on your readership having a broader prospective on the world!”

🗣️ “Context is everything..... It is possible to enjoy a bit of reminiscence without forgetting quite how tedious life was on a Sunday or Wednesday afternoon in the 60s & 70s. ”

🗣️ “I really liked reading this piece. It is very true that people sit at their keyboards and are happy to blame immigrants for a loss of their culture, and community spirit etc. If we open our eyes more, we will see that the immigrant communities are all about what we are lamenting. We need to move forward with compassion towards hate but also with a firmness and a commitment to challenge every aspect of racism. I am sad that people choose the path of blaming immigrants. Sometimes it isn’t a choice, sometimes people don’t see beyond the arseholes like Farage, a privileged, clueless man who is using the ‘ordinary’ person to spout hate. I am pure working class and am lucky enough to see it for what it is. My parents fought in WW2 and we were taught to challenge injustice, racism, elitism. My Mum and Dad would not stand for it because they fought against it. It is a complex issue in terms of history etc Lots more discussion and action is needed but this article gives food for thought, thank you! ”

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CAMDEN CURATED

Unexpected thing to go out and do this week

EXPERIENCE: 🦁 The annual chance to bed down amongst the lions, penguins and gorillas opens again tonight, as London Zoo opens it’s short summer season of Zoo Nights, giving locals the rare chance to sleep within the historic animal attraction on our doorstep. Nights run every Friday until 24th Jul, with no kids allowed.

FOOD: 🐄 Hot new hot broth, tender beef, noodle and crisp kimchi comfort food joint, Woo Tang has just soft-launched in the former butchers’ shop in Kentish Town Road. It’s a high-tech concept (with no service charge on account of the big touchscreen ordering system), and a laser-sharp focus on doing one thing incredibly well. Expect the next potential viral hit on NW5’s increasingly foodie main drag.

ATTRACTION:🪴 Visitors to St. Pancras International can currently encounter something they wouldn’t necessarily expect to see in a train station, as the quiet world of Britain’s peatlands arrives with new immersive installation The Composer’s Cabin. Expect this RHS Chelsea Flower Show silver medial-winning garden design to showcase the peatlands which the station has long supported alongside a Steinway & Sons grand model B Spirio R self-playing piano, bashing out a soundscape to evoke ancient landscapes. Runs to 21st Jun.

FESTIVAL:🎸Our friends at INTRA and the Apex Project and their fantastic cohort of schools rock bands, rappers and vocal artists are just one of the attractions at this Sat 6th Jun celebration as Camden High St’s pedestrianisation trial sees a Summer Street Fiesta. It’s free, family friendly, and celebrates global culture in the street through music, art and sport, from samba and brass bands to inclusive dance workshops and table football.

NIGHTLIFE: 🔊 Electronica aficionados (and all thumping 4/4 music lovers, really) will want to head to see Booker Shade - the Final London Show on Sat 13th Jun at HERE at Outernet as the German trailblazers call time on their international touring schedule for an unspecified pause with as special bash in the centre of town.

STAGE: 🎭 The London Clown Festival rolls on with daily shows this week, including the work in progress Lil Wenker: BOYKING, which sees ostensibly eight-year-old Prince Wilfred (Willy for short) seek power at all costs. Meaning death, destruction and dastardly deeds, all played out at Soho Theatre, tonight Fri 5th Jun - all hail!

MUSIC: 🎻 Vivaldi’s classical masterpiece is given an electronic rework at A Life in Four Seasons at Regent’s Park’s Open Air Theatre on Thurs 11th - Sun 14th Jun.

Oh look, there’s Tottenham Court Road in the 80s! Aww, remember the legendary Dionysus kebabs!! Fag billboards!! Nipping into Our Price for a tape, Gultronics for a Walkman, and two branches of Ann Summers!!! Surely, the best of times.

Nostalgia is one of the few sure-fire methods left to grab a few seconds of our attention (alongside outrage, violence and kittens, of course) in today’s scroll-based lobotomised media badlands.

And of all the emotionally resonant tricks, it feels like the most innocent, right? A momentary reminder of fond youthful memories, of ‘simpler times’ and the last vestiges of continuity in today’s race towards relentless redevelopment and the future.

On platforms like Facebook, photos of the past offer blessed relief from all the synthetic garbage and ads that top and tail them, and the many communities/groups that specialise in such historic imagery have huge followings.

Often, comparing then/now photos of familiar-yet-different London streets, taken 80 or so years apart is fascinating, as are the memories posted beneath them in the comments. But this is social media in 2026, so there are also plenty of examples from less well-moderated or politically motivated groups featuring a rapid descent into conspiratorial thinking and casual prejudice.

It’s all too easy for misty-eyed reminiscences to slip into anger that today’s London (“Khan’s London”) isn’t as good, and the immigrants are to blame. Alongside the harmless retro-obsessives sit bad actors, bots and big money, all busy leveraging the power of a good image to suggest some kind of previous utopia, and whip up anger as to why it has apparently been ‘lost’.

The “I just want my country back” switcheroo, from people who have literally just been discussing how rough and gritty it was growing up in Camden in the 50s, or 60s, or 70s, or 80s…. Valid resentment at being priced out of beloved childhood neighbourhoods twisted into a reason to blame the less well off who have no choice but to live wherever they can.

Nostalgia-bait is harmless until it isn’t.

We could all do with checking our natural instinct for donning rose-tinted glasses when looking at the past, and remember that all life - especially our cities - is in a constant state of flux and change. If ever we feel the intended twinge of grief at the loss of those ‘simpler times’ in a photo, well, we’d better just face up to the uncomfortable truth that it reminds us of our own aging and mortality - and that really isn’t the fault of asylum seekers, lazy Gen Z’ers or whichever other arbitrary scapegoat it’s more comforting to put it down to.

The quite overwhelming outpouring of emotion on local streets over the last few days at Arsenal winning the Premiership is the nostalgia of the future. Millions of memories seared into Gooners’ consciousness to be drawn upon when that future inevitably ends up turning out ‘not as good as it used to be’.

All the same emotive elements; a sense of belonging, continuity with what’s gone before and the pain of the passage of time, fed into the horn-honking, song-chanting, flag-waving joy and chaos.

Yet in this case, they worked to bring everyone together in a shared moment - pure nostalgia in action in it’s rawest, most human sense - free from the tinkering of those who might want to harness it to divide us. For fans, the last 22 years of missing out on titles haven’t been rose-tinted at all, which is actually a rare but far more truthful way of reflecting on the past.

It’s up to us to stay vigilant as to how our fondest memories can easily be used against us. Arsenal fans today are full of excitement at what lies ahead, despite the absolute knowledge that the good times will always make way for something that feels… less so.

When we look at life today being the nostalgia of the future though, it makes us much more likely to want to jump up and down cheering with a stranger rather than sneer at them for being ‘other’, and to realise that the present day will always be the best of times, as it’s the only time we’ve truly got.

OPENINGS

More local pubs are reborn!

🍺 The Fleet Tavern is the new moniker for the beautiful but recently troubled former White Horse pub in South End Green (pictured above, 100-odd years ago), which reopened this week in it’s latest incarnation. Having been known as various short-lived pub, wine bar and social meeting space concepts over recent years, the new team are already successfully running local boozers including The Lord Stanley and the Tufnell Park Tavern, so this might be the one that sticks. The intentions certainly look good, with decent pub food, no music and convivial local vibes planned for an ace Victorian classic that should be a local destination in an area with plenty of pubs to flit between after a walk on the Heath.

🥳 Iconic local The Camden Eye has just reopened too after a major spruce-up and is back to running regular DJ and comedy nights as well as serving Camden Town’s thirsty travellers as the road splits outside the tube.

🍀 Holloway’s much-missed proper Irish boozer The Mother Red Cap is about to reopen after being boarded up for two years (sine the previous landlord retired) and the usual last-minute delays. Get ready for the craic.

🎶 It might only really be a name change, but Chalk Farm Rd’s legendary music pub currently known as Camden Assembly is preparing to bring back it’s old name, Barfly, which (if you didn’t know) has huge history as a hotbed for nurturing grassroots musical talent, so is getting all the heads a flutter in yet more nostalgia news this week.

👒 The epic beer garden at The Edinboro Castle was thoroughly revamped earlier in the spring and has reopened looking mighty swish, just in time for the recent hot weather plus the arrival of al fresco World Cup screenings next month.

🦄 There are few updates on last month’s news of the proposed return of historic music pub The Unicorn on Brecknock Rd, however we did spot the architect’s approved plans here.

🍻 Down in town, Wetherspoons have just announced they are to open a massive boozer on Shaftesbury Avenue. To be called Piccadilly Hall, it will take over a chunk of the former Trocadero Centre, most recently occupied by the unreconstructed bar-dancing cowgirl themed Coyote Ugly Saloon.

🚧 Work continues behind the tarpaulin-cladding on restoring beloved King’s Cross backstreet pub McGlynn’s by the artist Peter Doig, who bought the space and ran some unexpected pop-up art shows there last year. No idea when the grand reopening will be, but it’s being watched eagerly by pub aficionados after Doig’s claims it will return as a proper unpretentious little backstreet watering hole.

❓ However, questions remain over several shuttered locals, including the defunct Brewdog cast-off The Camden Road Arms, Gordan Ramsay’s ex, the recently squatted Grade II-listed York & Albany on Parkway and The Haverstock Tavern, aka the historic Load of Hay, which shut down suddenly a couple of weeks back, with no sign as to what will happen next. Let’s hope to be adding those three to the next successful round-up of saved and reborn boozers soon…

📊 This week’s One-Click Poll

Are nostalgic social media photos of lost London an unwitting gateway to extremist viewpoints?

Yes! I see so much of this stuff being turned into an excuse for ‘send ‘um’ back’ hate speach

No! It’s harmless for the vast majority of us and I really love seeing the historic images

Maybe! There’s a dark underside to pretty much everything, so let’s just indulge in a spot of reminiscing

As ever, please do leave your comments after voting (or simply reply to this email) to join in the debate in next week’s edition…

📊 Last week’s results & comments

Last week, I asked: Is Wayne Hemingway right, should the likes of Labtech, Google and Meta restart the ‘paused’ Camden Highline dream?

Yes! These companies make millions, so who better to deliver some public good on their own doorsteps?
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 71%

No! They’ve had ten years to step up, but clearly won’t do it
⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 10%

Maybe! Could this be the glimmer of hope for the project local optimists have been looking for?
🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 19%

This was obviously a fairly predictable answer from readers, who can suggest with a simple click of the mouse that big companies should find it effortless to dig deep, even if their accountants and fiscal realities may find it slightly harder to deliver. Still, we shouldn’t give up entirely on this public park project, so pressure on stakeholders is not a wholly ineffectual strategy - in fact it’s possibly the only one left.

And some of your many comments…

🗣️ “They probably have a ‘local amenity fund’ so let’s press them to invest!!”

🗣️ “It was a classic vanity project that’s been in trouble for years and failed every economic reality test. ”

🗣️ “This concept is not wanted by locals who’d rather see the tracks being used for more trains.”

🗣️ “Priorities please people - public parks over yet more shareholder payouts!!”

