"Thinking about the ‘fabric’ of everything; man they were rough and ready, those gaffs. I think Carol Street was in worse nick though when Jawahar, Toby and Lorraine et al squatted them, but I might be wrong. It was slightly before you’re and my time; we both got to G Street in 1980. I know Jawahar and Lorraine and others were squatting in and around G Street in the late 70’s. The G Street houses when we took them over were being cleared out by the GLC (Greater London Council) mainly because of the squalor and the ‘roof rabbits’ (Fat Freddy’s Cat talk for RATS). Camden Town and rats were synonymous by the time we arrived in the early 80’s. Strangely enough and considering how rough the conditions were early on (traffic cone toilets etc) I never remember communing too much with the little furry fellahs in those days. NYC was way worse for roof rabbits! The G Street houses were quite unique in their design but sadly never attained the relative grandeur that was intended when they were built and when Camden Town as we now know it, was created from the 1850’s onwards. John Pratt, First Marquis of Camden who owned it all named the street after his beloved daughter because he’d aspired to create one of London’s swankiest Georgian suburbs. G Street was a victim of economic circumstances, always heavily overcrowded, always housing the poorer strata of people, people on the margins even of Victorian society. It is fascinating how much the very building of Georgiana Street itself was in a sense right at the global cutting edge of urban development and London’s massive leap from ‘rural facing’ to becoming the world’s first urban metropolis. Camden Town is also synonymous with cutting edge creativity on a cultural level, first with it being for a few decades the mother lode of the world’s piano manufacturing capability, then through the turn of C19th/C20th the mass of hugely popular music halls and theatres etc, all up the High Street. All of the experiences you’re recounting in the 80’s Indie music scene are in a direct line of creative gestation from Camden Town’s earliest days. Alongside this of course goes another of Camden’s roles as a cutting edge(excuse the unintended pun) of a different sort; surfing the psychotropic tsunami of intoxication, at points highly creative, at points destructive, but always pioneering! Your blog, apart from chiming very much with the fiction (Historical fantasy) i’m working on at the moment has got me thinking about growing older and how it gives us such a rich perspective on history because inevitably we become part of it. I’m minded of one of my hero’s Walter Benjamin’s theory …that objects or environments radiate a secret invisible meaning, and that perceiving this, knowing or comprehending or being ‘revealed’ in this enables us to embrace what he called, an object’s historical being, its ‘aura’ as he defined it. He felt that coming to understand this, to feel it, allowed us to touch upon secret transcendental forces implicit in an object, or a place’s history. I think G Street’s ‘aura’ would probably be visible from the moon. I raise a toast to all of us, all of the G Street, Carol Street, squatting, grooving, funk infused tribes and the secret transcendental forces unleashed by your blog John. Lookin forward to next week’s edition.”