People relaxing on Primrose Hill, sketched by William Roberts in 1949

When Charles Darwin wrote On The Origin of Species he did it in a scientific atmosphere that crackled with thinkers laying out research. And while Darwin’s name is front and centre of the development of evolutionary theory, standing right alongside him through the 1850s was Primrose Hill resident Alfred Russel Wallace, who lived in St Mark’s Crescent.

The naturalist, biologist, explorer and illustrator had been working on a theory of evolutionary science at the same time as Darwin, and in 1858 he published a paper about his research which included references to Darwin. This prompted Darwin to pen an abstract of the book he was working on.

Wallace’s home is one of the hundreds of highlights laid out by the editors of a new edition of Streets of Primrose Hill and Regent’s Park, part of the Camden History Society series that really does uncover the time-trodden streets of our neighbourhoods.

The book was last revised in 1994: editor John Cottrell with a team of researchers have embarked on the job of walking seven routes from Euston Road in the south to Adelaide Road in the north; Finchley Road in the west to Hampstead Road in the east.

“Alfred Russel Wallace was a very great scientist and a fascinating character,” says John. “He deserves to be as famous as Darwin and would probably have a blue plaque in St Mark’s Crescent if he didn’t already have one in Croydon.”

Every page is a joy of ephemeral information you may not have known but are richer for discovering. From MI5 spooks watching the moves of British Communist Bill Rust, who lived in Fitzroy Road, to the visit of Salvador Dalí to Sigmund Freud’s Elsworthy Road home – where he commented that the psychoanalyst’s head reminded him of a mollusc – the tapestry of life down the centuries leaps off each page.

“At number 39 Elsworthy Road, Sigmund Freud, founder of psychoanalysis, and his daughter Anna first found shelter when they came to Britain as refugees in 1938,” says John.

“It was here, in July of that year, that Freud met Salvador Dalí. Freud was deaf and Dalí was unable to speak either English or German. Dalí, who during the meeting drew a head of Freud resembling a snail, came away convinced that he had persuaded Freud to reconsider his theory of art. Freud merely whispered in German to the surrealist Edward James, who was also at the meeting, ‘That boy looks like a fanatic. Small wonder that they have a civil war in Spain if they look like that’.”

A few streets north of Wallace’s home, a block called Meadowbank – dating from 1969 – can be found on the corner of Primrose hIll Road and Ainger Road. There was once a large and rather unusual property on site, called The Hall, which was home to electrical engineer Nathaniel Holmes.

The pipe organ commissioned by Nathaniel Holmes for his house in Primrose Hill Road, woodcut 1876

Holmes specialised in laying underwater cables and connected Moscow to Hong Kong via Siberia, Vladivostok and Shanghai. The money earned from laying a cable that travelled more than 12,000 kilometres was to build his dream home in Primrose Hill.

Holmes was a fanatical organ player and his house in Primrose Hill Road was designed to contain the biggest organ he could design. The entire house was based around a giant music room.

The organ was larger than the one in St Paul’s Cathedral, boasting four keyboards, standing 50ft high, 30ft wide, containing over 400 pipes and weighing in at 87 tons. The contraption was powered by a series of electrical valves and pneumatics. It was completed in 1876 after a three-year building project, which was delayed somewhat by materials being delivered late after an explosion on the Regent’s Canal halted traffic.

The £8,000 bill to build the organ bankrupted Holmes and he had to sell the instrument, which was placed for a time in Battersea Park. Part of it remains in use in a church in north-east Scotland.

King’s College Road, pre-1917. The stretch between Adelaide Road and King Henry’s Road was the main shopping street for the area

Another notable resident – this time from Avenue Road – who also lost a fortune was the acrobat and tightrope walker Charles Blondin. He moved to number 70 Avenue Road in the mid-1860s and called his house, as he did with all the properties he owned, Niagara Villa – having successfully walked across the falls on a tightrope. Sadly, he had to sell up when his manager went bankrupt.

To the south, routes cover John Nash’s Regent’s Park and such an illustrious patch has plenty of tales to tell. You can see the architect gazing down over his work. His bust looks over Regent’s Park from a vantage point on number 3 Chester Terrace – an address that would later be known for being the home of the government minister John Profumo, whose affair with Christine Keeler rocked Harold Macmillan’s government in the early 1960s.

A little further along the terrace was the home of swindler Leopold Redpath, who fleeced investors pouring cash into the great railway boom: he siphoned off £250,000 and was sent to Australia after being convicted.

While Regent’s Park was once forested and owned by the monarchy, in post-Civil War England land was handed to officers of the New Model Army, who cut down trees for timber – the Navy provided a huge market – and to create space for agriculture. Development through the Georgian and Victorian periods created the park we know today.

“Cumberland Green was the site of an enormous postal sorting office during WWI,” adds John. “Covering five acres, it was said to be the largest wooden structure in the world. During its operation, the ‘Home Depot’ dispatched more than two billion letters and 114 million parcels to the Western Front.”

Across to Hampstead Road, where the book describes the late Silverdale block, now gone as HS2 work carves through the area. As John says, it was central to the St Pancras rent strike in 1960, when tenants fought back against Tory-imposed rent rises.

“A drastic increase in council rents led tenants to form tenants’ associations and to withhold the payment of the rent increase,” John states.

The strike had seen tenants’ leaders face eviction. A showdown was due and it happened early in the morning on September 22.

“Bailiffs backed up by 800 police began action to evict two activists, one of whom was Arthur Rowe of Silverdale,” John writes.

“Other tenants rushed from their flats to fight the police and were joined by around 300 building and warehouse workers from the Shell Centre site on the South Bank, who went on strike and marched up Hampstead Road to support them.

“Rowe and his son held out for an hour in their barricaded flat, but the bailiffs eventually gained entry by smashing a hole through a brick wall.”

Above all, this handy guide brings alive the people whose lives have helped form the Camden we know today.

[courtesy Louis Berk]

• Streets of Primrose Hill and Regent’s Park. By Camden History Society members, £14.99, www.camdenhistorysociety.org/publications