PUBLICATIONS

Our publications include 3 editions of Spirit!, and a children’s book, Fantastic Tales of St Pancras.
AVAILABLE ON DONATION.

All are limited edition independently published beautifully designed paperbacks with original research and archival historical images.
Available in Owl Bookshop or in local cafe/newsagents and on display on Phoenix Road.
We’d love your feedback! somerstownhistory@gmail.com

Spirit!

A quirky compiliation of histories, this slice through time reveals Somers Town as London in minature, from Wollstonecraft to Pearlies, taking inworking class histories, pub songs, Chartish, boxing rings, anarchist Rosettis and Gilbert & George.

100 years of social housing can be found in the small bounded area of Somers Town in London from slum clearance to modernist Golden Age. It’s a history of trailblazing efforts of a radical priest and the UK’s first female surveyor to clear slums, to the bold ambitions of Camden Council, from 1920s European modernist estates to the 1960s. This traces a housing community, and its rebellions: rent strikers and squatters. This a place where housing was never on its own enough

Journeys takes in 300 years of change and migrations, in an area which attracted intellectual giants of world thought and political activism – Godwin, Wollstonecraft, black activists George Padmore and Claudia Jones as well as more recent arrivals of the Irish and Bangladeshi.

Fantastic Tales of St Pancras

Fantastic Tales of St Pancras
Cover of ‘Fantastic Tales’
Inside page
'Fantastic Tales of St Pancras’
Our children’s activity book is based on the fairy tales connected to local ‘art in everyday life’ by Gilbert Bayes in St Pancras Housing Improvement Society, which still (just!) exists today. Dragons, tailors, mermaids… Hans Christian Anderson inspired much of his work. Any donation will be used to help fund their replacement.