Kentish Town - Culture, Bars and Music

Culture, Bars and Music

Kentish Town has always been noted for its pubs and bars. Pub rock is usually traced back to the "Tally Ho", a former jazz pub, where Eggs over Easy started playing in May 1971, and were soon joined by Bees Make Honey, Brinsley Schwarz, Max Merritt and the Meteors, Ducks Deluxe and others. Other music pubs include the "Bull & Gate" which featured early performances by Blur, The Housemartins, Suede, PJ Harvey, Ash, The Pogues, The Men They Couldn't Hang, Keane, The Libertines, Muse, The Shamen, Manic Street Preachers, and Coldplay. The pub was the site of the extremely popular and influential six-nightly 'Timebox' club run by Jon 'Fat' Beast from 1987 to 1992.

In more recent years the are has become noted as leading the trend for the resurgence of back-to-basics, real ale pubs like the CAMRA award-winning Southampton Arms, the Pineapple, and Tapping the Admiral. Many of these are stocked with ale from the Camden Town Brewery, located in a mews in West Kentish Town. A new bar is set to open on the site in March 2012.

Kentish Town is also home to The Forum (formerly known as the Town and Country club), for many years well into the 1950s one of Kentish Town's most popular and comfortable cinemas, and now a popular live music venue.

In the last five years Kentish Town, and particularly West Kentish Town, has become renowned for its art galleries, studios and creative spaces. Most notable are Spring Studios, the Zabludowicz Collection, the Beardsmore Gallery, photographer Rankin's Annroy and Leighton Space.

Torriano Avenue, dating back to 1848, is a popular Kentish Town street being home to Pete Stanley, one of the country's best-known bluegrass banjo players, British actor Bill Nighy, The Torriano Poets, a beacon of culture where local poets have met for over 20 years and still hold weekly public poetry readings on Sunday evenings; its founder was John Rety. The street is also home to two pubs, one being an 1850s hostelry The Leighton, the other The Torriano, which was for many years an old-fashioned community off-licence. One of London's most famous nudist public baths, Rio's, is in Kentish Town.

The Lion and Unicorn Theatre in Kentish Town is one of London's leading Fringe Theatre venues and is run by Giant Olive Theatre Company.

The Kentishtowner

Kentish Town is home to North London's only daily online magazine, The Kentishtowner, founded in 2010, which casts a wry look at the area's arts and entertainments scenes, and features contributions from a wide range of broadsheet journalists and readers.