The Devil You Know

I had three places on my itinerary, and I’d budgeted the whole day. That may sound a bit pessimistic, given that they were all in North London, but my first port of call was the Camden Town Hall planning department. You don’t exactly abandon hope, but you certainly slip it into a back pocket.

Back at King’s Cross again; it felt like I’d never left. The town hall building looks like a set from an old Doctor Who episode, and to some extent, that gives a fair impression of the experience you’re likely to have when you go in there: meeting strange, not-quite-human creatures, burning your way through vast swathes of time, that sort of thing. I went in through the Judd Street entrance and was sent straight back out again; planning was at the other end of the building and was entered via Argyle Street. The gods of local government would be angry if I walked straight through, and I’d end up with my resident’s parking permit revoked and a council-tax bill for seven grand and my immortal soul.

Actually, the system worked surprisingly well, at least to begin with. I knew I was being set up for a fall, but I took it for what it was worth. The planning department had partly gone over to computerized records. There were half a dozen terminals set up in the foyer where you could just sit down, type in an address, and get a planning history. Thinking about Cheryl, I spared a brief moment of pity for whoever was sitting in the bowels of the building, retroconverting.

“You won’t get everything,” I was told by an arrogant, acned young clerk who looked less like a Doctor Who villain and more like the kid in a teen gross-out comedy who doesn’t get the girl but does lose his trousers at the graduation ceremony. “There’ll only be an entry where there’ve been changes to the building since the late 1940s—that’s when the planning-application system came in. If you don’t know your dates, you could be here for a long time.”

But I wasn’t choosy, and it turned out that there were a whole fistful of documents on file for 3 Churchway, Somers Town, one of them going all the way back to 1949. That one was an application to repair bomb damage to the roof, frontage, and right exterior wall. Back then, the building was listed as belonging to the war office, but by the mid-1950s, when an application was put in to extend it to the rear, it had become an “annex to the British Library.” Then nothing until 1983, when there was a further extension and a change-of-use certificate; now number 23 was going to come under local authority control and house an unemployment claims office and a job center. Well, that was the Thatcher era—unemployment was a growth industry. One final application, from 1991, was for interior works. I suppose that was when they put in all the bare, brutalist staircases, the fake walls, and the dead ends. Nothing on file for the work that was going on now, but maybe current work was filed elsewhere.

That was as far as I could get online. Now I had to fill in some request slips and hand them in at a small counter in the main planning office. This was a large room on the second floor, cut in two by a long Formica counter, and it was as busy as a cattle auction. Most of the people there were men in overalls who were looking to get official stamps on hastily scrawled documents, but there was also a leavening of clerks from other parts of the building filing forms or retrieving forms or maybe just exchanging pheromones like worker ants.

I waited for almost an hour and a half before a stern, middle-age lady with a face out of a Far Side cartoon came back with a package for me. It was a set of photocopies of the oldest plans they had for 23 Churchway—the ones that had been filed back in 1949—and the newest ones from the 1990s. I figured that with those fixed points to work from, I could fill in the gaps.

So far so good. I genuflected to the dark gods and got out of there fast. My next stop was the British Newspaper Library, out in Colindale. A Thameslink train from King’s Cross took me to Mill Hill, and on the way out there, I took a look at the building plans. As I’d expected, the ones from 1991 had all the new staircases and corridors and fire doors marked in and were so small and so complicated, they looked like a maze in a kids’ puzzle book: help Uncle Felix get from the office to the haunted strong room—but look out for that nasty Mr. Peele. By contrast, the 1949 plans were austere and simple and clear, and showed fewer than half as many rooms. The place had grown and mutated to the point where the original architect would probably need the plans just to find the street door.