Well, it’s just as well that’s Sal’s having her Camden-based birthday drinks next weekend, otherwise we’d probably have been prevented from getting to dance like fools to indie tunes in the Barfly at the end of the evening due to half of Camden being on fire on Saturday night.
We were actually having a quiet night in on Saturday entirely unaware of anything going on when Sal’s phone got a text: “Are you ok with the fire? Is that near you?” asked her cousin Sarah from Melbourne.
“Fire?” we asked ourselves. “What fire?” (and how does someone on the other side of the world know about it before we do?)
We couldn’t see anything out of the window, so I stuck the telly on, and after skipping through the first three of our rolling news options (News 24, CNN and CNBC), who had all unbelievably found better ways to fill their airtime, we found Sky News, who clearly had nothing better to do with their channel than show grainy viewer footage of the Great Fire of Camden Town and let a man in the studio ramble incoherently over the top of it.
And there was plenty of hyperbole from the man in the studio. Apparently the Hawley Arms was just about the most famous pub in London, and at one point he just started reading out the names of indie musicians and their hangers-on (“Amy Winehouse, Pete Doherty, Kate Moss, Razorlight, Liam Gallagher…”) not because any of them were actually in the pub on Saturday evening, but because they may all have been there at some point in the past. Perhaps all future news events should be covered by a man reading out a full list of all the famous people who’ve ever been in the area before.
Of course, by this point it was about 10:30, and the fire had been going on for a couple of hours. I can only assume that he’d been talking over the top of whatever footage they had for some time and was running out of things to say (when he wasn’t listing the names of indie stars, he was mostly just saying “look! flames!”)
Occasionaly Sky would give their studio guy a rest and cut to their reporter on the ground, who would then speak to an inebriated man on the street who could provide some assorted hearsay and speculation (one chap told us that he’d “just heard that the whole of the Stables market [was] on fire”, which was entirely untrue). The reporter also spoke to an “eyewitness” whose first words to camera were “well, I didn’t actually see anything…” and at another point a chap speaking to them over the phone explained that at the time the fire broke out, Camden would have been pretty busy as lots of people arrived to start their nights out. Unfortunately he chose, without a trace of irony, to tell Sky News that things “would have just been warming up…”
PS. Memo to London buses: if you’re going to redirect the No. 24 bus route while Camden High Street and Chalk Farm Road are closed, then you might want to make sure your double deckers can fit under all the bridges (via Londonist).