Turn off the bustling Highgate Road and find yourself in Georgian London.
The journalist Valerie Grove remembered being introduced to Little Green Street by none other than John Betjeman: "I was driving him back to Chelsea after visiting his childhood house on Highgate West Hill, for a series called Where I Was Young," she recalled, "He made me stop at the foot of the hill. He wanted to show me 'the true Georgian of Kentish Town'. So I first saw the tiny hidden cobbled lane off the Highgate Road...
Little Green Street is a real rarity, a perfectly preserved row of Georgian cottages, eight on one side, and just two on the other, with a cobbled alleyway running between them. As the Kentish Towner once wrote "If there’s a hierarchy of cute NW5 streets, then this one sits fatly at the summit."
Built in the 1780s, the bow windows betray these houses' former use as shops — when they sold the likes of coffee, ribbons and mouse traps. In his 1898/9 entry in his survey Life and Labour of the People in London, Charles Booth marked out the residents of Little Green Street as "Poor. 18s. to 21s. a week for a moderate family" and "Fairly comfortable. Good ordinary earnings". These days, the residents are generally better off; at the time of writing one of these properties is on Rightmove for a cool £1.25 million (even if you've not got the cash, it's worth a browse, to see what these beautiful properties are like inside.)
Despite their idyllic appearance, not everything on Little Green Street has always been hunky dory. Rifling through the archives, we found that in the 1930s, the street was home to a money laundering milkman, while in 1960s, a resident of one of the houses died here of accidental alcohol poisoning. But it was another episode in the 1960s that would make Little Green Street famous — even if people didn't realise it. This was the street that inspired north London rockers the Kinks to write Dead End Street, and it was here too that they filmed their quirky music video for the song — a darkly comical Dickensian farce, in which the group dress up as undertakers, and carry a coffin. At the end of the video, Stan, one of the band's roadies, springs out of the coffin and legs it away, beneath the railway bridge at Wiblin Mews. It's been described as the world's first concept music video.
David Davis from the Kinks revisited Little Green Street in 2007, and claimed that the BBC hadn't been fans of the video: "they thought is was in bad taste," he confided. Musical magpies Oasis were surely inspired by Dead End Street with their own pallbearer-themed video for The Importance of Being Idle. "It was very similar," laughed Davis, "I wonder where they got the idea from..."
Towards the end of the documentary, Davis spots a sign up in one of the cottage windows, revealing that the street is under threat. The was the beginning of a bitter battle in which locals fought to stop Little Green Street from being used as a thoroughfare for huge trucks lumbering back and forth during construction of luxury apartments behind the road. The 'Battle of Little Green Street' became a high profile campaign, with celebrities like Bill Nighy showing their solidarity, and some locals laying down on the cobblestones to prevent vehicles passing through. The narrow street, thankfully, wasn't subjected to much through-traffic in the end — something which the Kentish Towner attributed to the 2008 recession. Although there was that time Father Christmas got stuck.
All images: Londonist