The Camden Town Group in Context

James Bolivar Manson was secretary of the Camden Town Group and so responsible for the group’s records. This list of addresses, probably written around the time of the group exhibitions in 1911–12, shows which artists were living in close proximity to one another and also who was actually based in or near the Camden Town area in north-west London.

Walter Sickert and Harold Gilman were close to one another on Hampstead Road, just south of Spencer Gore who was on Mornington Crescent, just off Camden High Street. Wyndham Lewis, a good friend of Gore’s in particular, was then based on Albert Road (now Prince Albert Road), in between Regent’s Park and Camden Town. Maxwell Gordon Lightfoot, who resigned from the group after the first exhibition and subsequently committed suicide, was also based in the area, living in Fitzroy Road, Primrose Hill.

Just west of Camden Town, Robert Bevan lived on Adamson Road in the Hampstead/Swiss Cottage area and Walter Bayes lived just south of there on Abbey Road. Manson lived in the newly built Hampstead Garden Suburb further north.

At the time it was fashionable for artists to live in Chelsea in west London. Augustus John and Malcolm Drummond were based on the King’s Road there and Charles Ginner is also listed as living in the area in Beauclerc Buildings, which the social researcher Charles Booth described as a ‘common lodging house’. Lucien Pissarro was further west at 27 Stamford Brook Road in Hammersmith. Only John Doman Turner is listed as being south of the river, living in Streatham Hill, and William Ratcliffe is the only artist based outside of London, then resident in the newly built Letchworth Garden City.

Henry Lamb, James Dickson Innes and Duncan Grant (who replaced Lightfoot after his resignation) do not have their addresses listed. This may indicate their estrangement from the internal activities of the group.

‘Charles Booth and the Survey into Life and Labour in London (1886–1903)’, Charles Booth Online Archive, http://booth.lse.ac.uk/.