👍🏼 Support Camdenist for the cost of a coffee this month…

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CAMDEN CURATED

Art, music, food and more welcome cultural diversions

ART: 🖼️ Taking Shape is the latest major exhibition at Camden Art Projects showcasing new and recent works by influential British Pop Art pioneer Allen Jones. The exhibition, which opens with one of their excellent launch reception events on Thurs 4th Jun features paintings and sculptures alongside a major piece created specifically for this presentation, celebrating Jones’s defining graphic style, vibrant use of colour, and provocative exploration of the human form (see pic above). Runs to 31st Aug.

MUSIC: 🔊 I went to the debut a year ago so have no hesitation in recommending all Jungle and D&B original heads go to Ray Keith presents The Renegade this Sat 30th May at The Jazz Cafe, as you’ll find the pioneer himself melding classics from 30 years of the London-born genre into a live band performance.

STAGE: 🎭 Catch a new play devised by members of Camden Youth Theatre, The Place We Made, tonight and tomorrow Fri 29th & Sat 30th May at New Diorama Theatre as 12 teenagers have had enough with modern life, to decide to make their own world to escape reality deep in the Scottish wilderness.

NIGHTLIFE: 🎛️ If you can stomach the sky-high final release ticket prices, then you’re likely going to be suitably wowed by perennial house music maestro Armand Van Helden who’s in town to smash the granny out of KOKO tonight, Fri 29th May.

STAGE: 🤡 It’s the kickoff of the 10th annual London Clown Festival with the traditional high energy Opening Cabaret showcasing many of the festival’s key acts in a special preview up at Jackson’s Lane on Sat 30th May before a fortnight of shows at Soho Theatre.

FOOD: 🍽️ New York’s celebrated French bistro, Bavette, which had a Covid-era fail at its first attempt to crack London over in Notting Hill, is opening in lovely Neal’s Yard this Thurs 4th Jun with an all-day menu of les grands classiques de la gastronomie Française and more besides.

“This is her!” Eleftheria’s friend shouts into my ear over the music, as a body bag is dragged through the crowd, up the central runway of the venue. Cranked towards the roof via a strap hanging only by her hair, the body then bursts into life, and unleashes her sweet revenge in a spinning blur of self-assured, scarcely-clothed fury, defiantly free from the man who dragged her there.

This is 2am on a weeknight in Soho, and - somewhat unconventionally - my 83-year-old mother has invited me as her +1 to a nightclub. We’re at The Box, the infamous, secretive and defiantly exclusive cabaret club that occupies the former Raymond Revuebar, and has been busy revamping the area’s sleezy old past into its own more inspired, body-positive, unapologetically risqué new image for 15 years.

I imagine most people who’ve been out clubbing with a parent are still in their teens and twenties, having been brought up on festival and day rave dancefloors by their 90s-nostalgic, midlife crisis mums ‘n dads. It’s perhaps less common for an octogenarian parent to be inviting a 50-something greyver like me on a proper night out, let alone to a club where an absurdly well-endowed gentleman is now painting a canvas with his most prominent asset in place of a brush.

But here we are. And it’s masses of fun. My mother has taught acting, presentation and voice work all her working life, and continues to coach six days a week, appealing to everyone from city execs to aspiring and existing Hollywood stars. She particularly hit it off recently working with Eleftheria, which is how we’ve been invited here tonight, turning heads as a curious duo in the midst of wider curiousness.

Although I’ve dedicated much of my own working life to being immersed in nightlife culture, the swanky West End bottle service clubs, with sharp-suited guys dropping £10k+ on a table to dance around illuminated magnums of Grey Goose, and the paps gathered to snap Prince Harry or Kate Moss stumbling out, have not been my natural nocturnal habitat.

They do, however, epitomise what lies at the very core of the night just as much as a sweaty Dalston basement or a sleepless weekend sortie to Berlin. And that’s the chance to escape the daily grind, to reinvent yourself in whatever image you choose, to slip into a sensual, hedonistic universe if only for a few hours, and move rhythmically amongst strangers with whom you are bound intimately for moments of shared euphoria - or even just a conspiratorial little smile.

Whereas, on the occasions I did navigate the midweek VIP scene as a younger man, we were just about tolerated sipping our single bottles of beer, if we even got in, tonight my teetotal mother is ushered inside like high-rollin’ royalty. The hosts and security are so fantastically on point, having been briefed by Eleftheria of our attendance - I can safely say that going clubbing with my mum is a joyful, unexpected new angle on London nightlife, after decades spend having so many different experiences in after hours adventures.

I love the hanging ambiguity of who/how/why we’re even in here tonight. Are we a kinky intergenerational older couple obsessed with burlesque? Why are we on the dancefloor, amongst the nipple tassels and latex pants of the club kids, and not lording it up in a booth? If anyone even guesses that we’re mother and son, how do they square our late night familial entertainment choices?

Yet, for all the boundary-pushing unconventionality on display, this place has been like a family to Eleftheria, so she had no hesitation inviting us.

“I’ve always been a dancer,” she tells me. “I first arrived in London from Greece to study my Masters degree in injury prevention, and got a job working as a lifeguard in the gym in Marshall Street, just around the corner from here.

“One of the performers – a transgender woman from New York – was coming in regularly to lift weights, and she invited me to a show. That first time, I saw a girl doing aerial straps, and said to myself right then that I would dedicate my life to this.”

Not just another cabaret show, and far more theatrical than the standard high end nightclub - that night was a revelation that set the course of her life.

“I’m coming from Greece, from a small village with cows and chickens, where the only job you can imagine having as a dancer is in a bar or club, but never in this kind of creative show environment.”

So, she started circus training in earnest. It took a couple of years of hard graft before they invited her to perform at the club, and for many years now she’s been “privileged to be asked to work here regularly”.

The key, she tells me, is being able to get on well with a whole host of very big personalities, all crammed into a small 3×3m dressing room in a historic old theatre. Intergenerational acceptance is a big thing backstage, too.

“There are performers in their 60s alongside others in their 20s back there,” she says. “You have to respect each other equally, and be a certain type of character to hold yourself together with all these people and still come out and do your job well. There have been some excellent performers on stage, but because they couldn’t get on backstage, we never saw them again.”

Eleftheria’s circus skills have since taken her all over the globe. It’s not an easy existence, living out of a suitcase and having to forgo relationships and putting down roots, which is probably why she loves being part of this quirky family so much.

The creative direction and concepts of all the shows at The Box are tightly controlled, and yet give a trusted artist like her huge freedom to bring ideas to life on stage. “I’ve worked all over the world and there are not many stages anywhere that give you what I have here. You really can do anything you’ve ever dreamed of.”

Her next big venture is appearing at a limited 6-show London run of Sinematic, where every act is inspired by an iconic movie moment, and which exploded in popularity on its debut in LA, when Quentin Tarantino visited and gave the show his thumbs-up.

It’s on at the Emerald Theatre, which has taken over the former Proud Cabaret spot on the Embankment, and will be showing on Friday nights only, starting from this evening, 22nd May - 26th Jun.

Meanwhile, our night is coming to a 3am climax as a glistening woman disrobes on stage to smash eggs against her bare flesh, eventually coating herself in a layer of shimmering black oil and writhes about in the viscous, albumin-infused slick.

My mum sits, rapt, alongside her young friend Eleftheria, now right at the front. It’s yet another striking performance. Unexpected, purposefully strange, and fully empowering. You can feel the incredible power of having that kind of creative, artistic and sexual freedom up in the spotlight - the unchained joy of another nightlife moment. The death of Soho may have been greatly exaggerated.

Outside, in its quintessential neon-lit alleyway, Walker’s Court, (being last to leave the club, as ever) we all chat about the night, the performers and the brilliantly warm welcome that’s been offered to us by everyone involved.

A tall, well-chiselled man saunters up, beaming, and shakes my mum’s hand. “I’m the penis guy!” he exclaims by way of introduction. He goes on to explain how he travels the world with his schlong-centred act, playing The Box’s sister venue in New York, his home of Canada and top clubs all over.

“Yeah, my mom must be so proud,” he laughs. Then adds “actually, she really is.”

Confounding the dullards, pearl-clutchers and prudes, the delights of the night clearly have no upper age limit - a theory we’ve well and truly had fun proving here, as we stumble off into the back of cabs, without any paparazzi in sight.

COMPETITION

2 x pairs of wristbands for full access to see 150+ artists & bands play multiple venues up for grabs!

Last year, our competition to win access to all the SXSW London music showcases was wildly popular with you lot - so we thought we’d do it all over again for 2026 😃

Taking place every night from Tues 2nd - Fri 5th Jun, the SXSW London 2026 music festival takes over multiple venues and stages across Shoreditch, to showcase of over 150 emerging artists, future headliners, and international collectives.

Starting from just £25 for a one night wristband, tiered up to conference level passes for those making music their career, there’s something that everyone can enjoy. If you love discovering new music, the £79 music week wristband includes access performances including Earl Sweatshirt, Fraser T Smith and Sega Bodega on the Tuesday, Circa Waves, Infinity Song, Rachel Chinouriri on the Wed, Amaria BB, Odumodublvck, Tiwa Savage on Thurs and Shame on the Friday, plus masses more.

And Camdenist has got 2 pairs of those music week wristbands up for grabs this week.

Click here to enter the competition. Good luck!

We’ll draw 2 x winners for a pair of wristbands at random on Mon 25th May and notify them by email. Over 18s only. Prize is non-transferable, has no cash alternative, and does not include travel or accommodation.

Camden Highline gets Camdenist readers animated

Last week’s lament that we may never see the long-anticipated Camden Highline, Is The Sky-High Dream Over?, provoked much varied feedback (see poll responses below).

Urban creative-led design royalty, Wayne Hemingway, also got in touch with thoughts on a project his studio has worked on from the outset. “This has really got my goat,” he says.

“As one of the world’s greatest cities, London needs to continue to fund meaningful, sustainable, and exciting ideas like this. Having relied on the generosity of crowdfunding and public funders to kickstart and develop proposals for the project, we (HemingwayDesign) believe that the billionaire owned multinational businesses at either end of the proposed Camden Highline - LabTech, Google and Meta - should be stepping up and helping to make this project a reality. After all, the money required to make this great placemaking project happen is dwarfed by the money they are spending on their projects. It’s time for these companies to step up, embrace common sense, and invest in their surrounding communities. Come on, let’s see some action!”

With interesting timing, I was at Google on Friday to hear Thomas Heatherwick talking about how, as designer of the company’s soon-to-open ‘landscraper’ on King’s Boulevard, he felt a duty to the public to make the ground floor exterior an interesting/beautiful experience. After all, it takes 4.5 minutes to walk it’s full length(!), and most locals will never get a chance to see the rooftop gardens and water features that bear at least a passing resemblance to… the Highline plans (pictured above).

Whether his studio has succeeded in that goal, to make such a hulking great building work at human scale will soon be revealed, when the ground floor units finally open, another story we’ll be following closely.

Meanwhile, Joanna Terry got in touch to point out how strangely scathing some of the response to the Highline plans being shelved have been. Surely an enthusiastic plan to bring forward a new public park should be appreciated for at least attempting to realise an ambitious dream?

