Camden Market, around 1990
Coming out of the Chalk Farm Road subway station (the Underground), you navigate around panhandlers and buskers, take a right, and the market is right there.
Traffic is dense both ways, the trucks spew diesel fumes which will combine with whatever you breathed in in the subway and your own mucous into a tar like substance.
Past the shops along the side of the road, next to the canal, the maze of stalls begins. This place looks more like an oriental bazaar than anything, it embodies life and makes the Portobello Road Market seem like the perfectly orderly posh movie backdrop it really is.
Camden is gritty, chaotic, you can buy anything here, not just overpriced antiques and leaky gas masks for your dungeon. Near Camden Lock, all small things Asia spill out in front of you - sometimes on the ground, too. Specialized stands sell off the vinyl discs of the past. Second hand clothing abounds. And Doc Martens shoes are cheap.
People haggle and chat, and you have all UK accents plus the former empire and the tourists.
Just outside of the market are old manufacturing buildings converted to music halls. If you enjoy punk or metal, there are venues with all black interiors, a floor easily washed with a hose, bare walls.
In those days, your walk on the wild side might well end with agitated room mates having plastered the area around the phone with notes: call home as soon as you get in, Jenny called - call back, Jenny called again.
All because you had planned to go to the market but then went watching mummies at the British Museum. Hence, you were not anywhere near the market when an IRA bomb exploded.
Camden Market 2010
Coming out of the Chalk Farm Road subway station (the Underground),
there are no panhandlers, and the single busker at the other end is having a chat with a copper (aka a police officer). Take a right, and the
market is right there.
Well, it should be. They narrowed the street for vehicle traffic, making more room for pedestrians. The shops along the way still have the old facades but that's about it. They are well lit display cases of two or three classes of goods: Crap and More Crap.
Near the canal and the Lock, the old stalls with their DIY cases, three legged card tables, and raggedy canvas shade and rain protection have been replaced with uniform little wooden huts, small rectangular box stalls with slanted roofs and maddeningly well aligned and straight interiors.
You can almost see the OxBrigde designers of the sanitized tourist trap go:
How can we engineer a, well, I believe you call it rustic, appearance of a market?
Well, McNitwit & Sons make delightfully tacky but stylish huts, all wood, so we can put Green on the brochures, fully wired for electricity.
Wonderful, it should be a clean and safe experience, so that the Queen herself would be comfortable shopping there.
They sell more crap. Brand new container ware, plastic. And steampunk gear all made in China.
On the plus side, the food is better. There is a food alley with pretty good chow from around the world. Better food, though, applies to all of the country. Gone are the days when cardboard recycling meant that PizzaChainOutlet turned the cardboard of discarded boxes into pizza.
The old English or British sales people are no longer there. Of course, those from way back when are retired. But not a single one of the booth attendants and shop clerks can be over 25 years old.
Tops, most are pushing 20. Only the street sweeper is still a black guy in his fifties.
A single vintage shop in the Stables market is a reminder of Camden.
We should have checked the reviews section of Time Out magazine, says Old London Connoisseur.
So, we did. Time Out review: not yet rated, be the first.
Don't bother.
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