Primrose Hill was born when navvies dug out the land by hand, bringing grime, racket, hard drinking and what some called Moral Depravity.
The neighbourhood radiates brilliant industrial solutions of Victorian engineers, but who built it? This walk puts hard-living navvies at the centre of the story and tells how the area developed in the face of the railway’s smoke, grit and noise. Camden railway landmarks include an Hydraulic Accumulator Tower, a roundhouse, the tunnels that working horses used to get to and from the Goods Yard, the site of the Stationary Winding Engine and numerous street details. The story of Primrose Hill’s creation also takes us to a beautiful stretch of the Regent’s Canal and the top of the famous hill with its superb views, as well as artists’ studios and pastel-painted streets. We end at a high street free of chain shops where good pubs abound, and it’s all minutes from Camden Market.