“This is a gem of an article when some other press has been unnecessarily harsh,” she wrote. “My husband is Richard Terry [Chair of Highline Trustees] and I read your Kentishtowner article in Toronto ten years ago. Since then we have shared your dream and worked SO hard to make it happen - with only good intentions.”

It was also pointed out to me this week that I had wrongly stated the first section alone would cost £50m, when in fact that’s the estimated price tag of the full three sections of the project. The first bit was actually estimated to cost £15m.

So, should/will the big local stakeholders set in to switch up the stalled Highline narrative? And what do those who don’t believe in the project have to say? Read on…

📊 The One-Click Poll

Is Wayne Hemingway right, should the likes of Labtech, Google and Meta restart the ‘paused’ Highline dream?

Yes! These companies make millions, so who better to deliver some public good on their own doorsteps?

No! They’ve had ten years to step up, but clearly won’t do it

Maybe! Could this be the glimmer of hope for the project local optimists have been looking for?

As ever, please do leave a comment after voting (or simply reply to this email). The topic remains a hot one…

Last week, we asked: What do you think about the Camden Highline project being suspended?

Disaster! That park was to be a huge asset to the area and the community
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 54%

Good riddance! There are many far more deserving uses for so much money right now
🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 10%

It’s not over yet! I remain optimistic that enough people want to happen and we may see it return yet
🟨🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️ 36%

And some of your many comments…

🗣️ “I was a volunteer for the idea, but I have to admit there was no way it was going to work. It ran alongside too many properties and a live railway line so was too complicated. Also the fence would have blocked the view to the south which was the point. Shame but no surprise.”

🗣️ “I’m glad it’s dead in the water. It was a terrible idea on so many levels. See article in latest CNJ for an unbiased summary of how poorly thought-out, untransparent and wasteful it has all been. Of course architects showed an interest - they often engage with even the craziest projects, it’s good PR. ”

🗣️ “I went on a walk organised by the Camden Highline. It was such an imaginative and exciting project. I do hope it will be realised one day.”

🗣️ “I am a natural optimist and it would be such a wonderful thing!”

🗣️ “It was always going to be a short-to-medium term plan given Network Rail’s long-term strategy documents call for the lines to be reinstated. ”

🗣️ “I was one of the people that chipped in £20 at the start and was saddened but not surprised that it has been put on indefinite hiatus. By the time the news dropped last week I had already resigned myself to it not happening. The problem is cost; in these straightened times it becomes very difficult to justify the sorts of budget the Camden Highline were talking about. In hindsight it is a shame that they could not have looked at what the minimum we can spend to get the route open to the public is, even if disabled access needs to come later. Once people are using the route it becomes easier for incremental funding to improve access, and would have allow community volunteer involvement in planting thus reducing and spreading cost and made the funding more feasible. I would have loved to walked along an initially post industrial landscape and watch it slowly transform over the years into a postmodern park.”

🗣️ “I strongly believe that if there is enough local support, eventually the scheme will come to fruition. Maybe we need to get the Mayor on board!”

🗣️ “This seemed like an imaginative solution to some disused ground that could provide green walkways across the borough.”

CAMDEN CURATED

Things to check out this long, hot weekend and beyond

MUSIC: 🎻 The internationally acclaimed London Concertante bring their ground-breaking new show to KOKO tonight Fri 22nd May, playing era-defining rock hits arranged for strings, harp, bass clarinet, vibes and percussion in Radiohead Reimagined.

STAGE: 🎭 The Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre season is off to a flying start with a new adventure for Sherlock Holmes from writer Joel Horwood, which sees our locally-based sleuth hurtling through the streets of London and down the River Thames via 221b Baker’s St. Runs to 6th Jun.

NIGHTLIFE: 🎥 It’s the final stretch for late night performance, cinema, live music and dancefloor experiment Lost, which has to move from it’s first home in the former Odeon Covent Garden, so why not check it out tonight, Fri 22nd May. All is not, er, lost as they promise to return in a new space, soon.

ART: 🚐 Radical ideas space Kairos is vacating its Tottenham Court Rd home to move to a new space, with the final show being a live auction of selected works from current show Everything Must Go this Sat 23rd May, and a grand finale party with cocktails, supper, Roulette, live music from the Daywalkers, DJ sets from Iko Cherié and Afroasis and a late licence until 1am on Sat 30th May.

STAGE: 🤡 It’s the kickoff of the 10th annual London Clown Festival with the traditional high energy Opening Cabaret showcasing many of the festival’s key acts in a special preview up at Jackson’s Lane on Sat 30th May before a fortnight of shows at Soho Theatre.

FOOD: 🐔 Catch the last day of the 50% off your bill soft-relaunch at Latin-infused chicken spot El Pollote in Carnaby St today, Fri 22nd May as they get back into their stride after a bit of a glow-up.

This was not the lead story I had planned for today’s Camdenist.

That’s partly as the fabulous tale I did have, all ready to send - involving a risqué intergenerational local cultural escapade - has necessarily been put on hold at the 11th hour (more on that soon, I hope).

But also because, a decade deep into planning, news dropped this week that Camden Highline, the ambitious project to turn abandoned railway lines running between Kentish Town Road and King’s Cross into an elevated public park, was also having to be paused - indefinitely.

Apart from obvious strong local support for such potentially dynamic new green space, the idea has always been particularly close to my heart, as it was inspired by a cover story I wrote exactly 10 years ago this month, back when we published Kentishtowner as a monthly print newspaper for the area.

I’d been researching a series of exciting mooted suggestions for local public realm improvements, including a walking route up to Hampstead Heath alongside the railway tracks from Kentish Town station, turning nearby Wolsey Mews into a live/work designer-maker alternative high street, and even outlandish suggestions to bring the decommissioned Kentish Town South tube station back into service on the Northern Line.

(Ten years on, it’s worth noting that none of those plans have got off the ground, although the Heath connection does feature in the longer term redevelopments of Regis Rd, now dominated by the more recent announcement of the Camden Film Quarter).

I stumbled upon some research by UCL geographer, Oliver O’Brien, who had identified a number of terminally disused sections of Network Rail infrastructure in his quest to see whether London could produce its own answer to the highly successful New York Highline.

His work suggested the Camden section was by far the most doable of the lot.

“Should the route remain abandoned, eventually Network Rail will have to maintain or demolish the bridges, which will be expensive,” Oliver said when I first called him up, back in May 2016.

“So, if that expense is on the way, then it might as well be used for something constructive, such as opening up this route. In a place like London, which is growing all the time in population terms but not in footprint, every spare space should be used for something, not allowed to sit and rot quietly.”

The good folk at local business tubthumping organisation, Camden Town Unlimited, picked up on the idea, and only bloody well went and attempted to see how far the could actually take it, attracting top architects, the support of City Hall and numerous small doners, volunteers and enthusiasts in the process.

I had begun to dream of feeling a soft radiating glow of pride when walking/doddering along the verdant strip at some point in the future, finally content with the knowledge that, while producing local media ain’t exactly a pot of gold, it still has the power to inspire and help germinate the biggest of ideas.

One month after the cover story ran, Brexit became a thing; just the first in the rolling sequence of national and global shocks and setbacks that haven’t exactly helped get the project off the ground, particularly with a £50m price tag required for completing just the first section. And I believe that was the pre-Covid quote!

So this week’s announcement, while probably the least shocking of the endless financial shocks, is still a bitter blow for everyone who had their own dreams of walking through the magically finished park, one day.

Rightly, there’s a never-say-never approach to the end of this decade-long chapter, in the words of Richard Terry, Chair of the project’s trustees, who says: “The work is not lost. The planning, creativity and imagination that brought the Camden Highline this far will be carefully preserved by the trustees, so that whether it is us or others who one day pick up the mantle again, the project’s achievements can be carried forward for the future.

“It is, in that sense, a time capsule: a record of what has been imagined, designed and built in partnership with the community, waiting to be reawakened when the time and conditions are right once more.”

We’d better hope (and dream) that Network Rail will maintain the Victorian infrastructure that long, as our general state of perma-crisis sure doesn’t look like abetting accommodatingly any time soon.

STAGE

We’re are getting lots of lovely new theatres though!

Happily, new stages are arriving all around us like the proverbial busses right now. First up is confirmation of the opening of pop-up 594-seater right by Marble Arch, to host the Arts Theatre programming while that West End venue undergoes a major 2-year refurb.

Snappily nicknamed Marble Arts, or rather ‘The Arts at Marble Arch powered by TodayTix’, to give it the official mouthful, it opens in July with a big new version of Christina Aguilera’s stage show, Burlesque.

The project has been conceived by Louis Hartshorn and Brian Hook, who locals may know previously ran the Peaky Blinders immersive show, Farrier pub and Lucky Club cocktail terrace at Camden Stables Market.

👯‍♀️ Meanwhile, the former Proud Cabaret spot on the Embankment, now reborn as Emerald Theatre, is about to start an ultra-limited 6-show London run of Sinematic, a cabaret extravaganza where every act is inspired by an iconic movie moment, and which exploded in popularity on its debut in LA, when Quentin Tarantino visited and gave it his thumbs-up. It will be showing on Friday nights only, from May 22nd.

🎤 While we’ve got to wait until next year for the biggest new theatre opening in the capital for 50 years, the 1,575-capacity British Airways Theatre at the impressive reinvented Olympia, its sister live music venue, the British Airways ARC, a 3,800-capacity monster operated by AEG Presents (another branding mouthful there), opens next month with Mercury-Prize nominated Self Esteem headlining the first two nights.

🎭 News also landed this week about the return of The Yard Theatre, out on my other beat of Hackney Wick, which has been totally rebuilt, after the original scaffolding and pallet-built DIY incarnation finally gave up the ghost. The new space has risen in its place in only a year, and has delivered a launch coup by announcing Ian McKellen in LEAR, which sees Shakespeare reimagined by playwright Simon Stephens and The Yard’s Artistic Director Jay Miller, due in November.

🌃 And Troubadour Theatres, who have already plonked big new immersive show spaces at Wembley Park and Canary Wharf, and preparing to open a huge new venue at Greenwich Peninsula later this year, boasting not one but two 1,500 capacity auditoriums, phew!

🌟 Finally, at the opposite end of the scale, with just 55 seats squeezed in above a pub, Hampstead’s recently opened Circle & Star continues to punch well above its weight when it comes to putting on delightfully intimate shows with big name stars.

📊 The One-Click Poll

What do you think about the Camden Highline project being suspended?

Disaster! That park was to be a huge asset to the area and the community

Good riddance! There are many far more deserving uses for so much money right now

It’s not over yet! I remain optimistic that enough people want to happen and we may see it return yet

As ever, please do leave a comment after voting (or simply reply to this email) - would love to hear your thoughts…

Last week, following news of 5-hour queues for a Korean food event at King’s Cross, we asked: How long would you queue for food you’re desperate to try?

And common sense seems to prevail over Instagram content…

4-5 hours - hey, the queue is all part of the experience and it provides a great time, too
⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 2%

1-2 hours - if you want London’s hottest dishes, you need to be invested
⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 8%

10 minutes - there are hundreds of other options, so I’ll just go elsewhere
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 90%

And some of your comments

🗣️ “London has loads of amazing places to eat; if one place has a long queue then there are plenty of others that don’t and you get the chance to discover something new. I like Dishoom and have eaten there loads of times but if there are more than 5 or 6 people in the queue, I’ll find somewhere else thank you very much. ”

🗣️ “If someone is that desperate to try the hottest spot in town, then why not book a table?!”

