London’s Alleys: Delancey Passage, NW1

This is a short Camden passageway that dates all the way back to when all around here were fields, which wasn’t that long ago, as it happens.

The alley leads off Delancey Street, but when that was first laid out in the 1820s, it was a much shorter road called Warren Street. The alley didn’t exist then, but you can see a gap in the houses lining Warren Street where space had been left for a back passage to be added later.

It didn’t take too long for the rest of the area to be turned from the remaining fields into the urban landscape it is today. By the mid-1800s, the alley was fully formed as a back passage running behind back gardens for the houses that made up the block.

Warren Street was renamed Delancey Street in the 1840s after James Delancey, who held land acquired from the aristocratic Fitzroy family, which owned a large estate in the area. That’s possibly when the passage also gained its name.

Although mainly providing access to the back gardens, at the very far end of the alley was a backdoor into something different – the Bedford Music Hall.

The Music Hall was built on the back garden of the Bedford Arms pub that was on the corner of the block, so the music hall’s entrance was hidden off the main road down another side passage. The music hall opened in September 1861 with a capacity for 1,168 people.

Just a few years after it opened, the music hall nearly closed as the structure was considered unsafe, but replacing timber columns with iron ones to hold up the seating galleries gave it a reprieve.

The music hall prospered, so much so that in 1898, it was demolished to be rebuilt as the much larger Bedford Palace of Varieties — but at the same time, taking over a strip of land that allowed it to have a grand entrance facing onto busy Camden High Street.

The theatre thrived in the era of variety entertainment, but as with so many, it suffered with the arrival of the television. It closed in 1959 and was demolished in 1969 to be replaced with a block of flats and shops.

Back to the alley though, and at the top, there’s a rather average 1970s office block on one side, and the former Forge and Foundry bar on the other, which was built as a mixed-use development in 2008. It closed in 2022, and attempts to reopen it as a music bar have been rejected by the council following repeated complaints about noise when it was open.

Further down the passage, on the right-hand side, behind the high walls, are still the back gardens first laid down 200 years ago, although one owner has sold a bit of theirs for a brick building used as an electricity substation.

Down towards the end of the alley, it ends in a wooden builders barrier. That’s a bit odd, as the flats that replaced the old theatre hall included a space for the alley to be extended through the new development and onto the next road along.

However, the flats side has a locked metal gate, and the alley side looks distinctly unfinished.

Something else that’s odd in the alley can be found at the entrance, where a street lamp sits right next to a bollard. If the street lamp already existed, why was the bollard needed, and if the bollard existed before the street lamp, why not remove it and use the space for the street lamp?

Very odd.