Article

Change

Community

Politics

8 July 2024

6 min read

Camden: what’s up in Keir’s backyard?

The new Prime Minister’s constituency has valuable lessons for the country.

Simon Walsh

Simon Walsh is a communications consultant, journalist and non-stipendiary priest in the Diocese of London.

Kier Starmer walks along a residential development's path with two other people.

Starmer and local councillors in Camden.

‘What good ever came out of Nazareth?’ was asked of Jesus. The same might now be said of Camden, which lies at the heart of the Holborn & St Pancras constituency. A safe Labour seat since the 1980s, its present incumbent is Sir Keir Starmer who has been handed the keys to Downing Street in the General Election.

His wallet apparently has on it ‘Take me home to Kentish Town’. Two buses link Kentish Town, where he lives, with Whitehall – a route of about four miles. He will go into government with a very full in-tray, and many of them are issues he knows first-hand from his own constituency. I know them too, having lived there for 20 years.

Sometimes I cover services for a clergy colleague in the nearby parish of St Mary’s, Somers Town. The church is on Eversholt Street which runs along the eastern side of Euston station, incidentally the capital’s first mainline railway terminus. Last year, as I arrived for a mass one rainy Saturday morning, a random group of people sheltered in the doorway. They were, I discovered, addicts waiting for a drugs drop. Towards the end of mass, one of the group – a young woman – came into the back of church and found a pew in which to start preparing her fix. Once I had disrobed, I asked if she wouldn’t mind doing it somewhere else.

Another time, in the same church, a young woman from Spain was asking for money. She had answered a job advert on social media to come and work on a chicken farm. Having arrived and paid her accommodation for a week, she found there was no chicken farm, and trying to find other work was almost impossible because of paperwork. What could we do to help? The church itself is in dire need of financial support too.

St Mary’s Flats... were among the first examples of public housing in the country to have electricity and Jellicoe became something of a social housing celebrity.

Somers Town was transformed 100 years ago when its energetic parish priest, Fr Basil Jellicoe, created the first housing association. Dismayed by the squalor of Victorian tenements, he set about raising funds for The St Pancras House Improvement Society. Jellicoe was only in his mid-20s but had a solid Anglo-Catholic background founded on mission and a heart for the poor. The cramped and filthy conditions with extreme poverty were ‘an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual disgrace’ – for him, the opposite to the sacraments.

By the time Jellicoe moved from the parish in 1934, the slums had been cleared and a number of the new blocks built, the first being St Mary’s Flats, with others given saints’ names. They were among the first examples of public housing in the country to have electricity and Jellicoe became something of a social housing celebrity. Tragically, having worn himself out he died at the age of 36. His legacy is one of praxis – active Christianity meeting social problems where they are – and his model became the blueprint for many other housing associations since.

No surprise, therefore, that families struggle to afford to live in the area and migrate further out. As a result, schools have started to close.

The area remains a swirl of social problems in addition to the drugs. Mental health issues are rife. There are plans to redevelop St Pancras Hospital which houses mental health services. The area suffers from traffic and noise pollution, and lacks communal spaces. Camden Council recently saw fit take one corner of a public green in Somers Town on which to build a tower block of multi-million pound flats, handy for nearby St Pancras Station. Crime rates are high with muggings and mobile phone thefts a daily reality. Last year, as mourners left a funeral one Saturday afternoon at St Aloysius Church just a few streets down from St Mary’s, a drive-by-shooting injured six people. Starmer called the incident ‘appalling’ and spoke of ‘extra patrols and community support’ after a conversation with police.

The area has become highly expensive. Local businesses are being priced out by increased rents. Very little social housing has been built this century. The average house price in NW1, which encompasses the Nash terraces of Regents Park, the council blocks and social housing of Somers Town, is £1.3 million. A two-bed flat is in excess of half a million quid. No surprise, therefore, that families struggle to afford to live in the area and migrate further out. As a result, schools have started to close – four in as many years recently. In his acceptance speech in Camden Council’s offices near St Pancras station, close to the world-renowned Crick Institute and Facebook’s UK headquarters, Starmer namechecked the mythical ‘girl from Somers Town’ and his hope for her future.

Charles Dickens went to school around here and knew these streets well. His 1848 novel Dombey & Son detailed the destruction and chaos caused in the area by the building of the railway line through it. 175 years later, it has been HS2, the great White Elephant which has dug up streets, seen whole blocks of accommodation and hotels demolished, diverted roads, and axed much-loved institutions like the Bree Louise pub. There has been no benefit to locals so far (quite the opposite, in fact) and it is a stain on both Labour and Conservative administrations. Sir Keir says he is furious at the ‘big hole’ left by the down-tools project. There is fear now that the redundant land will be subject to a ‘gold rush’ as developers circle to pick up some prime real estate.

Interviewed in June by the Camden New Journal, Starmer said: ‘The government has earmarked money for Euston. I want to see that money and obviously, if we come into power, we’ll see through all this money – and not stripped away from other projects which is the usual trick.’ He also said: ‘The other thing is we need housing. Camden desperately needs housing as many places do. So we will use it – if we are privileged to come into power – as part of our plan for 1.5 million homes.’

His manifesto has five pledges:

Kickstart economic growth

The cost-of-living crisis is biting hard here and the inequalities are stark. People need real money.

Make Britain a clean energy superpower

It’s going to need more than a few on-street charging points for electric vehicles. And the carbon footprint of that HS2 project?

Take back our streets

He wants to halve crime rates but London has around 106 crimes per 1,000 people and his own constituency feels less safe than it used to.

Break down barriers to opportunity

Camden already ranks highly in the deprivation index where barriers are concerned: schools, homes, jobs…

Build an NHS fit for the future

Again, the hospitals and GP services are cracking – high demand combined with under-investment is deadly.