🗣️ “Queue culture is very strange, especially when often it’s for fairly identical deep friend things with sauces squired all over them. I suppose at least the queue is free, so you get a lot of bang for your eventual buck if you wait 5 hours!”

Support Camdenist - I’m up all night writing this 😅

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CAMDEN CURATED

A few human-picked local highlights for the coming days

MUSIC: 🎸 Join local 6-piece band SHY at MAP Studio Cafe on Fri 22nd May as they draw on tales of their own escapades, local cab drivers and more for their genre-bending sound that promise to take you on a journey through the streets of London. With support from Leisure Centre, too.

FESTIVAL: 🍻 Who am I to say it’s optimistically a touch early for a summer fair, when the mighty Primrose Hill Summer Festival returns to pack out Regent’s Park Rd and surrounds this Sun 17th May. It comes with the legendary dog show, with celeb judge Gail Porter, too.

MUSIC: 🍺 The prolific DJ crew Dig It Soundsystem are celebrating the reopening of The Star pub in Chester Rd on Sat 16th May with one of their classic local backroom boozer hoe-downs and it looks set to be a bigg’un.

CABARET: 💃🏼 Drag star Honey Foxx kicks off The Foxx Den, her ferocious and feral new affair at The Black Cap, with assorted guests, showing late night tonight Fri 15th May.

CLUB: 🎧Esteemed producer, Ibiza legend and global DJ Nic Fanciulli & Butch, the German tastemaker in his own right, both touch down at KOKO tonight, Fri 15th May for an all night house and techno session.

MUSIC: 🛢️ Chalk Farm’s lovely Spiritual Bar move up the road to the larger room of Camden Assembly for the 20th edition of their Spiritual Records Spring Festival 2026 featuring 12 bands from afternoon into the night on Sun 24th May.

Last week - as always, right? 😉 - Camdenist posted the usual punchy, curated Friday morning list of hot events and cool places; the ones I feel you readers may well want to go check out over the weekend.

Well, did anyone try the recommended Jung Festival King’s Cross?

From the scroll-deluge, it was clearly a huge success. But seeing as waiting in line for up to 5 HOURS was the metric, I’m not entirely sure every customer would see it that way…

Unless they are a self-identified ‘influencer’, of course. In that case, the beyond-ludicrous queue - which at its peak snaked along the canal to quite comedic lengths (see below) - is exactly the kind of viral content they seek. Forget the generic crunchy chicken chomping, or oozy kimchi ‘n hot sauce close-ups, the comatose stares of overheated people waiting in a row for hours in the hot sun, simply to eat a spicy burger(!), is the real dynamite.

In today’s food game, ‘going viral on the socials’ is how you hope your marketing will pan out, luring in a profitable perma-stream of punters, each seemingly desperate to part with a wedge of their hard-earned cash in exchange for the chance to upload a shot of a visually compelling dish into the social media abys.

But, tickling the algorithmicly-driven herd instinct - which is apparently the jackpot - can easily tip things into overdrive. And the enthusiastic campaign of the Jung Festival’s organisers proved way too effective for it’s own good.

“It was literally a turnout beyond our imagination,” says the event promoter, Rollin Lee, in an awkward-but-enlightened post, following the queue carnage which dominated last weekend.

His deft manipulation of online foodie trend-whoring types (and some very nice other people too, of course) with all things Korean, pulled in far more day trippers than the Canopy Market food trucks could possibly contend with. It’s a nice problem to have, especially if some of those very people actively want to showcase ‘The Queue’, (as many did) but clearly things were stretched to the limits of operational security.

It highlights a real dilemma of the attention economy, as experienced at the local level. If we’re told that grasping for global-scale trends or hooks is the secret to success, how do we manage the fact that driving huge like/share counts can quite obviously brim over to uncomfortable numbers of customers, confusion and complaints?

Wandering past the now-standard queues outside Camden-based restaurants like Dim Sum Duck, Swiss Butter and (pioneers of the genre) Dishoom, I can’t help but feel a little uncomfortable at the gleeful uniformity of the patient waiting experience.

Are these customers perched at the cutting edge of restaurant culture when stood in that line-up? Or are they more like suckers in plain sight, hoodwinked into a lengthy commercial transaction, for which they are encouraged to provide free promotion, too?

It’s really down to whether you enjoy standing in the damn line, which has become a real world social experience of value to many in today’s atomised society. And there’s really no denying (from daily visual evidence) that thousands of tourists actively want to spend a chunk of their London city-break standing in the drizzle waiting for some fried potatoes squirted with gloopy sauce at Funky Chips on Chalk Farm Rd.

Targeting this video-based promotional juggernaut is clearly a very decent business decision for some, especially when you spot that a nominally identical (perhaps a lot better) kitchen can languish in obscurity nearby if they don’t ratchet up their own TikTok cheese-pull game.

All this makes ‘The Queue’ a nuanced cultural phenomenon to hold an firm opinion about. Eager lines of customers, interacting socially, and generating wild turnover success are fantastic news for beleaguered hospitality venues and lonely Londoners/visitors alike. But food-lovers also need to remember why they are driven to such extremes - five hours?! As was pointed out in the BTL fury of people who didn’t get into the Jung Festival at the weekend, most of the operators there have restaurants fairly nearby where you can eat the same food another night of the week.

If, as many commentators have suggested before me, that there’s an element of ‘peacocking’ in joining, then documenting, the queue, (see David Beckham winning at filing past her Majesty alongside the plebs), and one which is more affordable than securing a table at a two Michelin-star Mayfair affair (most of the queues you’ll encounter are for street food), then hey, let’s celebrate it as a cultural artefact of its own.

But if it is simply down to lots of suggestable people being fed the same hype at the same moment, the we should actively fight The Queue… by going somewhere different.

Otherwise, basing what and where you eat around your next Insta story, work blag or trend-driven burger lust, does not a satisfying meal out make.

REVIEW

Rum makes everything spicy

As some of you know, I tend to end up finishing writing Camdenist quite late on a Thursday night, against my better judgement. This week, the reason I’m burning the post-midnight oil is down to a little visit to Rum Kitchen on Inverness St.

It’s the new Caribbean party joint from the longstanding Cotton’s crew, serving up seriously juicy jerk chicken and assorted bites like salt cod fritters and oxtail croquettes, which we happily wolfed down with various cocktails.

The venue is mighty loud, making meaningful chat quite hard, but overproof aged rum concoctions like the Rude Boy and the watermelon and vodka punch Sunset Bay can sure smooth out the jarring edges fast. By 8pm the place was jumping, and it’s a nice reminder of what fun there is to be had on that strip, full of the kind of spots you’d find fantastic if you were on holiday - so a great quick escape from the daily grind to remember for locals, too.

The restaurant is in the former Bar Vinyl, scene of many a raucous music-led night in Camden Town a very long time ago. Those rum drinks and the soundtrack might do a good job of temporarily transporting your mind to the sunkissed West Indies, but your soul will very much feel at home.🍹

📊 The One-Click Poll

How long would you queue for food you’re desperate to try?

4-5 hours - hey, the queue is all part of the experience and it provides a great time, too

1-2 hours - if you want London’s hottest dishes, you need to be invested

10 minutes - there are hundreds of other options, so I’ll just go elsewhere

As ever, please do leave a comment after voting (or simply reply to this email) - would love to hear your thought on this!

Last week, it was a simple, but potentially provocative punt: Does public art move you?

Yes! I’m a big fan of random encounters with creativity, even if I don’t always like what I see
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 75%

No! It’s mostly over-conceptual, self-indulgent or plain ugly for me
⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 16%

Maybe! I’m no art expert, but I like colourful things, so I suppose I like public art
⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 9%

And some of your comments…

🗣️ “I’m bad at predicting what I will like - and it’s good to bypass the cultural gatekeepers sometimes.”

🗣️ “Big fan of the King’s Cross swing (aka identified flying object) which feels like an icon that I’m back home, and I’m forever proud of that.”

🗣️ “The gravity-defying Conrad Shawcross thing at the Francis Crick is phenomenal and moves me every day, on my bus back from work.”

CAMDEN CURATED

Check these…

FOOD: 🥐 While the concept of a pink-hued, sourdough-focused Insta-girlie lockdown spinout bakery might jar a few purists, you can’t argue that Sourdough Sophia has smashed it when it comes to selling prime pastries and loaves in destination retail hubs. Her latest outpost is - where else, really? - on the bakery and café mile of Primrose Hill’s Regent’s Park Rd. It opens fully today, and the first 100 of you through the doors after they open at 8am get a gift worth £30 - so go. Now!

MUSIC: 🎚️As part of the Soho 73 photography exhibition we tipped you last week, famed film, stage and TV actor Ben Miles; Simon Lee, of acclaimed Nu Disco outfit Faze Action; and exhibition curator and DJ Ben Osborne of Noise of Art and Slack City Radio, bring the travelling post-disco vinyl night and radio show, White Trash, to Soho’s much-loved Berwick Street boozer The Blue Posts on Sat 9th May, with free entry.

DRINK: 🍻 Despite a calendar of sold-out ‘Desi’ party events later in the month, these are the final days of King’s Cross micro-brewery Babel Beer House, who have announced that they will closing for good on Sun May 18th. It’s therefore a last chance to catch this bright and airy beery space, before it becomes something else. Following the similar failure of Little Creatures on the same spot, that might not involve brewing beer - but you never know…

MUSIC: 🍺 The prolific DJ crew Dig It Soundsystem are celebrating the reopening of The Star pub in Chester Rd on Sat 16th May with one of their classic local backroom boozer hoe-downs.

COMEDY: 🎭Midweek laughs in King’s Cross are assured at Comedy Freaks stand-up night on Wed 13th May at 26 Caledonian Rd, for another big line-up - and check out the drinks deals too.

MUSIC: 🛢️ You’ll enjoy a night of roots reggae with the rare London appearance of Virgin Island’s legends Busspipe and Tippy I at The Jazz Cafe this Sun 10th May.

FOOD: 🍷 Cult lunchtime destination, The Yellow Bittern, on Cali Rd is opening for dinner service the very first time tonight. You’ll need to book ahead, but they promise a summer-long season of single seatings, copious wines and effervescent conversation, so well worth your commitment.

In one form or another, King’s Cross has been a multi-sensory adventure zone for Londoners for hundreds of years.

Be that the bucolic babbling of the pre-industrial River Fleet, the all-out assault of noise, steam and heavy, fish and coal-scented rolling stock in the Victorian railway yard boom, or the mind-expanding music, crowds and chemical enhancements of its nightlife years.

Nowdays, it’s the permanent and pop-up public art installations that really tweak the synapses, offering an ever-changing backdrop to any casual KX visit, or reason enough to embark upon a dedicated trip there.

And so it came to pass that I sat for coffee and pastries at Caravan with French artist Delphine Dénéréaz bright and early one morning last week. She’s the latest practitioner to be invited to create work specifically for one of the estate’s event programmes.

