Mike Hollow [Mark Wilson]

• A NORTH Londoner, I have been a resident of Camden Town for 40 years.

In that time I have never heard anyone refer to Kentish Town as “Kentish” but many residents and visitors do, sadly, refer to Camden Town as “Camden”.

My heart sank when I read the first paragraph of the review of Mike Hollow’s new novel The Camden Murder (Case history, Review, June 29). “Thousands were killed in Camden by German bombs…” But, of course, that is not strictly true, such an entity not existing during the Second World War.

The London Borough of Camden did not exist until 1965, its subsuming three boroughs, those of Holborn, St Pancras and Hampstead.

Camden Town, as a London village, dates to 1791 when Lord Camden sold land on which to build houses (Kentish Town goes back a very long time, as Gillian Tindall tells us in her history The Fields Beneath).

Such misuse of the name Camden helps along what will surely be the eventual loss of the name of my London “village”, Camden Town likely disappearing some time after I, myself, have disappeared via the crematorium in NW11.

Mike Hollow’s story is about the death of a veteran, a chocolate salesman, found in a car in Baynes Street, Camden Town. I have sold my car but I am a veteran, a consumer of chocolate, and still alive at the time of writing!

And the estate where I live opens on to Baynes Street. I must therefore buy this book, of course, but perhaps I will have to deface the dust jacket of my copy by inserting “Town” after Camden in the title. I’ll certainly place inside the book two cuttings, your review and this letter.

The famous Camden Town Murder took place not far from Baynes Street in 1907 and perhaps the author thought it a tad too confusing to give his book a more geographically correct title; another of the author’s novels is The Canning Town Murder. There was, though, a murder in and around Baynes Street in 2002.

By the 1940s, when the detective thriller is set, Baynes Street was a rather new street name. It was known as Prebend Street until renamed in 1937 after St Pancras council’s chief electrical engineer, Sydney Baynes.

I understand that the increasing use of telephones, and of travel around the capital, had meant that London’s street names – so many named the same after royalty, land owners, the church and so on – in many London villages throughout the metropolis, had resulted in confusion and a large number of the capital’s street names were changed in the 1930s.

Let’s try to stem the renaming of my home town, the murder, one might say, of a well-known place name. Let’s keep the Town in Camden Town!

LESTER MAY
Reachview Close, NW1