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Camden Town perfectly embodies the cultural mix for which London is famed. Alongside the buzzing Lock market, the pubs and music venues and the eclectic shops, there is another Camden - impossible crowds, shameful poverty, bad housing, gang fights, murders...This book takes five landmarks as the starting point for a series of journeys into the layers of history and culture that make Camden Town. The World´s End pub existed in various forms before Camden began. The Regent´s Canal Bridge is where today´s crowds flock to the locks and market, while Arlington House, just a block away, belongs to a parallel Camden of immigration and new beginnings, poverty and homelessness. No. 8 Royal College Street represents how, even with the first buildings of nineteenth-century Camden Town, social outsiders were attracted to the area. Meanwhile the Roundhouse, an engineering curiosity, was to become the revered centre of Camden´s cultural scene.

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