The resulting piece, Dandelions Always Return, celebrates a medieval weaving technique that’s rooted in fabric reuse, which Delphine has crafted into a joyful little house, offering very bold colours and environmental messages (it also arrived here on Earth Day) alongside the cosy playhouse domesticity.

It’s a key part of this springtime’s Super Nature season, which offers a regular events programme, low-impact shopping and eating options and free activities (including a guided family nature trail) running throughout May.

Dénéréaz chose Dandelions to represent the way that a simple plant (and a vital pollinator, at that) has the ability, no matter how much we may have paved over or polluted the land is emerges from, to crop up regardless.

During our chat, the house - which is set atop Granary Square’s equally colourful and popular summertime sprouting of the ‘grassy’ suntrap steps - draws loads of comments, particularly from the chattering infant school group passing by on their way to swimming. It’s messages of careful textile reuse and engagement with the natural world effortlessly serving their purpose; a momentary reflective pause from the urban hustle and the pinging notifications of the rest of our day as adults, too. It’s enchanting.

“It grew from my fascination with how textiles carry memory, with each knot and each thread holding traces of the past,” says Delphine. “The dandelion mirrors this for me: it scatters, disappears, and always resurfaces.”

Also on the theme of memories evoked by visual cues connecting us with our past, I received an email about a unique building that’s stood nearby for over 30 years. It’s one that I bet many locals have never really taken the time to pause over, despite it looking quite unlike all around it.

Below, local architect, activist and Queen’s Crescent Market champion, Tom Young, delights in finally being let inside to have a look…

➡️ More public art to see around King’s Cross

Guest Editorial: Tom Young on a very special Kentish Town co-op

The dreams of an architect belong to the time and place she finds herself in.

In my 30s, mine were about a creative home in a quasi-industrial building. I was responding to something in the air in the early 90s when the notion of live-work was bandied about.

In Shoreditch for instance, it seemed to be a way to lessen the tension between an old-style defined employment area prioritising jobs for inhabitants of local housing estates, and the newer Yuppie demand for living space in 19th-century warehouses.

Architecture records old convictions that might reconnect us to a meaningful life. For more than two decades, I have passed by a building at 115 Bartholomew Road in Kentish Town. It has always seemed to me that it must be the product of an association of creatives who had fulfilled my old dream.

The other day I met someone from the group who drew up the plan to build 115 back in the mid-90s, when it was first conceived as a complex of two live/work units and one workspace. They invited me to look around their building.

There are two entries. One takes you from the street into an airy hall nicknamed ‘the atrium’, the other leads into the front garden where cyclists can leave bikes before entering through a side door.

The atrium is the main architectural space; half of it is three storeys high and enclosed by a steel frame infilled with u-shaped translucent Reglit glazing. This crystalline, industrial lantern is the building’s public signature.

The main stair is an assembly of thick timber treads and white steel structure which climbs up the atrium walls and terminates on a landing high above the entrance, where the top floor consists of a single, long office that spans between the street and the back gardens behind the building. The ground floor includes a workshop (occupied by a joinery business) with openings onto both gardens. All six workspaces are distinct.

Next to the street entrance is a shared kitchen and eating area. Typologically, 115 is a house, not the terraced sort but more like a Victorian villa with rooms off a celebratory stairhall.

It is enriched with witty details expressing creative commitments. These include, along with the Reglit glazing, doorway reveals from polished cut concrete blocks, plywood wall lining in the workspaces and screens across street-level openings formed of welded mesh panels set in galvanised steel frames.

Beyond the many enjoyable, industrial Modernist inflections and semi-traditional typology, 115’s meaning derives from its self-made aspect. Doing it yourself succeeded here, between 1995 and 2002, because a stable group of founders found and bought a site, reached design consensus, got a bank loan and constructed a building.

Since that time the building has hosted a stream of 50+ creatives working in joinery, architecture, script-writing, graphic design, software, music and other spheres. Three of the initial group of four founders are still here. Membership is controlled to ensure the building remains a haven for creatives committed to doing “good work” that is “useful and delightful to others,” environmentally aware, personally fulfilling, egalitarian, welcoming to apprentices or “assistants”, and concerned with detail.

The average length of membership is over 13 years, and my contact makes clear the importance of one of the founders, a publisher, who put up money to buy the site. I assume finance for construction was secured against land-value. 30 years on, members are now exploring ways to buy the freehold.

115 brings together themes of urban life: stability, creativity, independence, affordability, neighbourhood and genius loci. The site it stands on was a sawmill until the 1950s, then became a filo pastry factory before being sold as development land during the last stages of the de-industrialisation of London’s backstreets in the late 90s.

Instead of becoming another expensive residential development to be repeatedly sold in order to cash-in on rising values, 115 has ensured continuity of productive activity on site.

The world which could have existed if more schemes like 115 had materialised since the 90s is a dream. Many neighbourhoods would be better if it had happened.

📊 The One-Click Poll

Does public art move you?

Yes! I’m a big fan of random encounters with creativity, even if I don’t always like what I see

No! It’s mostly over-conceptual, self-indulgent or plain ugly for me

Maybe! I’m no art expert, but I like colourful things, so I suppose I like public art

As ever, please do leave a comment after voting (or simply reply to this email). I’d love to hear which local installations you particularly LOVE / HATE too. We’ll publish a selection of comments next week, which should make for a tasty, opinionated and diverse read…

Last week, following Camdenist’s sneak peek story I asked: Will you be making a beeline for the new QEII-commemorating bit of Regent’s Park?

Yes! I can’t wait to explore the garden, enjoy the landscaping and clever planting design
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 64%

No! I’m not a fan of gardens/the monarchy/crowds of people
⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 8%

Maybe! I didn’t know much about it, but it sounds worth a try
🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 28%

And some of your many comments…

🗣️ “Our kids (in a local school) were given an early preview day in the new garden, they absolutely loved it! Learning about plants and the late Queen.”

🗣️ “So looking forward to seeing the garden and how it develops - so great to have this free and accessible amenity on our doorstep”

🗣️ “Firstly, I’m am a republican so naming anything after our current or recent monarch is not something I’d condone. Secondly, for all its eco-credentials a large amount of plastic has been used to conceal the new garden from public view during construction. I visit Regents Park every day and love it and its friendly staff but this somehow seems out of kilter with the rest.”

🗣️ “Just don’t tell anyone about the best kept secret nearby: St Johns Lodge.”

🗣️ “I live just across the road from the park for over 40 years and it’s been a part of my life for all that time, especially through the Covid lockdowns, therefore it is exciting to have a new area to visit and see evolve over the next years.”

🗣️ “I am sure it is nice, but I’d rather spend time in my own garden.”

🗣️ “I love Regents Park anyway. Another free attraction on our doorsteps. Win win.”

Here’s a challenge: First person to sign up to a monthly £5.99 subscription to Camdenist can suggest the topic of a future lead story. Go!

Subscribe now

CAMDEN CURATED

Festival season gets into gear this week, including music, boats, food, animals & culture-fests

FESTIVAL: 🛥️ Ok, Little Venice isn’t in Camden, however it’s surprisingly quick to get to on foot if you walk via Regent’s Canal towpath (certainly beating the bus or tube most days, if you walk at a decent clip). And the area’s biggest weekend of the year is upon us, as the Inland Waterways Association’s famous free Carnival Cavalcade brings loads of boats, food, drink and art together from Sat 2nd - Mon 4th May, with the lovely illuminated boat procession taking place on Sunday night.

FOOD: 🍾 St Paul’s longstanding rooftop cocktail and dining institution, Sabine, has just taken over the NYX Hotel rooftop in the centre of Holborn, bringing the same mix of sharing plates, impressive drinks list and lively DJ-infused party nights, set to a twinkling urban panorama from the hotel’s 10th floor and terrace.

CABARET: 🌞 The Black Cap is well and truly back on the local night time venue circuit with a programme of drag shows, quizzes and outrageous performances to check out, following its eagerly-awaited reopening after an 11-year battle. And, just in time for the bank holiday weekend, it’s roof terrace, aka the Regina Roof Terrace, also reopens on Sat 2nd May. It’s named in memory of the late, great drag artist, Regina Fong, or Her Imperial Highness the Grand Duchess, and features a restored blue plaque in her honour.

FESTIVAL: 🐐 If you love a local goat encounter, or squeal with delight at the sight of an urban pig, the annual May Day Fair returns this Mon 4th May at Kentish Town City Farm, for an afternoon of music, maypole dancing, games, arts and animals. Oink, oink!

STAGE: 🎷 The challenges of being British, Iranian, and a Hip-Hop head collide in I’m Muslamic Don’t Panik where our storyteller, Bobak, invites us to join him on a physical, musical and emotional journey to accept his own heritage, set against a media culture which still portrays the Middle East as a frightening and dangerous place. See it at Camden’s People’s Theatre until Sat 2nd May.

FESTIVAL: ✍🏼 Down at Fleet Street Quarter you’ll find a stream of top notch speakers from the worlds of journalism, books, podcasting and politics taking to the stage from Thurs 7th May at the Festival of Words. Subtitled ‘The Age of Wisdom and Foolishness’, 40 different talks and events look at where we’ve collectively gone wrong, and what on earth happens next.

COMEDY: 🎭 Dirty Minds sees comedian Kayvan Khazaee unleash what he says will be his dirtiest material as part of a shamelessly honest deep dive into his chaotic life on Sun 3rd May at Aces & Eights. So expect dark gags, gleeful filth, and emotional vulnerability.

MUSIC: 💀 I’ll admit, I don’t know much about Metal, but if I did, I’d be spending Sat 2nd May getting thoroughly stuck in from lunchtime until the early hours at Incineration Festival 2026, which bring deliciously name bands like Blood Fire Death, Hypocrisy, Internal Bleeding, Vacuous and Beyond Extinction to five Camden Town venues, with one wristband valid at Roundhouse, Electric Ballroom, Underworld, The Black Heart and The Dev.

FESTIVAL: 🍜 If you like Korean food but want to go deeper into the country’s dynamic food culture, London’s first Jung Festival is bringing 30+ traders serving all kinds of skewers, kimchi, fried chicken and beautiful desserts at King’s Cross Canopy Market, while inside UAL at The Crossing, there’s a dedicated cultural zone featuring fashion, accessories, art workshops, traditional Korean games and a range of craft and design pieces. Runs from today, Fri 1st - Mon 4th May.

I’d been wanting to write something on the chronic state of disinformation that prevails online about London being lawless/lost for some time.

Last week, following Sadiq Khan’s warnings on exactly that issue, I went for it, but it would have been bizarre not to mention that two murders have taken place in LB Camden in recent weeks, too.

By doing so, the purposefully culture-first agenda of Camdenist crossed the Rubicon into culture-war territory. Crime - particularly the murder of a young person - is a deeply emotional ‘worst nightmare’ scenario for most of us, so it’s certain to grab the attention over happier topics in today’s overcrowded information space.

That visceral response is exactly the stuff that social network algorithms and the very same online provocateurs and trouble-makers feed on. I really didn’t want to veer into their ‘for eyeballs and clicks’ game, yet this unavoidable part of the story landed me there, and inevitably the comments and poll responses flooded in, reaching record levels, I’m fairly sure.

