Window Boxes at the Boma Garden Centre

Dear Readers, today my friend J and I went for a wander around Kentish Town – it’s only a few miles away from East Finchley and yet I rarely visit, which is a shame as it has a lively and varied High Street, and also a hidden garden centre on Islip Road. The Boma Garden Centre has been going for years (when my garden was originally developed the plants came from here). It isn’t huge, but it has a lovely array of plants, and some of the displays put have a kind of border design, so you can see what the different plants would look like together. Plus, it has metal giraffes!

Unlike most garden centres, Boma seems to be aimed squarely at people with small city gardens or balconies – there are more hanging baskets than you can shake a stick at (see the first photo). One of the people who worked there was happily popping the jasmine plants into a sheltered corner, where their scent hung heavy on this humid June day. All in all, well worth a visit if you’re in North London. The place is a little oasis.

But what it doesn’t have is a café, so for our light refreshment we headed up Prince of Wales Road to The Fields Beneath, a vegan coffee house that’s situated under the railway bridge. I’ve been meaning to go for ages, as my friend is a vegan and it’s so nice to go somewhere where you can eat literally everything on the menu. We both had the vegan bagel, with ‘egg’ and chilli, and honestly if you didn’t know that it was vegan you’d have thought that it contained hard boiled egg. And everything tastes better with chilli sauce.

Bagel from The Fields Beneath

And then it was off to Kelly Road. Kelly Road is famous for its painted houses, which date back to 1848, and which are each painted in a different colour. But first, we got side-tracked by this tree. It’s a Narrow-Leaved Ash (Fraxinus angustifolia) and the photo really doesn’t do it justice – the branches sweep right down to the pavement. This is a very august and respectable tree, with great personality. Incidentally, the Raywood Ash, with its spectacular autumn colour, is a cultivar of this tree. It might be interesting to pop back in October and see how this tree looks.

And then, on we go into Kelly Street. The whole road is Grade II listed, and you can see why – it’s rare to find a street in London that’s so well preserved, and which still has one continuous style for its whole length.

On Booth’s famous ‘poverty map’ of London, Kelly Street was pink, which meant it was comfortably well-off even then. Don’t be fooled by the modest size of these houses, or their very urban situation – this is an extremely desirable street, and I can see why, but you’ll have to save up your pennies – a two-bedroomed house here sold for £1.2m in 2024. There is a tiny café at the end of the road (Mario’s) which has been around since 1989, and looks like just the kind of place to catch up with all the neighbourhood gossip.

Kentish Town is currently booming, but it’s also a place where the very rich rub shoulders with the very poor – there is are a lot of homeless people, some clearly with mental health and/or addiction problems. Like so many places in London, the divide is growing, and the people that we need to work in our cities are increasingly unable to afford to live there. I love my city, I wouldn’t live anywhere else, but I ache for it.