Sue McCarthy is a member of the Camden and the Clerkenwell & Islington Tour Guides Associations, with a special interest in Women’s History. Sue helped devise a walking tour around an exhibition on notable women in the King’s Cross area created by the King’s Cross Visitor Centre.
In the few hours Sue and I spent talking, her abundance of enthusiasm and knowledge about Clerkenwell and Islington, as well as other areas of London, was shining through on a particularly rainy day. Sue took me to an area on York Way called Varnisher’s Yard, where we pored over Phillip O’Reilly’s 2005 mosaic maze, on the wall, dedicated to many of the past shops and traders who would have had their premises in the area.
Sue and I ended our interview by talking about the way King’s Cross has changed in terms of communities and the built environment. She thinks about my questions of change, and so aptly says:
‘It’s very much an interaction, an iteration, between the people and the place’.
Story by Carlotta Manzi Davies.