Pubs with Rooms in Camden, Kentish Town and Hampstead

Camden, Kentish Town and Hampstead are three overlapping bits of north London. Camden Town is the market and music district; Kentish Town is the long high street to its north; Chalk Farm and Belsize Park lead up to Primrose Hill and Hampstead; and Hampstead Heath, with Kenwood House and the open grassland of Parliament Hill Fields, forms the green edge of the area.

The Bull & Last on Highgate Road is the best known of the three. It began as a coaching inn first mentioned in 1721, burnt down and was rebuilt in 1883, and now has seven rooms upstairs, with a gastropub kitchen below and rooms from £170. The Old Farmhouse, on Kentish Town Road, was rebuilt in 1885 and has gone back to its original name; and Camden Enterprise, outside Chalk Farm station, is a mid-19th-century corner pub with hotel rooms above.

We also looked in Islington, King’s Cross and Highgate village, and could not confirm an open pub with rooms in any of them. These three give a spread between Camden and the Heath.

The area’s big stories are mostly musical and rebellious. British pub rock is usually traced to the Tally Ho in Kentish Town, where the band Eggs Over Easy began playing in May 1971, and the Roundhouse on Chalk Farm Road, built as a railway engine shed in 1846-47, launched the underground paper International Times with a Pink Floyd gig in October 1966. Karl Marx was living at 46 Grafton Terrace in Kentish Town from 1856, and Chalk Farm had a reputation for duels, including a fatal one in 1803 between Colonel Montgomery and Captain Macnamara. Up on Hampstead Heath, highwaymen and Dick Turpin are the stuff of pub signs and tour guides, but the famous horse Black Bess is generally thought to be a Victorian novelist’s invention, so treat the Turpin trail as legend.