THE IMPORTANT thing about Camden Market is that nobody planned it. Before London swallowed it whole, Camden Town was the fork in the road best known for a coaching inn called the Mother Red Cap. It served as a last-chance stop for beer, highway robbery, and gonorrhea before heading north into the wilds of Middlesex. In the early nineteenth century men in frock coats and serious muttonchop sideburns built the eastward branch of Regents Canal just to the north of the coaching inn. I say they built it, but the actual work was done by a couple of thousand strapping Irish fellers who came to be known, because of their canal work, as inland navigators or navvies. They and the navvies who came after them would go on to the build the three main phases of infrastructure development that characterize the history of the industrial revolution: the canals, the railways, and the motorways. I know this because I built a model of the area in junior school and got a gold star, a commendation, and the enduring hatred of Barry Sedgeworth, playground bully and poor loser. A couple of serious canal locks were built next to the Chalk Farm Road, from whence the market gets its name—Camden Lock. There were extensive warehouses along the canal and a large timber merchant.

In the 1960s the planning department of the London County Council, whose unofficial motto was Finishing What the Luftwaffe Started, decided that what London really needed was a series of orbital motorways driven through its heart. The planning blight caused by these schemes meant that what should have been lucrative land to be developed into multistory car parks or municipal rabbit hutches was instead leased to a trio of London wide-boys dressed in Afghan coats. These likely lads set up craft workshops in the old timber yard and on the weekends held a market where the products could be sold. By the mid-1980s the market had spread up Chalk Farm Road and down to the Electric Ballroom, and Camden Council finally stopped trying to put it out of business. It’s currently the second most visited tourist attraction in London and home to the Arches Jazz Club where my dad was going to make his comeback gig with the irregulars.

The irregulars were surprisingly nervous but my dad was remarkably unfazed.

“I’ve played bigger gigs,” he said. “I once played with Joe Harriott in a basement in Catford. After having to go on with him I never got stage fright again.”