Camden Town and Camden Market

Five markets, three owners

The single most useful thing to know here is that the name covers several separate businesses, and that knowing who owns which explains most of what is confusing about the place.

• Camden Lock Market — the original. The site was a timber yard belonging to the merchant T. E. Dingwall; Bill Fulford and Peter Wheeler bought it in 1972 and the market opened in 1974. Now part of the LabTech estate.
• Stables Market — the railway stables and horse hospital, and the largest part. Also LabTech's, bought in March 2014.
• Hawley Wharf — the newest, LabTech's, on the ground where Canal Market and then Camden Lock Village stood.
• Buck Street — no longer part of the same estate at all. The old open-air market closed on 12 September 2019; a container market followed in early 2020; Transport for London bought the site in late 2023, and its property arm leased it to Boxpark, which acquired the operation in April 2024 and opened Boxpark Camden in September 2024 with more than sixty traders.
• Inverness Street — a council market, nothing to do with the others. Owned, managed and licensed by the London Borough of Camden, with forty-eight pitches trading Monday to Sunday, licensed from seven in the morning to seven in the evening and in practice busiest from mid-morning. The council names it one of the four most visited of its own markets.

Inverness Street is worth a second line, because the usual description of it as a shadow of itself is half right and half wrong. What has gone is the fruit and vegetable trade, not the market: the last greengrocer left some years after nearby bus stops were removed and the council required barrows to be taken away when not trading, which left nowhere to keep them. The pitch count has held. It now sells souvenirs, clothes and street food.

On the ownership of the larger part, the honest position is dated rather than current. The markets were assembled by a vehicle associated with Teddy Sagi, floated as Market Tech Holdings in late 2014 and taken private again by LabTech Investments in an offer of 21 April 2017 valuing it at about £892.5 million. A sale process seeking £1.3 billion was relaunched in June 2022, and no completion, withdrawal or change of control has been reported since — while LabTech was still acting as owner in planning matters in 2025. So the correct form is that it is LabTech's, as far as the public record goes.

The borough and the town are not the same thing

The London Borough of Camden was created in April 1965 out of the metropolitan boroughs of Hampstead, Holborn and St Pancras, and it reaches far beyond this market: Bloomsbury, Holborn, Hampstead, Kentish Town and part of King's Cross are all in it, and so are Seven Dials and Neal's Yard, which sit on the Camden side of a boundary running along Shelton Street in Covent Garden.

Camden Town is the place, about two and a half miles north-north-west of Charing Cross, laid out from 1791 under Sir Charles Pratt, 1st Earl Camden, who had come into the manor of Kentish Town by marriage. The name is on the Ordnance Survey by 1822.

One detail that reverses the obvious assumption: the Earl's title came from Camden Place near Chislehurst, in Kent. The name travelled from Kent to London, not the other way about.

What the buildings were actually for

The market occupies a railway goods yard, and the structures people walk through were built for horses. This is where the most repeated error about Camden lives.

They are not Pickfords' stables. Pickfords did build here — Joseph Baxendale bought land south of the canal in 1839 and a shed designed by Lewis Cubitt opened in December 1841, linking road, water and rail — but the railway bought it in 1846 and leased it back, Pickfords gave up long-distance canal carriage at the end of 1847, and after a fire they were gone by about 1867. Gilbeys took the building on a lease in 1869. The stables and horse hospital were built for the London and North Western Railway, for horses working the Camden Goods Depot — and the Horse Hospital went up in 1882 and 1883, fifteen years after Pickfords left.

The listings are precise and they are higher than most accounts suggest:

• Horse Hospital, with its ramps and the Chalk Farm Road boundary wall of 1854 to 1856 — Grade II*, entry 1258100, listed 30 September 1981. Stabling for about ninety-two horses in the west range.
• Stanley Sidings stables, east of the bonded warehouse — Grade II, entry 1258101, about 1855 to 1870, upper storeys about 1881.
• The Interchange, with its horse tunnel, stairs, vaults and canal basin — Grade II, entry 1113238; a warehouse of 1901 to 1905 over a dock basin of 1854 to 1856. The Eastern Horse Tunnel of the same years moved horses from the stables to the marshalling yards.

Historic England calls Camden Goods Depot one of the most complete Victorian railway complexes in the country. But note what is not listed: the canopies, the stalls, Camden Lock Place and the Chalk Farm Road terrace — the market's own trading fabric — which the council's appraisal describes only as making a positive contribution to the conservation area. The famous buildings are protected; the famous market is not.

Two conservation areas cover the ground. The Regent's Canal area was designated on 25 April 1974 and extended four times between 1981 and 1985, its appraisal adopted 11 September 2008. The Camden Town area was designated on 11 November 1986 and extended in 1997 — and the government's own planning dataset gives 1 November 1986 for the same thing, so the council's date is the one to use.