A prophet is not welcome in his own country, it was said. Although the new Prime Minister was elected with a majority in his home seat, it was down to 18,884 votes from the 2019 endorsement of 36,641 votes – a drop of almost 50%. In this election, an Independent candidate called Andrew Feinstein polled 7,312 votes with his pledge to improve life for local residents. Starmer’s constituents will be counting on him to fix the nation along with the problems on their own streets. Otherwise, safe seat or not, he may no longer be welcome in Camden either.

Interview

Care

Change

Community

Masculinity

13 June 2025

5 min read

There’s a simple solution to society’s lost boys

Mentoring the fatherless helps and heals

Belle Tindall

Belle is the staff writer at Seen & Unseen and co-host of its Re-enchanting podcast.

A teenager slumped against a sofa plays a video game

Zach Wear on Unsplash .

What if nearly every major social pathology could be halted upstream? What if there was evidence to suggest that they commonly flow from one singular factor? What would we do – would we sit back and wait for the State to intervene, pointing to where we know the problem is beginning? Or would we wade up that stream ourselves, and start damning up the current?

Richard Kay and Robert Mansel Lewis have chosen the latter option. They are the founders of Chapter2, a charity that offers mentoring for boys aged seven to 16. And they have identified fatherlessness as the factor that is linked to many major social pathologies to be found in Western society today.

Earlier this year, the Centre for Social Justice brought out a report called Lost Boys. It found that2.5 million children in the UK do not live with a father figure, and that just under half of young Britons grow up with one biological parent, more often than not their mother.;

Back in 2013, the numbers were strikingly higher in low-income areas, with 65 per cent of children aged 12–16 in the bottom 20 per cent of income households not living with both birth parents – this was 26 per cent higher than in better-off households. What’s more, when children were aged three, the chance of them being in the bottom income quintile was 21 per cent if their parents were married, and a massive 81 per cent if they were in lone-parent families.

So, we can already see a clear line drawn between fatherlessness and poverty,. Chapter2 (informed by the work of psychologist, Stephen Baskerville) also point out that fatherlessness is linked to alcohol abuse, drug abuse, truancy in school, incarceration, and mental health difficulties – all among young boys, in particular.

There’s a smorgasbord of factors and influences that are making it increasingly complex to be a ‘healthy’ and ‘happy’ man right now. “You don’t even need to put the word ‘toxic’ in front of ‘masculinity’ anymore, Kay points out. “It’s just assumed. If we need to ask what healthy masculinity is, people really don’t know.”

As I’m writing this, I’m sitting in a coffee shop with ‘boys will be... what we teach them to be’ emblazoned on the side of it. It feels as though multiple destructive forces are making a beeline for young men right now, and we’re panicking. We’re manically trying to halt a fast and violent flow - but what if we waded upstream?

That’s what Kay and his colleagues are trying to do. The charity’s mission is to

bring good men into the lives of young boys who are living without a father. These men – all volunteers (?) - are committed to being there for the long term (two years, minimum) and to build a trusted friendship. That’s it: the beginning, middle, and end of the mission.

I was struck by the radical simplicity of it. Young boys get referred to Chapter2 through social services, schools, and by family members or guardians – they told me that referrals have never been something they’ve had to work hard to gather. Which is pretty heart breaking in itself.

The reality is, the fatherlessness crisis isn’t going to be solved by State-led intervention, and nor should it be. The solution lies in community living as it should do. It can be helped by the smashing down of hyper-individualism and the dismantling of our obsession with the nuclear family. It can be eased by reminding ourselves that it really does take a village to raise a child. Oh, and that we’re the village. When we spoke, Kay talked about his initial reluctance to found a charity that does this work, weary that it somehow relieves us all of our responsibility to live wide-open lives. Chapter2 is working toward a world in which the mentoring of young, fatherless, boys is normal, not a last resort.

I like that.

The longevity of Chapter2’s goal is pretty counter-cultural, isn’t it? We’re a commitment-phobic-culture. That’s pretty anti-love-your-neighbour, right? But the only way to respond to the wound of abandonment is by showing up – relentlessly, consistently, self-sacrificially. It’s the art of staying – come what may.

I was told that this takes the boys a little getting used to; that Kay and Mansel Lewis warn the men they’re training that there will come a point when the boys will try and push them away, assuming they’ll leave sooner or later and feeling more comfortable having that happen on their own terms. It’s a symptom of the abandonment wound, I guess. But the men stay, and the boys begin to trust them.

And here’s the other biggie for Chapter2: there’s no agenda. No goals. No solutions. No fixing. Just presence - consistent presence.

Again, I was struck by how foreign that must feel to the boys. Everybody else in their life needs and wants something from them – better school attendance, better behaviour at home, less trouble with the police – and rightly so. But the Chapter2 mentors are only interested in the boys’ company and trust. They’re not trying to fix them, they’re just trying to know them – if there are no measurable changes, they’ll still show up. Zero conditions.

The poet, rapper, author, and pastor, Joshua Luke Smith, often talks about a father as being someone who will

‘bind up your wounds and catch you when you fall’,

because that that’s what every young man needs – someone to care enough to do those two things. Because hurt people tend to hurt people. So, wounds need to be bound before they become ‘an excuse to wound others’. Again, it’s all very upstream, don’t you think? It’s very Chapter2-esque.

One Chapter2 mentor recently received a Father’s Day card from a boy he’d built up a relationship with. Another young boy who’d been arrested twenty or so times in twelve months eventually realised, thanks to his mentor, that it’s not worth getting into trouble. His mentor, he said, ‘is someone he can trust, he’s consistent and he knows he cares about him’.

This is community living as it ought to. Is this also the solution to the pandemic of fatherlessness?

Find out more

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