Evening Standard - ES Magazine
There really is no place like Caledonian Road
And no street more deserves a novel named after it, says Hamish MacBain
Awhile ago now, one New Year’s Eve, I was sitting in a bar-come-club halfway down the Caledonian Road. I know that it was a while ago now because, as someone who is 20-plus years fluent in the ways of London, it has been a while ago now since the days when I would have contemplated doing anything other than going to a house party on New Year’s Eve. Actually wait: the second Strokes album had just come out so… 2003 maybe?
Back then, at one end of the Cally Road, King’s Cross was a long way off becoming the tech utopia-slash-international transport hub that it is today (you would have struggled to get a Snickers bar in the station, let alone champagne and oysters). At the other end, meanwhile, Holloway Road was… I mean you’ve been to Holloway Road recently, right? A smattering of comically overpriced vegan cafés it may now have, but it is still some way off becoming Stoke Newington. Back then it was even more gloriously rough and ready and petrol smelly (I lived there for three years and enjoyed it far more than when I was in Dalston). And the long road that links the two? Well…
I remain somewhat baffled, therefore, about what it was that made me decide to leave the relative safety of that bar-come-club and walk the full length of the Caledonian Road four times at about 2am. But walk the full length of the Caledonian Road at about 2am I did. It was… eventful. Very, very scary one second, very, very hilarious the next. Both sad and uplifting in the space of a few seconds. All kinds of characters. Every few strides stood — and still stands — a grotty looking building that just made you think, ‘I wonder what on earth goes on in there?’ Just very, very London, in other words.
Chiefly because I have been reading Andrew O’Hagan’s much-chattered-about seventh novel of the same name — which comes out early next week — I’ve been thinking about Caledonian Road a lot. About how it has almost totally and utterly resisted gentrification. There is a Costa, but that’s about it so far as chain-y type establishments go. There’s Pentonville Prison, obviously. Cally swimming pool. Lots of the pubs look like the sort of place where you would walk in and everyone — all every-night regulars — would turn and stare at you, old Western-style. The restaurants are largely the sort of places where you might just a) eat the best meal of your life for about £4.50 and b) be traumatised by the toilets.
I cannot think of another road in central London that has such a strong, unpolishable, enduring identity. Even Camden High Street now has a Pret and a Shake Shack and an Urban Outfitters. I like to think of wide-eyed tourists stepping off the Eurostar, taking a couple of wrong turns and ending up walking the length of the Caledonian Road, stumbling into stories, thinking that this is simply what all of London is like. And then going to Oxford Street the next day and just thinking, ‘Oh…’
“The pubs look like the sort of place where you’d walk in and everyone would turn and stare at you, old Western-style”