Hampstead Road Lock, which almost nobody calls that

The lock at the centre of all the photographs is Hampstead Road Lock. "Camden Lock" is a popular name, and the Canal and River Trust, which operates it, says so on its own pages while using it too.

It is Grade II, entry 1272427, listed 9 January 1992, built about 1818 to 1820. And it is a pair, not a triple: two chambers side by side separated by a central island, each with two sets of double wooden gates, numbered 1 and 1a. The Trust calls it the only twin lock in London, and the council's appraisal adds the better fact — it is the only original double lock still working on the Regent's Canal.

The canal itself came from the Regent's Canal Act of 1812, engineered by James Morgan as assistant to John Nash. Paddington to Camden opened in 1816 and the whole line to Limehouse on 1 August 1820. It passed into the Grand Union Canal Company in 1929, was nationalised in 1948, and is now the Trust's.

The waterbus still runs, between Little Venice and Camden Market, about forty-five minutes, passing Regent's Park and the grounds of London Zoo and through the Maida Hill tunnel. It is charged for, and it does not stop at the zoo — the operator's own page says so and gives the walk from Camden as about fifteen minutes. A great many accounts have it stopping there.

The fires, which were three and not one

The one people mean is Sunday 9 February 2008, which began in an alleyway behind the Hawley Arms at about seven in the evening and took more than a hundred firefighters about three hours to contain. Nobody was hurt. The fire brigade's own account gives the cause as a gas heater igniting material in a clothes stall.

What was permanently lost were street buildings rather than canal-side ones: numbers 7, 8 and 9 Chalk Farm Road were demolished on 12 February 2008, and numbers 1 to 6 survived but lost their roofs, rear extensions and much of their interiors. None of them was listed. The Hawley Arms was severely damaged — not destroyed, as is often said — and reopened on 31 October 2008.

And the fire did not end the market it struck. Canal Market was rebuilt and traded again from May 2009 as Camden Lock Village, until that was cleared in January 2015 for the Hawley Wharf scheme.

Two later fires get folded into the 2008 one. The Stables Market burned in part on 19 May 2014, and Camden Lock Market on the night of 9 and 10 July 2017, damaging three floors and the roof. No injuries in either.

Hawley Wharf

What stands on the old Canal Market ground is a scheme by Allford Hall Monaghan Morris for LabTech: eight new buildings and two refurbished, including the Grade II listed 1 Hawley Road, across about forty-four thousand square metres — homes, a primary school, workspace, shops, workshops, market buildings and a cinema under the railway arches. It was consented on a 2011 application covering the two-hectare block between Castlehaven Road, Hawley Road, Kentish Town Road and Chalk Farm Road.

It opened in phases rather than on a date: LabTech announced the launch in August 2021, a second waterside building opened that October and the five-screen cinema at the end of the same month, with more through 2022. It is branded as part of Camden Market, which is why visitors do not notice the join.

The Roundhouse

The circular building north of the market was a goods locomotive shed of 1846 and 1847, designed by Robert B. Dockray, the railway's resident engineer, and built by Branson and Gwyther. It stopped being useful almost at once — engines grew too long to turn inside it — and was leased to W. and A. Gilbey as a store for spirits.

It is Grade II*, entry 1258103, and was first listed on 10 June 1954, which makes it the earliest protected thing here by a wide margin. Accounts giving it Grade II are understating it.

Its second life began as Centre 42 under Arnold Wesker from 1964 and as an arts venue from 1966, opening with an all-night event on 15 October 1966. It passed to the council in 1983 and closed for want of money; Torquil Norman bought it in 1996, the Roundhouse Trust was founded in 1998, and after a refurbishment by John McAslan and Partners it reopened on 1 June 2006. The Trust is a company limited by guarantee, incorporated 29 May 1998.

Koko, and seven names

The domed building at the junction has been, in order: the Camden Theatre from 1900, the Camden Hippodrome Theatre from 1909, the Camden Hippodrome Picture Theatre from 1913, the BBC Camden Theatre from 1945, the Music Machine from 1977, the Camden Palace from 1982 and Koko since 2004.

It is W. G. R. Sprague's, opened on Boxing Day 1900 by Ellen Terry, and is Grade II, entry 1272425.

The fire of 6 January 2020 is routinely described as having gutted it, and that is not what happened. It broke out during a refurbishment already under way, the venue was not trading, and contemporaneous reporting puts the damage largely in the roof. It reopened in April 2022, with Arcade Fire — the completion of a planned project rather than a rebuild forced by the fire.

The Electric Ballroom, and a threat that ended in 2005

Almost every account of Camden says the Electric Ballroom is under threat of demolition for the expansion of the Underground station. That scheme is twenty-one years dead.

