• RECENT decades have seen “massive changes” in Camden Town, highlighted by Peter Lyons recent comments broadening the “soul searching” conversation (Does Camden Town have a soul? Well there is history…, August 4), opened up by John Gulliver’s lunch-time adventures with independent film-maker, Jasdip Sagar.

The closure of factories and businesses recounted by the anonymous lady in Gulliver’s article sings of the shrinking of that soul Sagar’s piece is searching for.

Modern cities are labyrinths of energy and individual pockets of culture, reaching out to the human condition to feel the frequency that the earth, albeit concrete, gravel or tarmac around Camden, is giving off.

Who wants these new buildings that seem to be popping up everywhere? Who wanted to clamp in metal Buck Street market? Certainly not the locals who celebrate sub-culture and it’s rather painful explaining to tourists that it is actually still a market, when they ask from across the road.

Yet these massive changes and masses of buildings continue to pop up. A simple bus ride, taken on the 390 to through York Way towards St Pancras, offers a seemingly endless stream of construction views for these new buildings. All flats, all very trendy, all very pricey.

The recently developed Coal Drops Yard at King’s Cross offers an example of what may be to come if this continues in Camden. Culture seems to have evaporated for a commercial, albeit quirky, feel where queues of yuppies stand outside overpriced restaurants with bar codes needed to gain entry and menus so internationally blended no one knows what or how to order.

Is this coming to Camden or has it already begun? No one wanted it at King’s Cross, until they were sold the online image of themselves having done so well they could afford to rent a small space haunted by some of London’s darkest secrets dressed up in commercialised, trendy real estate packaging.

Will they want it in Camden? Probably not. It depends on how much they value the mirror image being sold to them while silently taking away the remnants of sub-culture and street life once celebrated across this city, which Camden clings to yet.

HESTER McCREARY, NW1