Sunday, 21 September

Primrose Hill and the Navvies Who Built the Railways

Primrose Hill was born when navvies dug out the land by hand, bringing grime, racket, hard drinking and what some called Moral Depravity.

By The Naked Anthropologist

Date and time

Location

Chalk Farm Station

Pavement outside on Adelaide Road London NW3 2BP United Kingdom

Refund Policy

Refunds up to 1 days before event.

About this event

The neighbourhood radiates brilliant industrial solutions of Victorian engineers, but who built it? This walk puts hard-living navvies at the centre of the story and tells how the area developed in the face of the railway's smoke, grit and noise. Camden railway landmarks include an Hydraulic Accumulator Tower, a roundhouse, the tunnels that working horses used to get to and from the Goods Yard, the site of the Stationary Winding Engine and numerous street details. The story of Primrose Hill's creation also takes us to a beautiful stretch of the Regent's Canal and the top of the famous hill with its superb views, as well as artists' studios and pastel-painted streets. We end at a high street free of chain shops where good pubs abound, and it's all minutes from Camden Market.

Laura Agustín is an historian and anthropologist interested in illuminating the lives of unnamed people in history - the 'ordinary folk'.

Thanks to Victorian Web for permission to use the photo from Dick Sullivan's Navvyman.

The Naked Anthropologist is Laura's longtime blog, focusing now on London walks with Gender, Sex and Class.

Organised by

The Naked Anthropologist

Laura Agustín has been a writer, researcher and critical historian all her life. She has been a Londoner since the 1960s, although she has lived in other towns and countries. Author of Sex at the Margins: Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry, she has for many years focused on getting the stories out of women and others marginalised because of being poor, foreign, ‘different’ or doing jobs some folks think are Wrong, in the present and in the past. She spent time with illuminated manuscripts at the British Library looking for clues to how women lived 1000 years ago, and couldn’t stop reading even if she wanted to. She is known as The Naked Anthropologist. She has qualified as a tour guide in order to take this focus to the streets, where guided history walks rarely talk about the poor except as objects of charity.