People’s Museum:
Somers Town

Futures are shaped and can be reshaped.

On 12 May 2022, the doors of a little museum opened on Phoenix Road in Somers Town, an area squeezed behind and between railway termini. It is situated in an old butcher’s shop in a block on a council estate that is modelled on the capacious proportions of Karl-Marx Hof in Vienna. The block was built by the London County Council in 1927 and named after Neville Chamberlain, then Minister for Health. Housing and social provision for the post-war working classes was developing. The LCC vied in magnanimity with another ambitious, churchbased, slum clearance project in the area. In 1924, in Somers Town, Father Basil Jellicoe, with social workers Edith Neville and Norah Hill, founded the St Pancras House Improvement Society.

To make palpable the cleansing destruction of their work, from which new homes were to rise like phoenixes from the ashes, they dynamited an especially squalid block of housing and celebrated its demise with a huge bonfire.

The museum that opened to showcase this local reforming work, and more, took the name People’s Museum: Somers Town. It was formed by a group called ‘A Space for Us?’. Why that name? The group came together to stand up for an area which it feels is subject to constant assault by rampant and largescale development. This undermining through development comes from multiple directions, including the expanding Knowledge Quarter, who have priority use of land, the off-shore owned luxury 28-story block on a sold-off public park, the various private student housing blocks, the ventures of the venture capitalists in the former Trades Council building, who are explicit in their desire to build, here, where Father Basil Jellicoe and the housing reformers dreamed of a new Jerusalem for the poor, a new Silicon Valley for them and their techmates, as they gaze over to Digital Capitalism’s UK HQ in the new supersurveilled NC1. At the other end of Phoenix Road, HS2 excavations now lie dormant, uncertain if they will break another brick after the wholesale destruction of the area and a massive transfer of public wealth.

The People’s Museum works on many fronts, drawing the living together to share memories or to learn of the past or to take some inspiration or courage from it. A timeline on one wall documents the origins of the town, in property speculation, established on Charles Cocks, 1st Baron Somers in 1784, its flagship building a 15-sided Polygon for a burgeoning middle class unable to afford the West End. The scheme did not work out, owing to war and slump. More marginalised figures were drawn to the Polygon and surroundings: French Huguenots escaping the revolution, liberal Spaniards fleeing reaction to inaugurate a virtual democratic Spain in exile here, and freethinkers such as the Anarchist William Godwin living alongside the feminist Mary Wollstonecraft. In this time too Irish people settled here, working seasonally and for rotten wages in Europe’s biggest city and escaping the intensification of political repression in Ireland. Some of those joined the United Irishmen and the Society of United Britons, of which there was a cell in Somers Town. They were inspired by Tom Paine and they founded the first popular reform societies in London and the provinces and argued for the vote for men and annual parliaments. The timeline and associated artefacts document how Romantics, anarchists, poets, publishers, feminists, squatters, reformers, political campaigners, religious zealots squeezed into this small spot – living and some dying here – such as Mary Wollstonecraft or Jamaican opponent of the death penalty Catherine Despard. Through the nineteenth century, the area was crammed increasingly with cheap housing and impoverished people living in unsanitary conditions. A neighbouring Bloomsbury estate was walled and gated off to keep it separate from the penurious muddle that was Somers Town.

A ‘radical wall’ documents the bewildering variety of ‘Isms’ to have germinated here: Godwin’s anarchism, Wollstonecraft’s Feminism, Arnott’s Chartism, Rossetti teenagers’ and then Freedom’s Anarchism, rank and file communism, George Padmore’s Pan-Africanism the Unity Theatre’s dramatic communists and folkists, and a panoply of rent strikers, town hall occupiers, disability rights advocates, squatters, gays and lesbian activists, occupying defenders of a once-threatened Elizabeth Garret Anderson’s hospital,and recent opposers of tree massacres, oversized building developments, luxury tower blocks, HS2 and more.

One corner of the museum reconstructs a modest living room, after the purging of the slums, from any time circa 1935 to 1973, the endpoint of Sidney Cook’s local grand-scale social housing projects. Above both a mantlepiece recovered from a demolished ‘day nursery for fatherless children’ and a hundredyear-old piano, found abandoned and stemming from a flat in the very same block, are many photographsof celebrations, from pub beanos to the more recent annual Festival of Cultures. The Pearly Queen of St Pancras’ crimplene suit from the 1960s vies in twinkliness with a bespangled Bengali wedding dress.

We set up something as grand-sounding as a museum because is not easy to find traces of the historical wealth on local streets, where wrecking balls are active (‘it wouldn’t happen in Hampstead’ the museum’s directors are wont to say of their area which is the most deprived in Camden – around 67% live in poverty, according to a recent survey). Much has changed. Much has been demolished, sometimes in the name of progress. Old houses, sometimes slums, were cleared away to build better homes. These in turn became old and slum-like. Markets were displaced to extend railway goods yards. Goods yards gave way to huge national projects such as the British Library, the Francis Crick Institute, the Eurostar Terminal, and, to come, the British Library Extension above Crossrail 2, which will dig out the entirety of Somers Town – a project now stalled, but the hole will still be made and it will match the hole of the now postponed HS2 at Euston. These global developments make it feel as if a locality called Somers Town will soon be buried under a dusty layer of construction rubble.

To open a museum here is a multiple political act. It invites anyone, locals, passers-through, tourists to imagine a place changing through time, sometimes in accord with the revolutionary demands of activists, sometimes in response to variously motivated reformisms.

Futures are shaped and can be reshaped. In times when there is not enough housing for the working classes, the museum draws attention to other times when decent housing for the working classes exceeded bare need and produced an excess ofcommunity, of everyday art, of life – as the St Pancras Housing Society slogan put it: ‘Housing is Not Enough’ . It is a rallying point for those that care about others’ past lives and all of our futures – which is most of us. And it is a place of consolation, a kind of harbour of social, community space that welcomes all with no demands, no insistence on money or qualification – simply receptivity to an invitation to think and rethink a place and its inhabitation along the vectors of past, present, future.

The street party during the Queen's Jubilee in 1977 on Kingsgate Road with residents and tenants of Kingsgate Road and adjoining streets from Netherwood street to Quex Road, West End Lane and Kilburn High Road, organised by Kingsgate Association.