Join us on a walk through the Dickensian back streets and alleyways of Kings Cross & north Bloomsbury where we will discover changing uses for buildings and open spaces. Although today a safe and desirable location, it was not always so.

Led by Daniel Hausherr, a man with a love of local architecture, industry, history and green spaces, and Chris Foster, once a Bobby on the Beat in this area fifty years ago. Every street has a story to tell.

This event is part of the London Festival of Architecture.

Meet Kings Cross Square: comparing the architecture of Lewis Cubitt’s 1850s and George Gilbert Scott’s 1870s to today’s public realm

Argyle Square: from dust heap to earnest residential square to red light district to Operation Clean Up

Hillview Estate: the East End Dwelling Company’s 1890’s attempt at model dwellings, later a slum before conversion and modernisation

Tonbridge Street: oddly curvy Brutalist 1974 Town Hall annex and library refurbished into a fashionable hotel

Camden Town Hall: Albert Thomas’s neoclassical town hall currently under redevelopment

Judd Street: featuring the early Victorian Skinners Arms PH and Abraham Davis’s residential Edwardian Queen Alexandra Mansion block

Cromer Street: The Boot PH and Holy Cross Church, the only surviving building on the south of the road after The Blitz

Bramber Green: former terraced housing destroyed by WWII bombing, now much valued green space

Compton Place: from a den of iniquity to Hunter Street police station refurbished by Gilbert MacKenzie, and later a home for policemen and more recently international travellers

Marchmont Street: community led conservation street with new public garden and award winning social housing project, The Brunswick by Patrick Hodgkinson