It’s tricky, as anyone producing content of any type or quality these days wants it to be seen, and to be engaging enough to make an impact, but we all know that pushing the emotive buttons via fear and outrage is not exactly doing society a whole lot of good, either.

Rather than defend my position or endlessly re-examine each turn of phrase, I’ve simply included a wide selection of the comments received in the poll section below ⬇️

There was substantial pushback, but also broad agreement about how safe the city actually feels, despite the obvious horrors of the recent incidents, so I hope a more nuanced debate is the overall result.

‘If it bleeds, it leads’ has long been the front page mantra for selling newspapers, but I think in an algorithmic, trackable era, we all have a duty not to get sucked in to feeling that every video of a phone snatching or fare evasion served up to us signals that our city has no hope. Watching these things simply feeds the outrage machine, as well as stoking our own worst fears, which only ends up making the issues (perceived or real), worse.

At a time when even such once venerable titles as the Evening Standard seem to be on their last legs, haemorrhaging their remaining journalists while churning out depressing amounts of vacuous sponsored content, it’s easy to see why publishers and audiences alike gravitate desperately towards the more emotive stuff.

I love having impassioned feedback to Camdenist, but I won’t chase it by running easy crime topics or culture war controversies. Thankfully, we’re spared the anonymous slanging match of X, YouTube or below the line keyboard warriors here, and all opinions are welcome, as long as they genuinely aim to improve city life, not deride or dismiss it.

👑 Remember when it used to rain in April?

The brand new Queen Elizabeth II Garden opens in Regent’s Park this Monday (27th Apr), commemorating the life of our longest serving monarch while also making some rather pointed, er, points about climate change with its striking design.

The wider Park is looking lush at the moment, its historic, generations-old formal landscaping and sweeping boulevards are bursting with the colourful buds of spring promise. In fact all that makes the new QE2 garden look positively arid, where more youthful plants have a few years of bedding in ahead of them.

The plucky specimens have also been set the challenge of growing deep into a high PH scree of crushed up concrete that was once the base for the defunct greenhouses that used to dominate this site, found just behind the pretty espresso kiosk on The Broad Walk.

By repurposing the rubble, the designers at landscape architects HTA have solve one environmental challenge (waste) while also creating a garden ready to adapt to the stresses of London’s scarily fast-shifting climate.

On a blisteringly sunny preview visit this week, we heard about the meticulous, low impact irrigation systems, the mix of rolling wildflower meadows, shady wooded areas and water features that all sit on top of some rather unforgiving London clay.

It’s certainly very different from the rest of the Park, hemmed in by trees and bushes as a curiously less green oasis in the middle, yet with the same odd glimpse of the BT Tower, which I always feel lends Regent’s Park a rather homely, urban exclamation mark.

The space looks idea for weddings (if not the shooting plenty of identical social content) although we were told it’s not been designed for such events. Meanwhile, an impressive figure of nearly 200 places to sit was also hinted at, across posh benches, concrete perches and assorted other places where you can to rest your feet throughout.

Oh, and the stone and iron work really are as impressive as the epic tulips currently swaying in the centre beneath the Queen’s fave - a magnolia tree - and well worth taking a look up close, too.

Suitably interested? You can find out a lot more from last week’s episode of Gardener’s World or just drop by from Monday - it’s another impressive free attraction on our doorsteps, and will doubtless prove a big draw (so beware initial crowds, perhaps), not just for locals and tourists, but also apparently for all the hedgehogs reportedly curled up in the strategically placed woodpile.

🌍 EarthFest is back in KX this summer

Talking of positive, free things in the area, right after the garden preview, I strolled on down to Euston for the launch of EarthFest 2026, which will see a week of summits and school events, leading up to public-facing activities on 27th & 28th June around King’s Cross.

The event developed out of the work of the Covid-era inspired Camden (now London) Clean Air Initiative, and introduces all kinds of sustainability topics to the public in an engaging way, with live music, wellbeing, workshops, food demos, an eco friendly expo, electric mobility showcases, sustainable fashion and big name panellists.

It’s the third edition, and every year the format gets tweaks to improve, with a move to coincide with London Climate Action Week the big news for 2026, alongside ticketed industry-specific summits which you can find out more about here.

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📊 The One-Click Poll

Will you make a beeline for the new QEII-commemorating bit of Regent’s Park?

Yes! I can’t wait to explore the garden, enjoy the landscaping and clever planting design

No! I’m not a fan of gardens/the monarchy/crowds of people

Maybe! I didn’t know much about it, but it sounds worth a try

As ever, please do leave a more detailed comment after voting or simply reply to this email with your thoughts. We publish a selection of your comments each week.

Last week, when looking at our lived experience of living in the capital, I asked: Is London is a more lawless/declining place to live?

Yes. I don’t feel the city is what it was and feel less safe, regardless of the statistics and awards
🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 16%

No. As huge metropolises go, it’s one of the safest, most exciting and promising of them all
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 59%

It’s complicated. There’s a lot wrong, and a frustrating lack of fixes, but it’s home
🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 24%

And some of your many comments…

🗣️ “I remember the days when there were fights constantly in pubs. That’s largely gone – I assume due to surveillance and banning the usual suspects. Glassings – in many ways much more horrific than the knifing culture – seem to have become less fashionable. Overall, cameras seem to have inhibited a lot of vandalism which was commonplace in the past, and what happened to serial killers? I’m figuring they are getting caught a lot quicker now, before they become cause celebres due to technology. A capital will never be as safe a village or small town, but its miles safer than it was the 70s and 80s and feels safer than most of the rest of the comparable capitals of the world.”

🗣️ “I have lived in London since 1982. I come from a seaside town in Northern Ireland, which is lovely and I go ‘home’ to enjoy the town and the sea and the different pace. Then, when I come home again to London I enjoy the city; the diversity a centre of excellence in the arts, the parks and architecture, the public spaces, the events, the local vibe, the excitement and discovery of a city I have lived in for so long, know so well, and yet so little. I’ve had children who are grown up Londoners, and become a Londoner myself.

🗣️ “I dare anyone to say this city was better under the Tories.”

🗣️ “London continues to attract people from Europe and around the world (despite post-Brexit hurdles and endless conservative online propaganda) for a very good reason. There is nowhere else like it. A cultural melting pot. It would be nice if Londoners reflected on this every now and then with a bit more of a New Yorker spirit when talking about London: “Greatest city in the world!” Perhaps that’s asking too much of Brits?”

🗣️ “I cannot understand why young people feel they possess ‘all the answers’ when they are so unaware of what London was and how it has evolved in history and. They own views that they think at their age are infinite (when people change, grow and experience life as one ages completely differently). Oh, the naivety of youth! If only it wasn’t so dangerous in its ability to do such damage by its WOKE and left wing condemnation! To be so sure, so young without knowledge is poisonous. I knew a London that has been damaged by the ideals of the politics now, entrenched in three generations of pure folly.”

🗣️ “I’ve been bringing American university students to London for three weeks each January since 2020. We have stayed in Kentish Town, Camden Town, and Dalston. As you note, the ‘undesirables’ are what make the city so vibrant: generations of immigrant communities that show up in decoration, music, and foods; the blend of working, professional, and government types; the clash between history and progress visible before your very eyes. Limited gun violence. Cleaner public transportation and streets. You don’t know how good you have it if you have nowhere else in the world for comparison.”

🗣️ “As I walk through Camden daily, I often think how easily all the different people in the thronging crowds get along.”

🗣️ “I do not recognise the city I was born and grew up in, it was never perfect, but it has deteriorated way beyond anything I could have have imagined. I am not racist and welcome other cultures, but I take exception to you labelling everyone who doesn’t like Khan and his implementations as racists, which is what I took from your article. Sadly, l honestly do not believe diversity has been our biggest strength as there are too many who do not wish to integrate as one community – it is sad and the places I knew growing up are no longer familiar. Many factors have contributed to that fact not solely diversity but when you walk down many streets across our city it often feels a task to find people speaking the native language - that is not helpful!”

🗣️ “London is an incredible place to live, I’ve lived here all my life and it keeps getting better. Yes, there are problems but the benefits that have taken place over the last 20 years in transportation, road safety, air quality, and urban regeneration have more than made up for it.”

🗣️ “Drug trading, the number of homeless and petty crime have all gone up in my neighbourhood.”

🗣️ “London is a tougher more atomised, alienating place than it was. Technology – everyone in their mobile phone bubble – people shouting into their phones on public transport – shouting into their phones in the street – playing loud media on their phones on public transport etc has changed London. Created a more fragmented, unconnected society with little consideration for everyone else. That’s the new London. The London of future mental health problems – a city without shared small values or a real sense of collectively and connectivity. When you peddle the idea that young guys stabbed on Primrose Hill should be regarded as a nothing in the greater picture, you reveal your insensitivity as well as a complete lack of connection and humanity. You too have been infected by the new technology. It’s an ‘I’m Alright Jack’ narrative. Essentially your peddling polarisation and peddling negativity. Rather than looking at how technology has made London a colder, more atomised and alienating place. (Flashmobs in Clapham etc) and come up with strategies revealing how we can make London a more humane place (with real connection, rather than an atomised consumer dystopian petri dish) you go for the simple ‘I’m great, other people are deluded’ narrative.”

🗣️ “Being female, I am particularly grateful that I live in London. We have a lot of freedom here to live, love, work and express ourselves. Dubai?! I am more concerned about the erosion of our civil liberties and right to peaceful protest than the level of crime in our city.”

🗣️ “London seems to be worse where I live. More drug addicts and drinkers.”

🗣️ “I’m a huge defender of London - I’ve loved her for over 35 years and have never lost the buzz I get here. But, her face is changing, people are taking the piss and getting away with it, disrespecting authority and clouding the skies for others. I live in Primrose Hill and am shocked at the violence recently, but I’m also shocked at the lack of any police presence – needed more and more since lockdown, and the chipping away at the edges of society. A bit like creeping tar, it won’t stop until it reaches an obstruction. The public have had enough, and the phrase ‘anti-social’ doesn’t cover it. How can we cut funding for police on streets, close police stations (which in themselves were pillars of security and presence) yet increase our multicultural population and not expect any adverse effects? Bring back the police stations. Traffic and 20 mph speed limits have become money making opportunities – the stats prove that. Your newsletter is great, btw.”

CAMDEN CURATED

Top ways to eek the maximum out of local cultural life. Am I right?!

MUSIC: 🎶 The latest big ticket multimedia spectacle to land at Lightroom opened this week, using the three-storey-high screens to bask visitors in the sounds and images of David Bowie in You’re Not Alone. With material curated from thousands of hours of film, its an indulgent deep dive into the archive of this untouchable pop icon, but did you know there’s also a series of events to catch in the weeks ahead too? Bowie Nights sees graphic designer and Bowie collaborator Jonathan Barnbrook give a talk on Tues 19th May, Miranda Sawyer interview six Bowie photographers (Tues 26th May) with podcaster Adam Buxton and a Bowie-0inspired cello recital by Peter Gregson lined up for the months ahead.

