A Camden Afternoon With Amy Winehouse
Stroll with me around Camden Town in the footsteps of one of London's greatest singers
A free tourist walking tour is never free. There are plenty of ‘free’ walking tours around Camden in North London, the former stomping ground of Amy Winehouse.
At the end of any ‘free’ tour, the guide will suggest a donation for his or her time. £10 a head would be a nice touch, they’ll say with feigned humility. Maybe £15? “I take credit cards,” they add.
We all know this, but when Mrs M found a ‘free’ walking tour of Amy Winehouse’s famous Camden sites through the MeetUp app, we were attracted by the fact that the guide was also a musician who would discuss Amy’s music in detail.
But just before we left to get to the tour, I received an email saying sorry, he’d double-booked himself for a live gig. Yeah, right, he’d got a last-minute booking more like.
Never mind, Mrs M and I know Camden pretty well; we don’t need a guide who has better things to do. I Googled the Amy Winehouse Camden sites and 20 minutes later, off we went anyway.
This tour really would be free. We just forgot it was a holiday weekend.
Camden on a sunny Bank Holiday Saturday afternoon
Camden is known as Camden Town, although it’s an inner London borough. This is the area’s original name from when it wasn’t in London, but a planned new town in the Middlesex countryside, built in 1791.
These days, it’s one of the capital's busier tourist spots at any time, let alone a warm late summer Saturday afternoon on a Bank Holiday weekend.
Mrs M and I hit the holiday and tourist crowds as soon as we stepped into the unairconditioned Tube Train at Euston Station, heading north for Camden. We joined the mass of sweaty bodies pressed together inside a carriage with less space than a can of sardines rammed in with a club hammer.
Luckily, it was just two stops to Camden Town station, where we burst out of the train like corks from a shaken bottle of Cava. Naturally, one escalator was out of action, so we were all funnelled onto the single working mechanical staircase. Only the bleatings of masses of sheep were missing from the scene of the crush from being forced into a narrow exit.
We got on the escalator, through the barriers and stepped out of the station. The High Street and market outside the entrance sparked with colour, noise and the smells of every kind of food from around the globe floating on streams of smoke clouds. The brightly coloured stalls and shops were stuffed full of mass-produced cartoon images of rock stars, nylon football shirts and trashy ashtrays made from sculptured CDs.
And people. Lots and lots of people.
Those on the pavements, and the closed-off to traffic for the holiday weekend High Street, weaved between each other and the stalls, finding tiny gaps and squeezing through. Different music from the shops and market speakers fought each other and lost, dissolving into one huge cacophony.
As we pushed through the crowds, we passed a side street where a DJ played music from a stage at a volume several times louder than a fully loaded Royal Air Force transport plane on takeoff. But less tuneful.
The Good Mixer Pub, 30 Inverness Street
Unfortunately, the DJ stage was in the closed-off to traffic Inverness Street, the site of our first Amy location, The Good Mixer Pub. There will be a lot of pubs on this tour, and many will be as packed as this one was.
Amy Wimehouse drank at the Good Mixer, played pool and sometimes performed. The scene in her biopic Back To Black, where she played pool and met her future husband, Blake Fielder-Civil, was filmed in this pub. It’s where it really happened.
The Tattoo Parlour Mural
Heading back onto the High Street, we find our first Amy mural. It’s in Buck Street, just off the High Road.
The Amy Winehouse statue, Stable Market inside Camden Market
Heading back to the High Street, we passed over Regent’s Canal and Camden Lock on the way to Camden Market. We’d have liked to have walked by the side of the canal and cross over to the Market on the metal footbridge, but that route was what the Spanish call petado.
Petado is a slang word I picked up when I lived in Valencia. They use it to mean packed together in a confined space with no room to move. An accurate description of Camden this weekend.
We shoved ourselves into the Market, ignoring the vendors with nose rings and purple hair selling artisanal products mass-produced in China. It took some time to get to Amy’s statue through the masses, and then more time to take a photo as everyone was lining up for their own shots or walking in front of the camera.
I quickly clicked off two shots before it got too crowded again.
We squeezed back through the masses towards an exit by the London Overground rail bridge.
We rushed across the road and took a moment to calm down. This side of the street was empty; everyone was crammed into the Market and High Street area.
The Hawley Arms, 2 Castledown Road
The next stop was the Hawley Arms, back towards the High Street. This pub by the rail bridge was popular with rock stars in the 2000s, including Amy Winehouse, who was a regular and used to sometimes hop over the bar and serve drinks.
