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.

Article

Creed

Politics

9 September 2025

5 min read

In praise of nuance

Life is complicated. The early Christians had a much better way than a dramatic headline

Graham Tomlin

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

A typewriter holds a piece or paper reading 'truth'

Markus Winkler on Unsplash.

Seventeen hundred years ago this year, the early Christians inched their way towards a landmark statement. The Nicene Creed was the result of 300 years of wrestling with a question at the heart of this new movement: if the Jesus they worshipped was in some sense the ‘Son of God’, what did that mean? Was he a human prophet, better than most, but fundamentally just like the rest of us? Was he God in human disguise? Or a kind of half-breed, like a centaur - half human and half divine? Bishops and theologians spilt blood, sweat and tears (literally) over these questions. Simplistic answers were put forward and found wanting. Treatises were written, synods met, opponents were castigated and excommunicated. Even riots broke out as the debates waxed fiercely across the Roman world.

Eventually, in 325 AD, the Council of Nicaea issued a carefully worded and hard-won statement. It said that Jesus was ‘God from God, light from light, true God from true God, begotten not made, of one being with the Father.' Every word was carefully chosen and the fruit of long debate, deep prayer and thought. It didn’t solve all the problems, but it has stood the test of time, and is still recited in churches across the world today.

I have been pondering all this during the summer as our political debates have raged.

Take the issue of immigration. On one side, there are the ‘refugees welcome’ banners, the suspicion that fixing a flag of St George on a lamp post is a sign of incipient fascism, and that claiming we have a problem with immigration is inherently racist.

On the other side, it is ‘stop the boats’, calls for mass deportations, protests outside hostels for frightened immigrants, the implication that all immigrants are scroungers, destroying the soul of Britain (or the USA) and the need to rapidly close our borders.

But it’s complicated. There are significant differences between the claims of legal migrants, asylum seekers and illegal immigrants. Most would probably agree that offering welcome to people escaping warfare, persecution and famine in their homelands is right, proper, and in line with a long tradition of wealthy countries offering a refuge for others in need. People will always be on the move, and to close all borders is unrealistic and unjust. The moderate, fertile British climate, our historic economic and political stability, our well-regulated legal system, the Christian faith which shaped our culture, even the relative tidiness of our streets and countryside, are gifts we inherit from the past and should be generous with them.

Yet these are blessings that can’t be taken for granted. They need protecting, not just for our sakes but for those with a legitimate claim to make a home here.

So, most would also agree that illegal immigration is a scourge, with the ruthless villains enticing desperate migrants to climb on their flimsy boats across the channel deserving little else but criminal sentences. Yet even mass ‘legal’ migration will change the character of the nation. In 1990, net migration was around 20,000 a year. In 2024 it was 430,000. When 40% of primary age children have at least one foreign-born parent, and for one in five, English is not their first language, that can't fail to have an impact on the character of the nation, especially in areas where housing is cheaper and newcomers to the country find it easier to find accommodation.

But this complexity gets lost in the need for a punchy headline. Neither ‘send them home’ or ‘all migrants welcome’ capture the dilemma. It needs nuance. It needs careful, patient working towards the right balance between differing claims – compassion towards the stranger and the preservation of the very things that draw the refugees and the restless here.

The same is true of Israel and Gaza. For the pro-Israel lobby, just to draw attention to the suffering in Gaza is to be anti-Semitic. To urge restraint on Israel’s determination to destroy Hamas, even if it means destroying Gaza and much of its population in the meantime is to echo the death camps and to bring down Zionist wrath. Yet for Palestine Action and its supporters, Israel’s legitimate need to live in peace without a neighbouring state dedicated to its destruction seems to count for nothing. How can it be expected to live alongside a regime that brutally murdered 1,400 of its citizens in one day?

Even assisted dying – on which I and others on Seen & Unseen take the strong view that it is a bad idea – is not simple. The cries of those facing a long and painful death need hearing and people like me, who argue against assisted dying, need to promote solutions that will alleviate such suffering without crossing the red line of encouraging a culture of death.

The truth and the resolution of our dilemmas – on immigration, or Gaza, or even assisted dying, are seldom simple. They require nuance. They need forbearance.

It’s complicated. Most important things are. Anyone who has tried to lead a large organisation will know that it’s often a delicate matter of trying to chart a path forward while keeping competing interests and perspectives on board. You lose some people along the way, but you can’t afford to lose everyone, especially if both sides of the argument have some legitimacy.

The early church’s long struggle to define orthodoxy took time, patience, careful thought and restraint – even though at times it wasn’t very good at doing it. The result was a nuanced statement that steered between one pole – that Jesus was simply a very good human being – and the other – that he was God dressed up in human clothes. The truth eventually glimpsed and embraced was not at one extreme or the other, nor even a limp compromise, but the carefully crafted, unlikely and counter-intuitive idea that held together the best insights of both sides - that he was not ‘only human’ or ‘only divine’, or 50% of each, like semi-skimmed milk, but 100% human and 100% divine, and that this (for reasons too involved to go into here) was not a contradiction in terms.

The truth and the resolution of our dilemmas – on immigration, or Gaza, or even assisted dying, are seldom simple. They require nuance. They need forbearance. They need careful attention and listening to the people you instinctively disagree with to arrive at the truth. Yet our longing for a dramatic headline, our hunger for simple solutions, our algorithms that promote the most extreme opinions, all militate against this kind of patient, watchful political and social culture that would help us arrive at better solutions.

Life is complicated. People are complicated. Solutions to vexed questions are rarely simple. We need nuance.

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