Let’s say you want to ride south from Camden to the centre of town.
There are at least 6 different routes to take, and you may prefer the most direct. Not in the Guvnor Owners’ Club, we prefer instead to take the best.
It’s unlikely to be the shortest route, or even to release you most conveniently. It will instead be that which guides you along a secret backstreet discovering why you live where you do, and why you ride a bicycle. And as a bonus you’ll be transported in the general direction you desire.
Park Village East is one such street. Starting at the corner of Parkway where Ramsay & Hartnett’s York and Albany sits newly refurbished, this backstreet will escort you to the Euston Road, whispering fascinations and abjection as you glide along its 200 year timeline.
Laid out by John Nash in the 1820s as part of the rus in urbe (country in the city) designs for Regent’s Park and environs, one lengthways half was destroyed by the expansion of the railway in the early 1900s, leading to the uneasy aspect of overgrown walls and open sky to the west. To the east the Cumberland Arm of Regent’s Canal once provided a quasi-rural outlook to the back gardens, until filled in around the middle of the last century. Yet, despite these planned ravages, when houses come on the market here it still makes the papers.
The expanded railway formed part of the attraction to the Camden Town Group of painters who lived and worked in the surrounding streets; you will roll close to the old studios and homes of Walter Sickert and others as you make your way south.
As Park Village East becomes Stanhope Street the mood offsets, and the low-rise bat cave of Addison Lee answers oft-pondered questions about the origin of their omnipresent black people carriers. Dense social housing quickly envelops the route, each building euphemistically named after rural aspirations: Scafell, Langdale, Borrowdale, Derwent, Hawkshead. Here and there the cobbled under-street reemerges from years of neglected tarmac, exuding a bourgeois aesthetic without the middle class overhead. Finally past the declined and confused pub / restaurant / bar that was the Lord Nelson to the sterile tranche of commercial buildings known as Triton Square.
In the last 3/4 mile you have seen it all, without a single bus or horn to disturb.
- Park Village East, with the railway off to the left. The pad on the right is yours for £3.9m
- York and Albany
- York and Albany converted coach house
- Addison Lee Bat Cave
- Bat Cave needed
- Lord Nelson, Stanhope St
Explore Park Village East in Street View
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We lived there: first in Silsoe House, then moved up the village and spent eleven happy years despite the Crown Estate. The gardens were amazing, because we had not only the original street-level and canal-side strips, but when the canal was filled after the war we inherited the towpath, canal bed and far bank as well. It really did feel and look rural, although the children loved most seeing the trains from Euston from the top windows.