Everybody does Camden Market once. It earns the visit: the scale of it, the food, the sheer noise. But it is also the only thing most people ever see of Camden, and after an hour of shoulder-to-shoulder you tend to want the other version of the neighbourhood, the one that starts about four streets back.
We work on Royal College Street, so this is the Camden we actually spend time in.
Walk the Regent’s Canal
The towpath is the fastest way out of the crowds without leaving Camden. Head east and you reach King’s Cross and Coal Drops Yard; head west and you are alongside Regent’s Park and London Zoo. Either direction, the noise drops away within about two minutes of stepping down to the water.
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Photo: Ian S / CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Climb Primrose Hill
A short walk from Camden Town and one of the best free views in London: the whole skyline lined up from a grass slope. It takes minutes from the bottom and it is worth doing at either end of the day.
Get your hands in clay (this is us)
At 221–223 Royal College Street is Studio 221, our making studio: wheel throwing and hand-building only, no painting. A beginner wheel taster starts at £30 for an hour, and you leave with pieces you shaped yourself. We dry them, fire them and glaze them, and message you when they are ready.
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If six weeks sounds better than one afternoon, the beginner and improver wheel courses run here in small groups with the same tutor each week. And everything we teach in the city is listed on pottery classes in London.
The Roundhouse
The former railway engine shed has been a music and performance venue since the sixties, and it is still the reason a lot of people come to Camden who have no interest in the market at all. Worth checking what is on before you plan the rest of the day around it.
The small stuff
The Amy Winehouse statue in Stables Market, the record shops and independents along the High Street, and the run of cafés that have quietly turned Camden into a decent brunch neighbourhood. None of it takes long. All of it is better than another lap of the stalls.
Getting here
Camden Town and Kentish Town are both on the Northern line, and we are a walk from either. Studio 221 is on Royal College Street; Studio 136 is on Kentish Town Road.
