Tudor Allen

• I WOULD like to praise one of Camden Council’s unsung officers.

Some 50 or more local residents filled a room at the Irish Centre last week to hear Tudor Allen, the local studies and archives manager, give a free illustrated talk about the connections that Charles Dickens has with the former boroughs of Holborn, St Pancras and Hampstead.

Delivered without notes, Tudor Allen’s hairstyle and beard made it seem that he was almost in costume, the resemblance with the great author a fun extra!

Ninety minutes well spent, interesting and, even if one thinks one knows Dickens, there’s always something new to learn.

Tudor Allen gives a good number of talks throughout the year, some at the Local Studies Centre in Holborn library, and one can sign up to an email service that gives notice of future talks.

Charles Dickens was approaching his teens when he lived at what was then 16 Bayham Street from 1822-1823, the house long gone but the site marked with a hard-to-see plaque (near Greenland Street).

That not particularly happy experience, 200 years ago this year, Dickens used to advantage when writing of Bob Cratchit in A Christmas Carol (1843). That story a must-read, surely, this bicentenary of Dickens’s being a Camden Town boy.

LESTER MAY, NW1