It’s a dozen years since the High Line, a narrow strip of park on an abandoned elevated train line, opened on Manhattan’s West Side and was swiftly embraced as a local resort and an international destination, as well as becoming a powerful if flowery engine of commerce. Other cities around the world have been inspired by the project’s success—and by that of the Promenade Plantée, in Paris, which transformed an old rail line and viaduct into a civilized retreat in 1993—to revivify abandoned infrastructure of their own. Sydney has the Goods Line, which turned a former heavy-goods rail line into a walkway bordered by fig trees and supplied with Ping-Pong tables. In Seoul, the Seoullo 7017 is a verdant, if noisy, garden built on a former highway overpass, with trees and shrubs arranged in hundreds of concrete planters above a snarl of traffic.
The latest city to enter the urban sky-garden game is London, with the Camden Highline. Currently in the planning stages—and having recently appointed James Corner, the head designer of the original High Line, as its lead landscape architect—the project is to be built atop a three-quarter-mile stretch of disused rail track in North London, extending from Camden Town to just north of King’s Cross station. With an estimated budget of fifty million dollars, it should be open within three years—at least, that is the aspiration of Simon Pitkeathley, the Camden Highline’s C.E.O., who agreed recently to take a walk beneath the as yet unrealized park to discuss the project. London, like the rest of England, was still under strict lockdown, with restaurants and all but essential shops closed: a good time to look up and dream.
The route begins, on one end, at Camden Gardens, a triangular pocket park a short walk from a number of hallowed live-music venues and close to Camden Market, which for generations has served as a scuzzy hub for teens in pursuit of outfits and substances contrived to upset their parents. (Where are the bondage trousers of yesteryear?) “Camden Town has always been a place for young people to do creative-industry-type stuff,” Pitkeathley said, observing that a hundred years ago the area was a center of piano manufacture. “It’s always had that feel of being slightly anarchic, slightly away from the mainstream.”
Pitkeathley moved to London thirty years ago to be in a band. “So, Camden was the obvious Mecca,” he said. His music career did not pan out, he explained, but a political one did: he worked on numerous winning campaigns for Tony Blair, the former Prime Minister. Since 2007, he has headed Camden Town Unlimited, a business-improvement district.
At Camden Road station, Pitkeathley paused and looked up. Overhead, a structure of blue-painted iron ribs loomed. A few feet away lay a still functioning train track. One feature of the Camden Highline that differs from its New York inspiration is that it is adjacent to a working Overground line. “They trundle past—they are all speed-limited,” Pitkeathley said. “But it’s quite surreal to have these big machines trundling past you.” A little farther on, he ascended a staircase to the point on the route where a pedestrian with imagination can currently get the best view of what might come: instead of weeds, well-chosen plantings; instead of discarded plastic bags and paper cups, ice-cream stands and venders of artisanal kombucha.
Another difference between the Camden Highline and its Manhattan precursor is the kind of urban fabric through which it weaves. In New York, the High Line caused at least a doubling of property values in its immediate vicinity and prompted the construction of cantilevered condos supplanting former industrial sites. The Camden Highline passes above streets where terraced houses already sell for millions, but—in keeping with the heterogeneous, patchwork patterns common in this part of London—it also threads through four public-housing blocks. “They are not going to change just because there’s a nice Highline next door,” Pitkeathley said. “You’re not going to get as many individuals or commercial owners benefitting from the uplift.”
The walk along the Highline should take a brisk ten minutes from one end to the other—unless, like its New York precursor, it becomes chronically clogged with selfie-taking tourists, in which case, budget half an hour. At its eastern end, the Camden Highline runs alongside the Maiden Lane Estate—an expanse of red brick pedestrian paths and brutalist blocks built by Camden Council in the seventies and eighties. A number of apartments have balconies facing the projected walkway. Will the Highline present a potentially cacophonous new neighbor for the residents? Pitkeathley was optimistic as he neared the route’s conclusion. “They’ve got the trains there already,” he said. “So I think people walking alongside the trains is probably going to be less intrusive than the trains themselves.” ♦
