Strange town

KENTISH TOWN ROAD is a humdrum high street in north London. It contains pawnbrokers, pound shops, hairdressers and some long-in-the-tooth hardware stores. Unlike Camden Town to the south, full of bars and tattoo parlours, or Hampstead to the west, with its bistros and boutique clothing shops, little seems to have changed on the street for the past three decades. “It’s never quite got going,” admits Gary McLaren, a local bookseller. Yet the lack of change is odd—and hints at some of the strangeness of London.

Kentish Town has excellent transport links to central London, and plenty of residents prepared to pay good money for that. Off the high street stretch rows of pretty Victorian terraced houses, which sell for as much as £2m ($3m) apiece. Between 2007 and 2014 property prices in the postcode area surrounding the main Tube and railway station more than doubled. An influx of French parents, drawn by a school that opened in 2011, is pushing prices even higher. Yet Kentish Town’s shops and cafés are almost invariably untrendy and in some cases mouldering. A hair salon, a butcher and a sportswear shop have each been owned by the same men for more than a quarter of a century. Why?

One explanation is that, in common with other parts of London, Kentish Town has lots of social housing as well as costly Victorian terraces. Camden Council, the local authority, is building even more in the borough. This helps cheaper shops survive, suggests Tony Travers of the London School of Economics: council tenants are less likely to drive and so rely more on local outlets. And the sheer volume of car and lorry traffic on the busy high street, which is a main road into the city, might deter shoppers from visiting and swanky businesses from setting up in the area.

Demography plays a part, too. Fully 72% of the population of Kentish Town is white, including a good number of Irish residents—higher than the proportion in London as a whole, at 60%. Unlike the high streets around Peckham and Brixton in south London, which cater for African shoppers who may travel far to reach them, few specialist shops draw people to Kentish Town. “We’re not a destination high street,” sighs one local trader.

NIMBYs have not always helped. Lots of civic groups are active in the area, campaigning against late licences and the like, says Dan Carrier of the Camden New Journal, a newspaper. A local business association is also good at complaining. Partly because of this, a big supermarket has not yet opened on the high street—though Lidl, a discounter, will set up shop this year. “We quite like that it is rough around the edges,” says Michael Williams, a writer and local.

Paradoxically, soaring house prices in the area might be another brake on change. Wealthy family buyers mean that some houses once split into flats have been turned back into homes, says Mr Carrier. The result is fewer shoppers on the high street. Wealthy residents are more likely to get their groceries online or drive to bigger stores. And most will go out to the West End rather than a local restaurant.

Such “counter-currents” will prevent Kentish Town from gentrifying fully, suggests Gillian Tindall, a local historian. And they affect many other streets in London, too. Lupus Street in Pimlico serves a large council block on one side and white stucco houses on the other. Caledonian Road in Islington, close to rapidly-changing King’s Cross, is still full of kebab shops. London is a global city, but it is also a collection of villages, cranky and resistant to change.