Camden Market, Camden Town: free audio guide, hours and getting there

Camden Market is the sprawling market of vintage clothes, vinyl, crafts and street food beside Regent’s Canal in Camden Town, north London. It is open 7 days a week and entry is free. This free audio guide lasts about 4 minutes and is made to be heard as you wander between the canal locks and the old stables.

What the Camden Market audio guide covers

Start it on the Camden High Street bridge over the canal and finish it by the canal. It comes in 5 parts:

Camden Market opening hours and getting there

Camden Market is open every day, bank holidays included, and closes only on Christmas Day. The market opens from 10am to 7pm, though many stalls close at 6pm; the Hawley Wharf food halls open from 11.30am to 11pm and the North Yard restaurants stay open in the evening. Individual traders may keep slightly different hours. There is no entry fee: you only pay for what you buy or eat.

The market is one site in 3 quarters that run into each other: Camden Lock, by the locks; the Stables Market, in the old stables on Chalk Farm Road; and Hawley Wharf, the canalside quarter that started opening in 2021. Together they hold more than 1,000 places to shop, eat and drink.

Public transport is the way to come. Camden Town Underground station (Northern line) is about a 5-minute walk from the market; Chalk Farm, on the same line, about 10 minutes; and Camden Road, on the Overground, about 8. The market has no car park of its own and parking in the area is very limited.

Each quarter has its own ways in. Camden Lock has its main entrance on Camden Lock Place, just off the high street by the bridge, and another from the canal towpath. The Stables Market opens onto Chalk Farm Road and also through the old Horse Hospital entrance. Hawley Wharf is reached through the Waterside Halls food courts on the high street, or along Water Lane, which also connects to Kentish Town Road.

Camden Lock: where the market began in 1974

Camden Lock takes its name from Hampstead Road Locks on Regent’s Canal, a pair of twin locks just beside the high street bridge. Beside them, in the old T. E. Dingwall builders’ yard, a small market opened on Saturday 30 March 1974 with 16 traders selling antiques, jewellery and crafts. It began as a temporary affair, yet it traded on Sundays too, the day English shops had to stay shut until 1994, and that drew the crowds.

Before the stalls, the whole stretch from the locks to the Roundhouse was an industrial site of gin distilleries and warehouses, and the gin left by canal for the rest of the world. By the 1970s the barge trade had ended and the empty buildings filled with makers. Today a micro-distillery, Half Hitch, makes gin again in Camden Lock’s West Yard, a few steps from the largest former gin warehouse in Camden.

Camden Lock is also where most people eat. The street food stalls crowd together by the water, and Hawley Wharf has whole halls of food with covered seating, handy when it rains. Hawley Wharf stands on the site of an older market that closed in 2015 for a redevelopment costing more than £500 million; its first buildings opened in 2021, and it is the newest and most modern corner of Camden Market, built right on the canal.

The Stables Market and its horse hospital

The Stables Market fills the former stables of Pickfords, the carrier whose horses pulled delivery vans and canal barges. It was a network of saddlers’ workshops, tack rooms, stables and even a horse hospital, a listed building with its ramps that is now one of the market entrances. That is why bronze draught horses appear around the market and the yards are cobbled throughout.

This is the most maze-like quarter: cobbled yards and railway arches turned into shops. The Camden classics are here, such as Dr. Martens and Cyberdog, with its futuristic neon and PVC clothing. The market keeps changing: much of the Stables was rebuilt from 2007, and on 9 February 2008 a fire destroyed the Canal Market, where Hawley Wharf stands today.

Camden High Street, music and the Roundhouse

Camden Town is named after Charles Pratt, 1st Earl Camden, who began granting leases for houses here in 1791. The railway and the canal turned it into a transport district: the Roundhouse on Chalk Farm Road was built in 1847 as a circular engine shed and is now a concert venue. Dingwalls, by the locks, and the Roundhouse were much-loved venues for bands such as The Clash, the Sex Pistols and Blondie, and the clothes followed the music: mods, rockers, punks and bohemians came to shop at young designers’ stalls.

You can see it on Camden High Street, between the Tube station and the canal, where brightly painted shop fronts carry giant figures above the doors. Amy Winehouse lived in Camden from 2003, and the Hawley Arms on Castlehaven Road was her favourite pub.

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Walking along Regent’s Canal

Regent’s Canal runs along the north of Camden Town, and its towpath is now a shared path for walkers and cyclists looked after by the Canal & River Trust. A regular waterbus leaves Camden Lock heading west around Regent’s Park, calling at London Zoo, and on foot the towpath carries on to Little Venice.

In summer the waterbus runs every hour, and sightseeing narrowboat trips also go from Camden Lock to Little Venice, a gentle way to see the canal from the water. On foot you can also head the other way: the towpath runs without a break from Little Venice through Camden Lock to the Islington Tunnel, so the canal links Camden to the rest of north London.

Camden is about 4 km north of central London. For a museum afterwards, the British Museum has its own audio guide, and for a big green space, try Hyde Park:

Free audio guideBritish Museum
Free audio guideHyde Park

All our audio guides for the city are in London.