Camden

Finds from Hampstead Heath, including Mesolithic flint tools, pits, postholes and burnt stones, show that a community of hunter-gatherers lived there around 7000 BC.

When the hospital of St Giles was set up in the early 1100s, the Bloomsbury area seems to have been part of the parish of Holborn.

Kentish Town began as a small settlement on the River Fleet. It was first recorded in 1207, during King John's reign.

The earliest record of the name Bloomsbury is as 'Blemondisberi', in 1281.

From the 17th century Hampstead became popular as a resort away from the capital, especially for wealthy people.

Bloomsbury began to be built on in the 17th century under the Earls of Southampton. In the early 1660s the Earl of Southampton built what became Bloomsbury Square.

Bloomsbury was laid out mainly in the 18th century, largely by Wriothesley Russell, 3rd Duke of Bedford. He built Bloomsbury Market, which opened in 1730.

In 1735 the sea captain Thomas Coram asked King George II for a Foundling Hospital, and it was founded in 1739. The first children were taken in on 25 March 1741, in a house in Hatton Garden. In September 1742 the stone of its new building was laid on Lamb's Conduit Field, in St Pancras parish.

In May 1749 the composer George Frederic Handel held a concert in the Foundling Hospital's chapel to raise money for the charity. He performed his Foundling Hospital Anthem, which included the 'Hallelujah' chorus from his oratorio Messiah, and on 1 May 1750 he directed a performance of Messiah there. Exhibitions of pictures at the hospital led to the Royal Academy being formed in 1768.

On 7 June 1753 King George II agreed to the Act of Parliament that set up the British Museum, the world's first public national museum. It began with the will of the doctor and naturalist Sir Hans Sloane.

The British Museum's first galleries and its reading room for scholars opened on 15 January 1759, in Montagu House, on the site of today's building.

A house here called Caen Wood House is thought to have been built around 1616 by the King's Printer, John Bill. In 1754 it was bought by William Murray, the Lord Chief Justice, who later became the Earl of Mansfield. In 1764 Lord Mansfield asked Robert Adam to remodel the house.

The Highgate Ponds were made in 1777, when the Hampstead Water Company, formed in 1692 to meet London's growing need for water, dammed Hampstead Brook, one of the River Fleet's sources. The Heath has three natural swimming ponds: the mixed pond, in use since the 1860s, the men's pond, which opened in the 1890s, and the ladies' pond, which opened in 1925.

Camden Town was laid out as a district of homes from 1791, on land that had been part of the manor of Kentish Town. It is named after Camden Place, the home of Charles Pratt, 1st Earl Camden, who owned and developed land in the area in the 1790s.

Around 1800 Francis Russell, 5th Duke of Bedford, knocked down Bedford House and built on the land to the north, with Russell Square at its centre. This was the start of the squares we see today.

In 1802 King George III gave the museum the Rosetta Stone, the key to reading Egyptian hieroglyphs.

From 1808 to 1814 Hampstead Heath had a station in the shutter telegraph chain, which linked the Admiralty in London to its naval ships in the port of Great Yarmouth.

In October 1814 a large vat at the Horse Shoe Brewery, just west of Dyott Street, burst open. A 15-foot wave of beer poured into the streets around it, killing eight people.

Between 1801 and 1812 agents of the 7th Earl of Elgin removed about half of the surviving sculptures from the Parthenon in Athens, and in 1816 they were acquired for the British Museum. In late 2022 the museum began early talks with the Greek government about their future.

In 1816 the Regent's Canal was built through Camden Town. Horses pulled the canal barges until the 1950s, and their towropes wore deep marks into the handrails by the bridges.

In 1823 George IV gave the museum the King's Library of George III. Work began that year on a new building, starting with the East Wing; the South Wing, with its great colonnade, was finished in 1847.

In 1837 Camden was the end of the line for the North Western Railway. The railways made Camden Town more important, alongside the canal.

Charles Dickens once lived in Camden Town, and he put places and people there in his stories, such as Bob Cratchit's family in A Christmas Carol (1843).

Karl Marx lived in Kentish Town from 1855 until 1883.

In 1866 the Hampstead Heath Protection Fund Committee was formed; the Heath & Hampstead Society, which grew out of it, still campaigns to protect the Heath. In 1870 the Metropolitan Board of Works agreed to buy the Heath for the public, for £45,000 plus £2,000 for legal fees. The Hampstead Heath Act 1871 said it would be of great advantage to the people of London if the Heath were always kept unenclosed and unbuilt on.

In 1865 the Midland Railway Company held a competition for architects to design a hotel at the front of St Pancras station. Work started in 1868, and the main part of the Midland Grand Hotel opened on 5 May 1873, with the west wing following three years later.

In the 19th and early 20th centuries Kentish Town was home to several piano and organ makers. In 1901 The Piano Journal called it 'that healthful suburb dear to the heart of the piano maker'.

Parliament Hill Fields officially became part of the Heath in 1888. In the late 19th century Octavia Hill and the Commons Preservation Society defended it from being built on.

Bloomsbury had gates around it until an Act of Parliament of 1893 got rid of them.

In the early 1900s a group of artists, including Virginia Woolf, met in private homes in Bloomsbury. They became known as the Bloomsbury Group.

In 1912 the Church of St Silas the Martyr in Kentish Town, designed by Ernest Charles Shearman, was built and consecrated.

In 1922, after threats that Kenwood would be sold to a building syndicate, the Kenwood Preservation Council bought part of its grounds. King George V opened this land to the public in 1925. In 1928 Kenwood House and its grounds became part of the Heath, after their owner, the Earl of Iveagh, left them in his will.

In 1918, because of the threat of bombing, some of the museum's objects were sent away, partly by the London Post Office Railway. On 24 August 1939 it began moving chosen objects to safe basements, country houses, Aldwych tube station and the National Library of Wales. In 1940 bombing badly damaged the Duveen Gallery.

The London Borough of Camden was created in 1965. Hampstead, which had been a metropolitan borough since 1900, became part of it.

By the 1960s St Pancras station was seen as no longer needed, and there were several attempts to close it and knock down the hotel. In November 1967 the station was made a Grade I listed building, which stopped any big changes. A statue of John Betjeman at the station remembers his part in the successful campaign to save it.

Pub rock is usually traced back to the Tally Ho in Kentish Town, where Eggs over Easy started playing in May 1971.

Kentish Town City Farm, at Cressfield Close, was set up in 1972.

Camden Lock Market started in a former timber yard in 1973. The Camden Markets have grown since then and attract many visitors.

In 1981 a former car showroom at Hawley Crescent became the studios of TV-am, a national breakfast television station. After TV-am closed in 1992, MTV took over the building and kept TV-am's eggcups.

The British Museum's Great Court opened in December 2000. It is the largest covered square in Europe.

On 4 September 2007 the first test train ran from Paris Gare du Nord to St Pancras. Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip reopened the station as St Pancras International on 6 November 2007, and Eurostar trains for the public started on 14 November.

In September 2023 sheep came back to Hampstead Heath, as part of a plan by the City of London Corporation. A trial in 2019 had been the first time sheep had grazed on the Heath since the 1950s.