6 St Chad’s Place – Jamboree WC1X

I went to sketch this place in a back alley near Kings Cross because I enjoyed the geometry of the roof, spotted on a morning run some time ago.

This is “Jamboree” where there is live music, dancing and events: It is open Tuesday evening to Sunday.

“music forms from around the world, cabaret, European folk, dances.”

(https://www.jamboreevenue.co.uk/)

I was expecting the hidden alleyway to be deserted on a Tuesday lunchtime, and so it was for the first hour. But then it became suddenly busy. A small ambulance backed carefully down the alleyway in front of me and parked. Its doors opened and two paramedics went round to the back of the car. They lifted out their equipment and walked calmly off down the alley. After that excitement, a certain calm returned to the alley, insofar as calm is possible a few hundred metres from Kings Cross.

I carried on sketching, now working on the beer barrels to the left of the picture. But the calm did not last long. Two cars arrived and people dressed in orange hi-vis vests scrambled out. They unlocked a gate off the picture to the left, and went in, leaving their car on the pavement. Then a van arrived, it parked directly in front of me, and a further person in a hi-vis outfit got out. He looked across the bonnet of his van and saw me sketching. “Oh, sorry,” he said, “Am I in your way?” I said that yes, he kind of was. I stood ready, however, to concede the space to him, as he looked important and determined in his bright orange overalls and hard hat. But to my surprise he grinned at me, “Ten minutes! I’ll be just ten minutes!”. He rushed off through the gate where the other people had gone. I abandoned the beer barrels and worked on the roofs.

The roofs were quite a challenge, and they productively occupied the 8 minutes until the driver came rushing back out, looking triumphant, accompanied by a selection of the people who’d arrived earlier. “I told this woman I’d be ten minutes,” he explained to his entourage. He raised a hand to me in greeting, got into his car and rumbled off, leaving the other people standing on the cobbles. I asked them what they were working on. “The bridge,” they said. Oh yes, I was standing on a bridge. The train lines were below.

It’s in a labyrinth of roads and railway lines just to the east of Kings Cross mainline station.Here are some maps to show the location. Walk east from Kings Cross, about 10 minutes.

On the maps, the blue line represents the River Fleet, which is alongside the Kings Cross Road, underground. It flows from left to right across the map (West to East) and then heads South down to join the Thames beneath Blackfriars Bridge.

The river Fleet, before it became an underground sewer in 1825, flowed along the western side of Pancras Road and then eastward along the south side of the common, crossing the old highway (now Gray’s Inn Road) north of St. Chad’s Place.

‘Battle Bridge Estate’, in Survey of London: Volume 24, the Parish of St Pancras Part 4: King’s Cross Neighbourhood, ed. Walter H Godfrey and W McB. Marcham (London, 1952), pp. 102-113. British History Online http://www.british-history.ac.uk/survey-london/vol24/pt4/pp102-113 [accessed 7 February 2024].

St Chad’s Place slopes down towards the River Fleet. This area was once the location of St Chad’s Well, a spring said to have health-giving properties. It operated from about 1815 to 1860. I found a picture in the London Picture Archives, reproduced below with their permission.

The website “A London Inheritance” has an informative article about St Chad’s Place and the Well: https://alondoninheritance.com/london-streets/st-chads-place-and-a-lost-well/, which is well worth a read.

A river, a bridge, a well, a passage and a music venue. It’s amazing what you find.

Here is work in progress on the sketch:

The colours are:

• For the sky and pavement – a special new colour, Schminke Horadam “Random grey” – “formulated each year from surplus pigments”. This is the 2022 edition.
• Rose madder permanent – also on the pavement
• Mars Yellow
• Ultramarine Blue
• Green Serpentine Genuine
• Buff Titanium
• Fired Gold Ochre in the brickwork
• Burnt Umber