The Queen’s Crescent-Malden Road junction

• STREET configurations are part of neighbourhood identity.

The one formed by Queen’s Crescent and Malden Road is distinctive, the crescent’s arc bisected by the snaking line of Malden Road.

Queen’s Crescent is the main shopping frontage and setting for a declining street market. Malden Road is the main route through for buses and cars making it the area’s most public place. It hosts key institutions, for example, St Dominic’s Church and school, the old folks’ home, the undertakers.

Mourners from funerals at St Dominic’s often celebrate their wakes in the Sir Robert Peel pub on QC, spilling out onto the wide pavements to smoke. Before QC was closed to through-traffic, hearses would process along it to and from the church.

St Silas is still celebrated in a procession down Malden Road in the spring. It’s not far-fetched to recognise in the intersection of QC and Malden Road the urban embodiment, albeit frayed at the edges, of mundane and spiritual axes, something that is still important to our neighbourhood.

At the intersection, opposite the Sir Robert Peel, stands Cheriton, a puzzling, council-owned, Modernist housing block dating from the early 1970s. It is neglected, underused, and partly derelict. It does all the wrong things, given its important position in our neighbourhood.

In London’s sensible urbanism of streets, junctions matter. Seeing this, the Victorians, for example, put quite elaborate pub buildings on street corners when laying out terraced housing. One hopes it is obvious to Camden that the state of Cheriton hinders QC’s improvement.

Where there should be a strong signpost for QC and a positive frontage presence on Malden Road, there’s an absurd outcrop of irrelevance and decay – the opposite of The Fiddler’s Elbow at the far end of Malden Road.

Over the years local people have made constructive proposals for Cheriton none of which entail costly wholesale redevelopment; all ignored or tossed into the long grass. I made my first one 30 years ago and my last this month.

The problem of inertia, unresponsiveness to new ideas (despite loud claims about “consultation” and “co-design”), ad hoc regeneration without an area plan, very poor maintenance and many, many missed opportunities, is how it goes in Haverstock and Gospel Oak where, in the cabinet member for new homes, jobs and community investment, Danny Beales’s, phrase, “there is largely one major landowner – Camden”.

Cheriton perfectly represents the malaise.

TOM YOUNG
Bassett Street, NW5