The ninety minutes nobody photographs
By day the few hundred yards around Camden Lock are about the most crowded ground in north London, a slow tide of visitors moving between the food stalls, the vintage rails and the railway bridge with its famous painted name. Then the traders start pulling down their shutters in the early evening, the yards are swept, and within the hour most of that tide has gone back down the High Street to the station. What remains is a canal, a pair of lock gates and a neighbourhood that has been waiting all afternoon to have its pavements back.
The useful window is roughly half past seven to nine. The lock side is still lit and still peopled, so it never feels deserted, but it is quiet enough to hear the water working through the gates and to hold a conversation without leaning in. Later than nine the late crowd starts arriving for the halls along Chalk Farm Road and Camden High Street, and the character of the place changes again, not for the worse, but into something louder.
The lock itself is older than the market by a century and a half. Its proper name is Hampstead Road Lock, a pair of chambers side by side, built around 1820 when the Regent's Canal was cut from Paddington through to the Thames at Limehouse, and it is the only one of the canal's paired locks where both chambers survive. The market grew up in the old timber wharves beside it in the seventies and borrowed the name, which is why most visitors assume the lock was named after the market rather than the other way round.
Where to stand while it empties
The best place to watch the handover is the iron footbridge that carries the towpath across the canal beside the lock. From the middle of it you can see the gates, the lock keeper's cottage, the backs of the market buildings and, looking west, the water bending away under a run of bridges towards the park. It is also a place that anyone can find, which matters when you are meeting somebody for the first time and neither of you wants to be pacing a crowded street with a phone held out in front of you.
If the footbridge is busy, the paved lock side next to it does the same job with more room to stand. Avoid the pavement directly under the railway bridge on Chalk Farm Road, where everybody photographs the lettering and nobody moves on. It is the most recognisable spot in Camden and the worst place in it to wait for anyone.
Give the desk a landmark rather than a postcode. Around the lock the water, the viaducts and the market buildings all cross one another, and the market alone has several yards, each with its own entrance. The lock, the footbridge and the cottage are unmistakable, and a companion told to meet you there will walk straight to you.
West or east along the towpath, and how far to go
The towpath is the real gift of this hour. West from the lock it runs in a deep cutting under the backs of houses, past the castle shaped boating club on Oval Road, and on towards the edge of the zoo and the northern side of Regent's Park. East it passes the next two locks at Hawley and Kentish Town, slides under a tangle of railway bridges and arrives, after something like twenty five minutes, at St Pancras Lock and the rebuilt gasholders on the edge of Kings Cross.
In summer, with the light holding until late, either direction is a pleasure for as long as you like. After dark things change, and the sensible rule is to walk only as far as other people are walking. Close to the lock and under the road bridges there is light and company; a few hundred yards further on the cutting deepens, the lamps thin out and the path becomes somewhere you would rather be on a dry afternoon. In practice that means coming up to street level at the first bridge where the towpath goes quiet.
Heading west, you climb to the street at the next bridge and finish the walk through Primrose Hill, which is lit, residential and still lovely at that hour. Heading east, you come up at one of the road bridges and walk the last part through the streets to Kings Cross. Neither costs you much time, and both leave the canal as the best part of the evening rather than the part you spent looking over your shoulder.
The rooms that fill as the lock empties
Most people who linger at the lock are on their way to something. The Roundhouse stands a few minutes north on Chalk Farm Road, a round Victorian engine shed, built to turn locomotives, that has been one of London's great performance spaces since the sixties. The Jazz Cafe is on Parkway, a minute from the station, small enough that everybody in it feels near the front. The Electric Ballroom is on Camden High Street almost next door to the tube, and KOKO, the old theatre at the Mornington Crescent end of the High Street, reopened after a long rebuilding and is once again one of the grand rooms of the district.
The trick is to treat the lock as the beginning of the evening rather than a detour on the way to it. Meet at half seven, stroll by the water for half an hour as the light fades, find a drink at a table that looks onto the canal, and arrive for doors with something already said. The alternative is meeting outside the venue among two hundred other people all looking for someone, and that is nobody's idea of a first ten minutes.
If a gig in the next postcode is the point of the night, the Forum on Highgate Road is one stop north, and the same logic applies there: meet early, somewhere that is not the queue.
Building it into the long way home
This hour at the lock is the natural opening of the long way home, the booking on this site built for a night out that finishes on foot. Three hours at £700 holds the walk, a show and a late table with room to get back slowly. Two hours at £500 suits an evening without music in it: the lock, the towpath as far as it stays lit, a drink on Regent's Park Road and the walk back.
Hotels close to the water are few. One is right on the canal, a short walk from the bridge, and an old inn with rooms above its restaurant stands at the far end of Parkway by the park gates. Plenty of evenings here end at a private address instead, which suits a companion arriving at the lock perfectly well. We have no understanding with either hotel; she simply arrives as your guest.
Send the desk the night, the hour you would like to start and, if there is one, the doors time of whatever you are going to. Verity, who answers the evening desk, will work backwards from there and tell you honestly whether the timing is comfortable or tight. The full ladder is on the rates page, and the Camden Town page lists the stations and the rooms.
Who to ask for in NW1
Three women give Camden as their ground, and each has her own version of this hour. Michelle is warm, level and in no hurry at all; she will stand on the footbridge long enough to watch a narrowboat work through both gates, and she would always rather walk home by the water than ride. Tiffany, quietly spoken and fond of the residential streets west of the lock, will steer the evening towards Primrose Hill and, given half a chance, the fiddle music at Cecil Sharp House. Both are on the brunettes page, along with a dozen other names who would reach the lock from anywhere on this map inside half an hour.
Angelika sets out early on purpose and is usually leaning on the lock railings when you arrive, with a firm opinion about which direction the weather favours. She sits among the raven haired companions, and she is the name to give the desk if the evening is going to end up at the Roundhouse.
If you would rather the lock led somewhere quieter, Regent's Park is fifteen minutes away down Parkway, and Kentish Town is a short ride north with a very different sort of night waiting in it.
Cross filed: most of the names on this sheet also sit in the brunettes drawer of the moodboard.