Looking back – and stepping in to 2026…
As we close the year, we’ve been reflecting on what a special one it has been for Camden. In 2025, the borough marked 60 years since its formation, and we have loved bringing you stories that celebrate the people, places and events that make Camden such an inspiring part of London – and one that we LOVE.
Of course, one year is never enough to tell all of Camden’s stories. There are still streets to walk, and so many stories waiting to be shared. That’s why, as we welcome in 2026, we’re excited to launch Explore Camden with us – a new way for us to continue uncovering and sharing our favourite tales from this remarkable borough.
We hope you’ll join us online, or better still, in person on one of our guided walks in the year ahead, as we keep exploring Camden together.
Until then, from all of us at the Camden Tour Guide Association, we wish you a very Happy New Year – and we look forward to walking with you in 2026.
For anyone who is looking to start the new year with fresh perspective – and perhaps a thoughtful walk before returning to work – we have just the thing.
On Saturday, 3rd January, Camden Guide Laura Agustín, also known as The Naked Anthropologist leads a walk that explores one of Camden’s most defining themes: migration, work, and survival in the city. This is exactly the kind of story we love to share – complex, human, and rooted in the streets beneath our feet.
Historic Working-class migrations to Holborn: Irish, Italian, African, Jewish is not a conventional history walk. Drawing on Laura’s work as a migration scholar, it looks beyond labels and stereotypes to explore how people from different backgrounds navigated precarious lives in London, often side by side, sometimes in solidarity, sometimes in competition – always in motion.
In Laura’s own words:
Historical migrations to Holborn
The walk’s title is Historic Working-class Migrations to London: Irish, Italian, African, Jewish, with ‘working-class’ standing in for a range of precarious situations. My approach as a migration scholar is inclusive: Some migrants would have been fed up with how things were going at home, and some might have felt hounded out of it. I include slaves who were brought by owners to England and seasonal workers who intended to return home and then didn’t. Few if any discussed on this walk had a job waiting for them; they were gambling on finding a way to make a living.
I don’t make a point of some migrants’ being ‘skilled’ while others were supposedly not. When farm-hand migrants wound up in London with no previous urban experience or trade, they did heavy manual jobs instead of exercising their skills. All migrants acted to make money in situations where their options were limited by state policies and societal prejudices. We’re all skilled at some things, but middle-class discourse still disqualifies most of the skills of the poor or pretends, if they now drive an illegal taxi, that they can’t do anything else. These are the people currently tagged as ‘economic migrants’.
I don’t study ethnic or national groups as though they were cut off from each other in ‘ghettos’, especially when they were poor. On this walk through Holborn’s back-streets I show how different groups overlapped and intermingled, both in terms of solidarity and competition. Both are normal human conditions. Living in the Bourne Estate, Italians and Irish felt united by the experience of being despised by many English people. This local-authority-run estate is still marked by diversity, its newest building named for former slave and abolitionist Olaudah Equiano, who had already bought his freedom when he lived in this street and began to campaign against slavery. The Diamond District became what it is because of a Jewish diaspora that had already adapted to multiple expulsions and adaptations.
As this is a walk, there are geographical limits, so the four groups covered are those who settled in one area of central London, from the late 17th century into the 20th – but evidence of contemporary migrations are also visible on the route. On the weekends it’s possible to see much more than during the week.
Book tickets: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/historic-workingclass-migrations-to-london-irish-italian-african-jewish-tickets-1976397831116