Other stars such as Kate Moss, Liam Gallagher and Pete Doherty were regulars. The pub featured in the Netflix series Baby Reindeer, where it was renamed The Heart. It seems it was where some of the events of the story actually occurred.
The pub still hosts live rock music and, of course, we were planning to have a pint there.
The Amy Winehouse Mural, Stucley Place, behind the Hawley Arms
Silly. It was a summer Bank Holiday weekend and the pub was completely petado. Obviously.
So we moved onto the next Amy site, which is the Amy mural on the wall at the back of the pub and the image I used at the top of the article. Here’s the mural from the other angle. I should have stood by it to get an idea of its size, but I would have come up to her nose.
The Dublin Castle, 94 Parkway
The next stop on our tour was another pub (of course), but also an important London music venue — The Dublin Arms.
Most pubs in Camden have live music, and there are many other live music venues in the area, such as the Jazz Club. Our supposed free tour guide was probably performing at one of them.
We shoved down the High Road, passing the metal record-style discs laid into the pavement of artists who had performed at Camden. It’s known as the Music Walk of Fame, similar to the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
It was far too busy to do this when I was there, andthere is an Amy Winehouse star in the pavement somewhere to seek out when there aren't so many people. I did spot this one by local band, Madness.
We turned right off the High Street and onto Parkway. Suddenly, there were far fewer people, but lots of traffic. You can’t have everything.
The Parkway leads to the Dublin Castle, the location for many of Amy Winehouse’s early gigs. Many of the great British bands have played at this small venue, including Oasis, Blur, The Libertines and Coldplay. Local boys Madness began their career here too in the late 70s.
Mrs M and I thought we’d maybe get that long-awaited pint. It wasn’t busy, but the music on the sound system inside was so loud, it was probably also being heard 5,000 miles away in Camden, Nova Scotia.
Amy Winehouse's home, 30 Camden Square
We left with eardrums ringing and headed for the next location on the Amy Winehouse tour — her former house, a 20-minute walk from her old haunts in the centre of Camden.
We reached the massive semi-detached home at №30 Camden Square, a beautiful, upmarket, tranquil zone opposite a small park and a square.
The house looked to be shut up, although someone else now owns it. The square and tree opposite have been turned into a shrine to Amy Winehouse by fans with messages, pictures and personal vigils.
There is little sound - the fams maintain a silent vigil in the square, and the ambience is very different to the High Street and Market. Some listen to Amy’s music on personal earphones while others just sit quietly and contemplate.
The Flamin’ Eight Tattoo Parlour, 2, Castle Street
Just around the corner from Amy’s home, we found the Lord Stanley, a local Victorian pub in a residential street. There were just a few locals inside and plenty of spare seats and tables. Finally, we could get a beer without noise and crowds.
After we finished, we caught the bus outside the pub for our final stop – The Roundhouse Music Venue. Amy Winehouse had some of her tattoos done at The Flamin’ Eight Tattoo shop, which is between the pub and The Roundhouse; however, we ran out of time to get off the bus to check it out.
The Roundhouse, Chalk Farm
Chalk Farm is the area just north of Camden; it’s the next stop on the Tube. It was never a Chalk Farm, and the soil is London Clay. There is no chalk. Before the area was built up, it was farmland, and the two farms were called Upper and Lower Chalcot Farms.
The Roundhouse is a small but iconic London music venue opposite Chalk Farm Tube station. It was built as a circular train engine workshop in Victorian times and holds just 1500 people. I’ve been many, many times.
The Roundhouse has hosted performances from rock music’s greats, from Jimi Hendrix and The Doors, through to David Bowie, Led Zeppelin and The Clash.
And of course, Amy Winehouse.
Amy Winehouse’s last ever public performance was at the Roundhouse when she made a surprise appearance on 20th July 2011, three days before she died.
The Amy Winehouse tour of Camden
I added the street addresses to each site on the tour, should you wish to do your own truly free Amy Winehouse Walking Tour and not get let down by a double-booked musician.
Once you get to Camden Town Tube Station or Camden Road Overground Station, most locations are easily walkable. If you do the same loop as this article, you’d need to take the bus from Amy’s former home to the tattoo parlour and then the Roundhouse, though.
And it’s probably best not to go on a warm summer bank holiday weekend if you want to avoid crowds.
Probably best not to go on a warm summer bank holiday weekend, either.
