It’s clear that the inhabitants of Camden Town eke out a precarious existence giving one another tattoos.

Every other shop on the main street seems to be a tattoo parlor.

Now, I know what you are thinking. Andrew, you’re thinking, that’s an economic impossibility. Eventually every inch of skin in Camden town will be covered in tattoos, and the whole economy will grind to a halt. But you’re wrong. Some of the tattoo joints also offer laser tattoo removal, thus opening up new areas of skin to be inked.

There’s also obviously a market niche for people who cover the front of shops with immense sculptures.

However, if this gig is to be sustainable in the long term, just as with the tattoos, Camden town also need artisans capable of removing the dragons, elephants, scorpions, running shoes, and naked angels in bondage from the front of buildings to allow of their replacement by unicorns, steam engines, cephalopods, and spiny anteaters. (2019 will be the year of the spiny anteater. You heard it here first.)

There’s some pretty nice 2D artwork as well.

We got to Camden by walking along the Regent’s Canal tow path through Regent’s Park and past a two story Chinese floating restaurant.

The first place we explored was Camden Market, a labyrinth of old and warehouses, stables in which every square foot of indoor and outdoor space is occupied by some sort of retail store selling stuff you don’t really need. On a sunny Saturday morning with was packed with locals an tourists blithely indifferent to the royal wedding and the FA cup final, desperately shopping for jewelry, clothes, and foods of many different cuisines.

It was mostly too crowded to take photos, though people were not getting too close to the giant robots, in case they decided to go walkies.

In the evening we went to a concert of baroque music (with a little Mozart thrown in for the modernists) at St Martin in the Fields, a church on Trafalgar Square famous for its musical performances. It was an all woman ensemble. They did have a male conductor for bits of the first half, but did better in the second when the first violin directed a very spirited performance of the Four Seasons.

What have they done with the pigeons? While there are still large flocks in the parks, there were hardly any in Trafalgar Square, and none at all in Camden Marketplace. In Camden the evolutionary niche occupied by pigeons (eating leftover junk food and begging for breadcrumbs) has been taken over by starlings.

A quick google reveals that after £140,000 damage by pigeon shit to Nelson’s Column alone, London decide to get rid of the Trafalgar Square pigeons by introducing a hawk called Lemmy to scare them off and a £500 fine for anyone caught feeding them. They are also changing the words to that song from Mary Poppins

Feed the birds
Five hundred pounds fine
Do it again
And you will serve time…