EXHIBITION: 🎥 There’s a special screening of the acclaimed ANARCHY! McLaren Westwood Gang alongside the launch of Soho ‘73, an exhibition of street photography taken in the area at the birth of punk, taking place at the Museum of Soho inside Dean St’s bohemian hangout All Is Joy next Fri 1st May. Meanwhile cross-platform music collective Noise of Art’s head honcho, Ben Osborne, launches Slack City Radio London and his new show on the station.

FOOD: 🤯 There’s a fairly unique chance to tickle all five senses at HERE at Outernet on Tues 5th May where Michelin-star chefs will prepare a six-course meal soundtracked by big room electronica heroes Bicep at Sensora. It’s all in aid of The Brain Tumor Charity, and tickets (priced at £375) are already sold out, however there’s a chance to win a pair by pledging a tenner in the next couple of days.

MUSIC: 🎛️ The Roundhouse Three Sixty Festival is in full swing this weekend with the might Detroit techno originals Carl Craig and Octave One Live tonight, Fri 24th Apr and a pay-what-you-can party from Situation Dance with Annie Mac, Benji B, Yazmin Lacey, Kash Jones + Femi Koleoso on Sat 25th. Both events have vanishingly few tickets left - if you‘re quick.

ART: 🖼️ The 16 interdisciplinary artists and curators that make up the newly formed Palace Cinema Art Collective have their firs show in their new Kentish Town gallery home on Fri 25th Apr with a free private view of House Warming, which then runs all weekend.

FOOD:🌶️ Swish food hall Arcade is opening a third London site fairly near their Tottenham Court Rd original. This time its the former TGI Fridays spot in deepest Covent Garden, with flat iron and smoky spatchcock at Solis and smash burger from Manna amoung the hall highlights, plus standalone outlets for Southern Thai specialists Plaza Khao Gaeng and an exciting Greek Cypriot taverna from ex-Kiln/co-owner of Singburi, Nick Molyviatis. Doors open to everything on Fri 15th May.

COMEDY: 🎭 Seven Dials club Comedy Carnival hosts a showcase of international stand up comedy this Sat 25th Apr, featuring outspoken Irish comic Mary Bourke, Scott Capurro, Sam Picone and the entertaining David Ward on MC duties.

MUSIC: 🪩 You’ll need to venture just over the river for this one 😱 but the prospect of 500 free drinks, the start of a bank holiday weekend and al fresco bangers courtesy of Guilty Pleasures and Flexin’ means the return of the South Bank’s annual food and cultural programme Between The Bridges next Thurs 30th Apr is one for the calendar, I’d say.

BOOK NOW

🥕 Celebrate the arrival of Spring and its fresh harvest of vegetables on Sat 9th May as local sustainable food champions Vegbox and Eat Club team up for Seasonal Surprises, a cooking workshop followed by a community meal, at Calthorpe Community Gardens. You’ll learn to prepare some simple, delicious, seasonal dishes and then meet fellow local food enthusiasts around the table afterwards.

It doesn’t need me to poll Camdenist readers about their views on London, as I absolutely know the vast majority of you are fully enamoured with living in the capital, despite its challenges.

Yet we’ve all doubtless had a few conversations of late with concerned friends, remote relatives, or superior-sounding expats about how the city is perceived as too dangerous and/or in a state of terminal decline.

In such pointedly polarised times, I suppose a proverbial cultural melting pot with the power to stir great emotion was always going to become a target for politically motivate point-scoring, but some of this stuff is really off the charts.

A combination of anti-Sadiq sentiment, augmented with some common-or-garden racism and casual prejudice, then super-charged by malicious bot farms intent on stoking disharmony, has lead to an often comedic gulf between Londoners’ lived reality and the persistent narrative that our home is some kind of lawless hell hole.

So, while the capital has just scored a major gong (the Lee Kuan Yew World City Prize 2026) for its world-class innovation, vastly improved air quality, transport infrastructure and vibrant public spaces, the Mayor simultaneously had to go on the record to decry the “disinformation blizzard” that continues to swirl regardless, where the hot button topics of crime, violence and clashing beliefs are fully weaponised to badmouth London in the attention economy’s post-truth scroll wars.

It’s certainly landing reputational blows, too. Earlier this year, YouGov found that most Britons (61%) now think London is ‘an unsafe place to live’, a big increase across the board. So there’s no doubt that sentiment originating from online far right agitators is currently being accepted as ‘fact’ by millions, who have been confused by the algorithmic prevalence of triggering violent video clips and the snarky words of questionable commentators.

And yet. It’s an inescapable truth that we’ve seen two horrendous murders here in the Borough in the last month.

Such violence rightfully causes fear, grief, anger and a search for accountability, but the inevitable way the usual agitators seized upon these devastating incidents to push their narrow agenda offers nothing to solve any of the complex issues behind them. It definitely makes things worse.

The sensational nature of this content as a form of viral engagement/entertainment hook sums up so much of what is wrong with the current libertarian free-for-all of the social platforms.

Perception is everything, as the Mayor knows. Fear is real, even if what is feared actually befalling you might not be. Whipping up hateful ‘I told you so’ stories about statistically/thankfully rare crimes reveals a twisted glee at how damned - and damned wrong - us Londonphiles must all be. Meanwhile, we just get on doing the daily work of supporting stronger community bonds and rejecting hate across the city, in our millions.

The things I love about London the absolute most, are often those most savagely attacked by the keyboard critics: multicultural enclaves, bountiful street art, Notting Hill Carnival, daily encounters with edgy nonconformist characters. They represent joy, tolerance and creativity, which is all obviously a real threat to certain fading power structures.

Put into any kind of historical context, from Dickensian squalor to post-war race riots, the capital is unquestionably safer than ever, though. I’d say the real danger - culturally at least - is a slide towards bland over-sanitisation and regulation.

That’s my perception, but I know its far from shared elsewhere, particularly online. Yet, we’ve similarly seen the much-touted online perception of a city like Dubai, (regularly juxtaposed with London for being so much more safe, clean and prosperous - at least if you ignore the human rights issues and repressive government overreach), fall apart in the buzzing shadow of Iranian drone bombs.

If the carefully constructed reputation of one city as ‘safe’ can crumble so fast, so can the equally manufactured narrative that our city is apparently so lacking.

Speaking with an Afghan refugee in Camden this week, I heard only that London represents security and opportunity for his family. Of course, he’d quickly be portrayed online as the ‘wrong kind’ of Londoner to be enjoying the place so much, but his perception is just as real and valid as anyone else’s.

While the local murders are shocking, the actions of one or two disaffected, angry young men simply do not represent what this massively varied city and its wealth of culture and lived experience is all about.

That shouldn’t need to be pointed out, but here we are.

As the Mayor suggests, London might be “the canary in the coalmine” for many more such disinformation outrage battles to come, but we also have the chance to make it the place where the fightback began.

Let’s make that happen.

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📊 The One-Click Poll

Is London is a more lawless/declining place to live?

Yes. I don’t feel the city is what it was and feel less safe, regardless of the statistics and awards

No. As huge metropolises go, it’s one of the safest, most exciting and promising of them all

It’s complicated. There’s a lot wrong, and a frustrating lack of fixes, but it’s home

As ever, please do leave a more detailed comment after voting or simply reply to this email with your thoughts. We publish a selection of your comments each week.

Last week, with Debbie from local circular economy action champs Think&Do as Guest Editor, we asked: How do you feel about taking small steps towards better social and climate outcomes?

Excited! Positive change really is in our hands, step by step (and there’s joy in the process)🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 73%

Depressed! Meaningful change can only happen with political heft behind it, and I don’t see much of that
⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 6%

Curious! I’ve not done much beyond putting out the recycling each week, but maybe I’ll do more
🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 21%

And some of your comments…

🗣️ “What if….every community had such a brilliant organisation doing this, all over the country!!!”

🗣️ “Very excited - going to look into getting involved!”

🗣️ “We need this kind of grassroots action that orgs like Think&Do run now more than ever. Our global leaders have shown that they are more in thrall to the oil barons and their vast $$$ than the democratic voters, so we need to show them that these crazy energy policies are not what ordinary humans want - and then, if they continue not to listen, we need to vote them out!”

And also…

🗣️ “I’m excited to be working with a group of Council gym users and teachers who are trying to petition the Council to renegotiate their contract with GLL Better Gyms, who took away use of proper licensed music by artists who need to earn a living and are instead paying USA global fitness brand PowerMusicNow for royalty free and ‘own brand ‘ cover versions - music that a lot of us really don’t want. Let’s try to work collectively and collaboratively to find a Camden way of supporting real music and genuine artists, to give teachers music the like and Camdenites trying to keep fit the inspiration we all need to keep going in these times where big business and autocrats seem to be trying to take over everything. We have started a WhatsApp group and are currently trying to collect signatures for a petition to Camden Council. ”

PUBS

🍻 3 boozers return - we’re spoilt!

Despite the prevailing doom felt right across the nation’s cherished hospitality industry, Camden’s pubs just don’t die easily (even if it takes some serious community mobilisation to keep them incubated when in dire need).

Hot on the stilettoed heels of vital LGBTQ+ drag pub The Black Cap returning after over a decade in the dark last month, April has seen the return of lovely backstreet local The Star in Chester Rd, too. It comes complete with masses of optimism after a successful campaign to save it from permanent closure, as story that sits behind an increasing number of boozers in the ‘hood now.

Particularly exciting it the return of Tufnell Park Film Club to its old haunt upstairs, with screenings shown every Tuesday.

And, low and behold, another long-closed local fave, Camden Road’s The Unicorn now looks set to return as an outpost on the live music circuit once more. With such positivity on the pub scene despite numerous challenges, the next question looms over the former Camden Arms right opposite Camden Rd Overground station, which was dragged down with the precipitous fall from grace of Brewdog. Surely that well-appointed hostelry won’t sit dark for quite so long…

CAMDEN CURATED

10 pleasingly different suggestions to go out and explore

COMEDY: 🎭 The old Belushi’s sports bar at Mornington Cres has become dedicated comedy and live entertainment venue Hot Toddy’s, promising regular stand-up shows championing rising comedy talent, outrageous LGBTQ+ performances, free karaoke parties and capsule hostel beds upstairs, aiming to become an exciting hub of Camden’s nightlife as the summer gets going.

MUSIC: 🎤 It’s Record Store Day on Sat 18th Apr, which means a celebration of all things analogue and vinyl. Look out for ragga metal legends Skindred takeover at Raven Records in Camden Town for signings, chats and demos, and a special in the monlth-long series of outdoor DJ and live gigs at Kingley Court’s Soho Sounds, supporting the frenzied crate-digging going on at other key local bastions of the black stuff including Phonica, Sister Ray and Reckless.

SHOPPING: 👗 There’s a new pop-up location for the excellent Charity Super.Mkt just launched over at Finchley Road’s 02 Centre, which brings together loads of different leading charity shops offering stylish preloved clothes, as co-founder and urban visionary Wayne Hemingway told us when he was a Guest Editor of Camdenist back in 2024. Look out for their Fashion with Compassion upcycling workshops on Sat May 7th offering practical tips ways to re-vamping beloved garments, and a specially curated capsule collection with exclusive discounts for students.
It all started at their Classic Car Boot Sale, which also returns this weekend, Sat 18th & Sun 19th, to its home of Granary Square in King’s Cross for what is always a riot of music, fashion, food and vintage vehicles.

