I've fallen out of love with Camden

WHEN my wife and I bought our Victorian town house in Camden Town in 1962 it seemed like an entirely natural area to move to. I had been born a mile away, on the other side of Regent's Park, and before moving to Camden I lived nearby in Primrose Hill.

Camden seemed a safe, residential area in which to raise a family, and indeed my children and grandchildren have taken pretty much the same walks through the same streets as I did when I was a child.

The area was then, as it had been for more than 100 years, an archipelago of shabby-genteel bohemianism, full of writers and artists and intellectuals.

Partly, this was because it was a short bus ride from the British Museum, Bloomsbury and University College, where I studied medicine, and from the West End.

Dickens had parked his abandoned wife in the street we moved into. VS Pritchett, Angus Wilson and George Melly all lived there. Camden was a family neighbourhood, not a destination.

The High Street then was a proper, oldfashioned high street, with hardware stores, grocery shops, a chemist.

The market on Inverness Street, which runs from our street to the Tube station, was a thriving and very plural outfit, much like you would expect to find in a French provincial town. Three or four families had run stalls there for more than 80 years, selling not just fruit and vegetables but also cheese and, on a Saturday, poultry.

These were people I was on first-name terms with. There was a coherent sense of community. Our children and our friends' children went roller-skating in the street, and in those days a child could be sent out alone to pick up a newspaper.

Well, when people get old everything gets worse, so as you read this you may discount it as the view of a misanthropic malcontent. But in the past 50 years things in Camden in general, and Inverness Street in particular, have deteriorated. The appearance of big supermarkets such as Tesco and Sainsbury's has undercut the work of the market, so now only one family is left selling groceries and clinging on by their fingernails.

The empty slots have been filled with stalls selling bags and leather goods, an overspill from the stalls that now cover the whole of the area from the Tube station up to the old stable buildings by the Roundhouse in Chalk Farm.

After 8pm, drug dealers lurk around the Tube station and leak into Inverness Street, where they hang about in a threatening manner.

As a tall, old, middleclass man who doesn't look as if he's likely to take cocaine, I don't get solicited for drugs, and I'm lucky in that neither I nor my family have ever been attacked, but my children wouldn't dream of sending their children out alone.

There are countless situations in which one feels one has to tread lightly, back off, not catch anyone's eye. About six months ago I passed a gang of boys in Inverness Street and took issue with one for spitting as I passed him. He threatened to break my teeth.

The market traders are worried because the dealers stash their drugs under the wheels and awnings of the stalls when the police appear, and the street is haunted by gangs of threatening youths.

Comments I made about drug crime at a recent meeting to discuss the future of Inverness Street market were pounced on by the media, but to focus solely on crime would be an oversimplification.

Camden today suffers from a mixture of unseemliness and menace and dirt brought about by the vast influx of tourists that floods the market every weekend, and the bars every weekday night. God knows what they come for. It's not a particularly beautiful area. In the end, though, the greatest tourist attraction is other tourists. People flock to a place simply because large numbers of other people go there.

Hence we have these unthinking, restless, migrant hordes who pull after them a sort of jetstream of opportunistic exploiters and predators.

You see tourists on the streets looking faintly bemused about what they are supposed to be doing here, hear their strange, whooping cries, their brains damaged by what they've been drinking, at 3am.

TO sound again like a middleclass man getting on a bit, there has been a general decline in public propriety over the past 20 years. When I first moved to Camden, no one would dream of urinating in the street, or of daubing graffiti over things - which is itself a typographic form of urination.

Now the back wall of the Odeon, at the end of Inverness Street, is in permanent use as a urinal, and our own street is awash with discarded litter and broken bottles. There is a rather heroic man from Grenada called Nat who has been cleaning the market studiously and carefully and courteously for at least eight years, and it's all he can do to keep the place swept at the end of the day.

Jane Jacobs summed this situation up in her book The Death and Life of American Cities, almost 45 years ago. If a disproportionate number of people in an area have no connection, and therefore obligation, to that area, then as far as they are concerned, it is a rubbish dump. That's what has happened in Camden I won't leave the area now, but these days I would think twice if I were to move in. For one thing, I couldn't now afford it. For another, the tourists have taken over.

STARS, BARS AND KICK BOXING...

BARS

Oh! Bar, 111 Camden High Street (020 7383 0330) Great for live music - hip hop, reggae, soul and funk. Serves a good selection of beers and spirits.

Made in Brasil, 12 Inverness Street (020 7482 0777) This lively bar has the biggest selection of cachaca in the UK. Chef Juarez Santana Ferreira serves up Brazilian dishes.

CLUBS

Koko 1a, Camden High Street, NW1 (www.koko.co.uk) This reincarnation of the Camden Palace has a 1,500-capacity room boasting theatrical red walls, chandeliers and vertigo-inducing balconies.

Jazz Cafe, 7 Parkway, NW1 (www.jazzcafe.co.uk) This venue has played host to some of the best jazz gigs in London. Stellar names include Amy Winehouse and Chaka Khan.

RESTAURANTS

Loch Fyne 74 Chalk Farm Road, NW1 (020 7428 5680) The perfect place to meet for a relaxed meal, it offers an extensive menu of topquality fish. Fresh lobster, oysters and mussels are enticingly displayed.

The Mango Room 10 Kentish Town Road, NW1 (020 7482 5065) Favourites at this hip Caribbean eatery include the delicious jerk chicken. If you're lucky, you'll bump into Macy Gray, Samuel L Jackson or Cat Deeley.

GYM

Karmaa gym: 101 The Stables Market, Chalk Farm Road, NW1 (020 7485 7474) This martial arts and alternative therapy centre is a favourite with Jonny Lee Miller and Sadie Frost, who attend kick-boxing classes.

SHOPPING

Camden Market The market situated around Camden Lock and The Stables is extremely popular. At weekends it's brimming with people rummaging through the endless array of clothes, jewellery and bric-a- brac. The Stables is good for antiques and furniture.

Elsewhere, the gothic emporium and punk outlet cater to quirkier tastes.

Kate Church

(c)2004. Associated Newspapers Ltd.. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved.