Primrose Hill and the Navvies

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

The neighbourhood radiates brilliant industrial solutions of Victorian engineers, but who built it? This walk puts hard-living navvies - navigators - 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 a 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, 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.

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