MUSIC: 🎤 Africa’s celebrated musician and visual artist, Nissi brings her Afrobeats, R&B and soul sounds sung in English, Yoruba and pidgin to the Jazz Cafe on Thurs 23rd Apr. Sister of Burna Boy, its a rare chance to catch this compelling artist in a club setting.

FOOD: 🥫 The latest addition to Camden Town’s smorgasbord of international supermarkets has just opened on Parkway, with a new branch of Russian deli Dacha, featuring meticulously laid-out racks of pickles, sauces, sweets and signature caviar, too.

BOOKS: 📚 Up at Ally Pally, the North London Book Festival brings masses of authors and readers under one roof for a guaranteed inspiring three days, Thurs 23rd - Sat 26th Apr, of readings, panel discussions, Q&As, workshops, and book signings.

FOOD:🌶️ There’s a spicy new Thai kitchen residency at King’s Cross listening bar Spiritland throughout April on Sunday’s (lunch and dinner) and Mondays (dinner) with the acclaimed Bangkok Delivery Boy.

COMEDY: 🎭 Dave Chawner is a stand-up currently writing a show about quitting alcohol and getting his shit together, and diving into the complex relationship today’s culture has with booze. He’s previewing Dry Humour at Camden Comedy Club on Thurs 24th Apr.

ART: 🖼️ The 16 interdisciplinary artists and curators that make up the newly formed Palace Cinema Art Collective have their firs show in their new Kentish Town gallery home on Fri 25th Apr with a free private view of House Warming, which then runs all weekend.

BOOK NOW

🥕 Celebrate the arrival of Spring and its fresh harvest of vegetables on Sat 9th May as local sustainable food champions Vegbox and Eat Club team up for Seasonal Surprises, a cooking workshop followed by a community meal, at Calthorpe Community Gardens. You’ll learn to prepare some simple, delicious, seasonal dishes and then meet fellow local food enthusiasts around the table afterwards.

With global headlines this week shaped by flailing, ego-led idiocy of the highest order, down here at local level, we might be excused for feeling a little powerless in the face of it all.

But perhaps our discomfort in observing the once great USA debase itself so completely, while making life measurably worse for almost everybody, signals a moment for swinging into action, no matter how insignificant that might initially feel.

Despite the anti-human imperatives of Late-Stage Capitalism, there’s always been a parallel green and pleasant underground movement working diligently, idealistically and vitally towards a pro-climate, pro-social agenda.

In Camden, the volunteer organisation Think&Do has been running these types of local initiatives for many years, so what better time to turn our attention away from Trumpian petro-war doom and look towards areas where all of us really can exert some power?

The organisation’s co-founder and ‘avid’ weekly Camdenist reader, Debbie Bourne, reached out this week with some proactive inspiration…

Guest Editor Debbie Bourne asks: what if…?

At Think&Do we are all about turning some major ‘what ifs?’ into, ‘hell yeahs!’

What if… we reimagined waste as opportunity, and more of the things we no longer need could find a new home, instead of ending up in landfill or incinerated?

What if… we could have everything we need to be strong, connected and self-sufficient - by sharing things we already own?

What if… our homes and estates across Camden became mini power stations with rooftop solar and solar balconies, helping us become energy secure?

What if… we could easily save £400pa on our energy bills without any government or energy company BS?

What if… Camden became one big pollinator pathway and radical leader in ecological justice?

What if… climate action wasn’t just feeling ‘what’s-the-point-with-Trump-in-power’, but becomes a no-brainer, woven into our daily lives?

Think&Do is a not-for-profit Camden-based organisation run by an enthusiastic bunch of locals. We’re on a mission to build a fairer, greener Camden with projects which make positive, sustainable long-term change. Put simply, it’s climate and social justice in action – and it’s good fun.

We believe that if we wait for governments, it will be too late. If we do it by ourselves, it will be too little. But if we join together as one big, connected community, it might just be enough, and in enough time. We urge you to join in the fun, since it’s all such uplifting, positive stuff.

So, back to the ‘what ifs’, and also, ‘what has this got to do with me’? Well, we have some events coming up that should answer both questions.

In terms of reimagining waste and sharing, how about a bit of retail therapy that doesn’t cost the planet? Join us alongside Transition Kentish Town on Sat 18th Apr, 10am-2pm, at the Hampstead Heath Education Centre (right by Parliament Hill Lido) for our next big street swap. These events see all kinds of goodies from guitars to printers, clothes to kitsch china plates all ready to be swapped. What’s more, if you’re then inspired to host a street swap where you live, we’ll not only show you how to do it, but we’ll give the most convincing plan a £200 budget to get cracking.

Want to discuss ideas about circularity and sharing in general? Join us at the Primrose Hill Community Association (PHCA) on Thurs 23rd Apr for an In The Loop People’s Assembly where we’re going to expand the conversation.

On Sat 25th, back at PHCA, we’re co-hosting a general electronic repair event and a ‘Mining Your Mobile’ workshop with our friends from the Queen’s Crescent-based Fixing Factory. Come along to get any electronic item repaired and also to learn about the precious minerals inside your mobile phone and the climate justice issues related with mineral extraction. Sounds a bit heavy, but it’s all positive, important stuff. E-waste is a big fat downer with over 2 million items generated in the UK each year, but we all have to power to reduce that with our actions.

In terms of Ecological justice, we are big into helping Camden residents on estates plant pop-up wildflower meadows and pick-your-own fruit patches, and are hoping that our ‘Communitree’ project, in partnership with the amazing KOKO Foundation, re-emerges after its Glasto-like fallow break, for a fifth year.

We’re helping residents set up Sharing Spaces across Camden estates, where neighbours can meet, build connections, and collectively work towards a more resilient future; we’re working on a solar balcony pilot project, training up new Power Rangers. There’s masses going on.

I hope that, wherever in the Borough or beyond that you are reading this, you stop to look around and that an idea pops into your head for a project that you and your besties might do. Whether it’s about food, energy, sharing, greening, skilling-up, artivism, or whatever. It’s really that simple. Just get Thinking & Doing, and we’re always here to help with advice. We’re also always looking for volunteers to help us run our own projects.

Now really is the time for exploring ‘what if…?’, so do get in touch: info@thinkanddocamden.org.uk

📊 The One-Click Poll

How do you feel about taking small steps towards better social and climate outcomes?

Excited! Positive change really is in our hands, step by step (and there’s joy in the process)

Depressed! Meaningful change can only happen with political heft behind it, and I don’t see much of that

Curious! I’ve not done much beyond putting out the recycling each week, but maybe I’ll do more

As ever, please do leave a more detailed comment after voting or simply reply to this email with your thoughts. We publish a selection of your comments each week.

Last week, we looked at why it’s so hard to play live music outdoors these days and asked: Should buskers get more opportunities to play easily in Camden?

Yes! Making it so hard to perform is yet another form of cultural vandalism that needs fixing. Keep the streets free
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 54%

No! I can’t stand the racket of over-amplified street shows. More arrests please
🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 10%

Maybe! Regulation can work, but it’s clearly not fit for purpose. More collaboration with buskers
🟨🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️ 36%

And some of your comments…

🗣️ “While I support busking, there are factors to considers such as noise pollution, pavement access, and the general wellbeing of the buskers. Hopefully with more dedicated spaces and collaborations with the council it will allow for better conditions for buskers and audiences alike.”

🗣️ “I can’t believe that buskers all over London need licences to perform. For me, as a born and bred Camden resident, it is an integral part of life wherever you live and work, and is part of what makes London such an amazing cultural and musical centre and wonderful place to wander around hearing music from performers whatever their calibre. If you don’t like it, just move on!”

🗣️ “We have competing needs and wishes in public places, so this is never going to be easy. The joys of street music are undoubted, but nowadays it is complicated by the facility to make it into ear-splitting racket via powerful amplifiers. Some clearly love this but for others it is unbearable. I used to help on Camden’s Street Kitchens outside Camden tube station but had to give up because I couldn’t hear what people wanted above the racket of amplified music which, to me, was both painful and frustrating. I knew we may be the only people some of our guests spoke with in their day and, on those occasions when there was no music or un-amplified music, we could do this in a relaxed way. Why not allow licensed musicians to play in agreed places but just forbid amplification?

🗣️ “Some music is far too loud…it must be hell for neighbours, but non amplified music should be ok. So rules etc need to be rethought…..and thought through properly before being put into place. ”

🗣️ “The principle should be that busking is part of what makes Camden a great place to live. It shouldn’t be that difficult to have a policy that over-amplification is antisocial and repeated breaches of the policy will result in confiscation of equipment. I hate to say it, but the current administration have lost their ways in so many areas of local government they need some time in opposition to reset their ideas. I just hope whoever replaces them are not a load of right wing nutters who will only make things worse!”

🗣️ “I love buskers, even the ones playing cheesy hits. But I hate it when they are amplified. Why not ban amplification, which would probably also help reduce complaints. ”

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CAMDEN CURATED

Unexpected things to do for the days ahead

FOOD: 🍹Soft-opening next Thurs 16th Apr with four days of 50% off your food bill, Rum Kitchen is the new addition to the longstanding Cottons Caribbean dining empire, born and bred in Camden Town. Promising beach shack-style food, bountiful rum cocktails, plus rhythm and late-night energy on Inverness St, just in time for a tropically scorching London summer, right?

STAGE: 🎭 The new Hampstead Theatre production of Michal Frayn’s multi award-winning WWII play Copenhagen is essentially sold out for the entire run until 2nd May, however we’ve spotted very limited availability for this Sat 11th Apr matinee performance, if you’re quick about it…

EXHIBITION: 🔊 As part of the current Roundhouse Three Sixty Festival, the iconic Chalk Farm music venue is hosting free exhibition From Soundboy to Streaming: Collective and Individual Joy where groups of local young people, in association with the (soon to be nearby) Museum of Youth Culture, explore the changing face of London’s music culture, and why it remains such an important force. Runs 11th - 25th Apr.

MUSIC: 🎤 Euphoric live rave singing collective House Gospel Choir are onto week 2 of their Jazz Cafe residency, belting out the vocal-driven Afro and Soulful house classics tonight, Fri 10th Apr.

FILM: 🎞️ Cute new Chalk Farm bookshop and café, Fable & Falcon, have their first movie screening event tonight, Fri 10th Apr, with a Y2K-themed showing of 10 Things I Hate About You with a slice of Ria’s pizza and your first drink included.

ART: 🖼️ Camden Arts Centre has just opened London’s first comprehensive survey of Guyanese-British ceramicist, painter and sculptor Donald Locke. Resistant Forms includes over 80 works from this Windrush Generation artist who played a pivotal if under-recognised role in 20th century British sculpture. Runs to 30th Aug.

MUSIC: 🎤 Indie rock and alternative energy in the vein of Sam Fender, Arctic Monkeys and Catfish and the Bottlemen, singer-songwriter Luke Chappell brings his UK tour to Camden for a headline show at The Dublin Castle on Wed 15th Apr.