Walking Tour - Primrose Hill and the Navvies Who Built the Railways
Schedule
Sun Sep 21 2025 at 01:00 pm to 03:00 pm
UTC+01:00Location
Pavement outside on Adelaide Road,London,NW3 2BP,GB | London, EN
Primrose Hill was born when navvies dug out the land by hand, bringing grime, racket, hard drinking and what some called Moral Depravity.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 soot and smoke. 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 House and numerous street details. The story of Primrose Hill's creation 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, ending at a high street free of chain shops. 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, now dedicated to historical walks that highlight issues of Gender, Sex and Class .
