From Edgy Youth To All Grown Up: Movie
Follow Arthur, Debbie and Aron as they take us on a trip through their King’s Cross and see how the area has changed.
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Give us a women’s centre!
Anne Neale, currently the Peer Support & Volunteer Co-ordinator at the Crossroads Women’s Centre, talked to us in May 2018. She spoke about the history of the centre, which began in 1975 as a squat in Drummond Street, near Euston Station. Frequently displaced due to redevelopment and rising rents, the centre later spend 17 happy years ...
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Two sides of King’s Cross
Séamus Rea was born in 1956, in Northern Ireland. He moved to the King’s Cross area in 1980, and has lived there ever since. Moving to King’s Cross represented an escape from the oppressive atmosphere that he had grown up in, as a young gay man. “It was an amazing, liberating experience to move to ...
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Hot dinners in a cold church
Sarah Walker first came across the English Collective of Prostitutes at the North London Polytechnic, where she was studying English, in the early 1980s. In May 2018, Sarah and I sat down to record her memories of the ECP occupation of the Holy Cross Church in King’s Cross in 1982. Sarah talked about the political ...
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Trains, Lines and Activism in Kings Cross
Ursula Troche is a writer, ‘train-informed psychogeographer’, performance poet and life model who has played an active role in the politics of women’s and race equality since moving to London in 1991 from her hometown of Löhne, Germany, in 1991. In a locational interview in the grounds of St. Pancras Old Church, Kings Cross she ...
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Daughters Made for Each Other
Chrissie Joyce and Denise Spence first met each other at The Bell, a pub and venue on Pentonville Road during the 1980s/90s. With a shared Northern Irish heritage the two women had left Ireland seeking to escape – in Denise’s words – a climate of ‘drink, violence, religion and hate’. Gravitating to the King’s Cross ...
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Window boxes and needle exchanges
Sioned Churchill’s first job in King’s Cross was at the Neighbourhood Centre on Argyle Street, where she organised activities for older people. At the time she was struck by the camaraderie and sense of community that she found there. The residents were cheerful, resilient and full of humour, despite the hardship that some of them ...
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Ghosts on the dance floor
Debbie Smith, Heritage Coordinator, Musician and DJ on her memories of King’s Cross and The Bell. I met Debbie one chilly October morning in her offices at the grand and glorious Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives at Bancroft Library. We talked about her past as a frequenter of The Bell (now The Big ...
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