The proposal would have cleared the block between Buck Street, Camden High Street and Kentish Town Road, taking the Ballroom and the original station building with it. Camden refused it in 2004, a public inquiry was held that year, and the order was refused by the Deputy Prime Minister's office in 2005. Every scheme since 2013 has put the second entrance on the north side of Buck Street instead, specifically to avoid demolishing the Ballroom and the station.

What is actually live is duller and matters more. The station upgrade has been on hold since December 2018, when Crossrail's overruns hit the transport budget, and it was still on hold in January 2025 with no funding identified; the cost has been put at at least £250 million. After funding there would be at least two years of consultation and planning and about a year of detailed design. Meanwhile Boxpark has permission on the station's own construction site until mid-2027 and has applied to stay until mid-2032, which objectors say could push the upgrade further out. The transport authority's lease allows it to end that early if the work proceeds.

The Ballroom sits in the Camden Town conservation area. No national listing for it could be found, and in 2007 the government declared the building dilapidated, which is hard to square with statutory protection — so it should not be described as listed.

One thing inside it has gone: the weekend indoor market of about fifty stalls closed at short notice in 2015, and guides still list it.

Nobody knows how many people come

Camden is always given a very large visitor number and there is no sound figure at all.

The operator's own portfolio page contradicts itself within a single undated page: twenty-eight million a year in one block, more than thirty million in another, over thirty million for the Stables alone, and a projection of fifty million for Hawley Wharf. Local reporting of 2023 gives about thirty million as an estimate with no source named. A figure of two hundred and fifty thousand a week also circulates, which is an order of magnitude lower.

The reason none of it can be checked is structural: there is no admission control and nothing is counted, so Camden does not appear in the only audited United Kingdom attendance series. There is therefore no basis for the claim that it is the fourth most popular attraction in London either, which traces to no authority. The honest statement is that it is very busy and that no reliable count exists.

What has gone, and what was cancelled

Three changes that guides have not caught up with.

The Camden Highline is cancelled. The elevated park along three-quarters of a mile of the North London line, between Camden Town and King's Cross, was approved by the council's planning committee on 19 January 2023 subject to an agreement that was never completed; a dispute then arose over Camden Gardens, protected by an Act of 1931; and by January 2026 no new application had been made, so the scheme had no permission. On 12 May 2026 the charity announced it was paused indefinitely with immediate effect, citing rising costs and reduced funding, and it was reported the next day as scrapped. Money raised and spent included a lottery grant of 2023 and four hundred thousand pounds of planning money originally earmarked for a bus route. Anything written in 2024 or 2025 describes it as coming.

The Jewish Museum London has left Camden, and then left its own closure behind. It announced on 1 June 2023 that it would close its Albert Street building, and its last public open day was 30 July 2023. But it is no longer without premises either: it opened Two Rooms by Jewish Museum London at JW3 in Finchley on 17 June 2026, and is looking for a permanent home by 2030, its favoured option a site in the East End. So two versions in circulation are now wrong — the one that puts it in Albert Street, and the one that says it has nowhere.

And Camden Lock Village, the name that replaced Canal Market, has been gone since January 2015.

Visiting

The markets are open daily, including bank holidays — the operator gives ten in the morning to seven in the evening, with the food halls running later, from half past eleven to eleven at night, and the shops on shorter and more variable hours. Individual traders set their own times. Inverness Street also trades seven days. Entry is free and nothing is ticketed; the waterbus, the Roundhouse and Koko are charged for.

The station is Camden Town, on the Northern line, and it is the weak point of the whole place. The transport authority's own guide for avoiding stairs shows no step-free route from street to platform — only a step-free change between the two northbound platforms. That guide is dated February 2023 and is a map rather than a statement, so it is worth checking directly, but the upgrade schemes of 2013 and 2017 both existed to introduce step-free access and neither has been built.

The station is also made exit-only at busy times, which catches people out. A timetabled arrangement ran during escalator works from January 2018, and the authority has continued to close it to entry at short notice since — including on several dates in late 2024. It is a crowd-control practice rather than a published rule, so accounts stating fixed Sunday-afternoon hours for it are describing something that is no longer written down anywhere.

Chalk Farm, one stop north, is the usual way round the crowds at the Stables end.

What is not Camden Market

Camden Passage is the one to know. It is an antiques market in Islington, off Upper Street, and has nothing to do with Camden Town or with this borough. It is the most common misplacement on the subject by a wide margin.

Dingwalls is not a market either. Dingwall was the timber merchant whose yard became Camden Lock Market; Dingwalls is the music venue on it.

And the Horse Hospital is two different buildings. The one here is the railway's, at Chalk Farm Road, listed Grade II*. The other is an arts venue in Colonnade, Bloomsbury — separately listed, and the two are routinely swapped in picture libraries and guides.