Markets
Camden’s street markets are its main local industry and tourist attraction. When I first moved here, the nearest market on Inverness Street was set between shops that were low-key but vibrant and individual – a Cypriot grocer, an Italian dairy, a fish-and-chip shop, a pub, a cheap but useful stationery and odds-and-ends shop. The street itself was filled in the daytime by fruit and vegetable barrows, several of each, run by Londoners. I loved drawing the old market because of its vitality, friendliness and character, and because its customers looked interesting and varied. But in the end, about ten years ago, the old market lost out to the new supermarkets. It was replaced by a different kind of market altogether, announced by a prominent but superfluous name-plate suspended between two street lamps across the High Street end, rebranding it as a tourist attraction. But irritating or even deplorable developments still make good subjects – you needn’t like what you draw.
The more famous Stables Market occupies what had previously been the Camden Goods Depot of the Midland railway and the site for Gilbey’s Gin’s warehouses. These have now become flats and media companies’ HQs, but relics of earlier local industries – piano factories, a publishing house, a design office – still survive. Recent commercial developments include the space just north of the canal, ‘new Croydon’ to its detractors. More romantically, Stables Market has preserved the surviving tunnels, ramps, vaults and canal bridges that were created for the old goods yards’ hundreds of heavy horses.
In the sixties Inverness Street market was still based on barrows and trolleys, patient queues and friendly relations between salespeople and local customers, the latter shabby by today’s standards. Apart from the fruit and veg barrows like the one in the wood engraving below, the market’s main attraction was a junk stall, a one-man outfit run by the no-haggling Reg Stone, taciturn in his flat cap, likened by the writer David Thomson to the captain of a tramp ship. His stock varied in its appeal: some of it dull or depressing rubbish, some it useful or lovely. It must all have been acquired by clearing out people’s homes after they had died. When Reg himself died, his own formal and well-attended funeral procession came majestically up through the market on its way to the Catholic church in Arlington Road.
The market is noisier now, especially when setting up at around eight in the morning; the sound of trundling barrows has changed to the clanging of metal rods as the new stalls are skilfully assembled by a cosmopolitan European-tongued workforce and their pre-arranged displays are carried from the spray-painted lorries parked nearby.
Here is a quick sketch made from the top of an empty market barrow. Drawing it was tricky because the people in it were constantly changing and I had to get their activities and stances down before they moved and while I remembered them, with no time to worry about accuracy. Being up on the barrow I was out of the way; everyone was far too busy to pay any attention and they were friendly anyway. Looking at the drawing now reminds me vividly of the scene and the individuals in a way that a photograph wouldn’t.
In Inverness Street Market, the fresh fruit and veg have been replaced by Union Jacks and T-shirts with red double-deckers and football teams’ colours. Things get more interesting on Camden High Street; heading towards the canal, most of the upper floors have become hoardings, often ingeniously constructed, for the ground-floor businesses beneath them. Just up this road is the Chalk Farm Road entrance to Stables Market, part of Camden Market but far bigger, busier and free from traffic.
Top left:Camden High Street, 2018
Running right through the middle of the market is the North London Railway, carrying its steady flow of freight containers on the overhead arches. (Its freight used on Thursdays in the 2000s to carry nuclear waste on its way to Sellafield.) The lock’s old involvement with horses, and in particular the beautifully curving and cobbled ramp leading up to the old horse hospital, has been carefully preserved. There are other more human figures like the big bronze one of Shaka Zulu over its restaurant, and the many good sculptures of accurately portrayed horses provide a realistic foil to the imaginary creatures glittering on the wall. At the top of the horse ramp is a bridge with a good view down the main central length of the market, a subject which I’ve drawn many times.
When drawing and painting anything, mistakes are inevitable but they needn’t matter; they’re just part of the process. Often they can be drawn over, or if they’re serious enough you can begin again. But anxieties and uncertainty are part of the task; it’s best simply to get on with it.
