Piano-making
in Camden Town
One
of the major industries of 19th century Camden Town, piano-making started
in the West End before moving, first to the traditional furniture-making
district of Tottenham Court Road, and then gradually northwards into Camden
Town. Soon there were dozens of factories, all working to meet the demand for what
had become a symbol of domestic respectability in Victorian society. After all,
a married couple’s second biggest purchase, after a bed, was a piano!
By
the 1880s London had over 200 piano-making firms, three quarters of them north
of the Thames. It was often said that every street in north London contained a piano works, and in many parts of Camden Town this was literally true. Bayham Place was the most notable piano-making enclave.
 |
| 19th century trade directory |
From
a practical point of view, this part of London made an eminently suitable
centre for the piano industry. The Regent’s Canal could be used to transport
bulk timber to the factories and then the finished products away, either westwards
via the canal network to the Midlands, or east to the docks and the rest of the
world. Hence the proliferation of firms along the canal in Stoke Newington,
Islington and, notably, Camden Town. The latter soon became the beating heart
of London piano making in the period 1860–1930, at its centre the historic Mother
Red Cap pub (now the World’s End),
which functioned as a kind of informal labour exchange. The streets nearby were
crowded with pianos or piano parts being trundled on hand-carts from one
workshop to another.
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| Goad's fire insurance map of 1891 |
 |
| Collard & Collard factory in Oval Road |
The oldest firm was Collard
& Collard who patented a form of upright ‘square’ piano in 1811. The Goad
Fire Insurance map shows that they had a concentration of factories at the end
of Oval Road in the triangle bounded by the houses in Gloucester Crescent,
Arlington Road and Jamestown Road. These housed the premises of different craftsmen
and included a veneer store, timber stores, engineers’ shops, French polishing,
fret-cutting and wood turning workshops, glue boiling, stringing shops, key
loading – all specialist skills required to produce the finished instruments. At
the heart of the operation was a (still) distinctive round factory with 22 bays
and a bench under each window to give good light. There was also a central open
well to allow pianos to be hoisted from floor to floor during manufacture - the
lowest floor was used for drying, the next for upright pianos, the second floor
for cleaning, the third for polishing the cases and those above for ‘belly’
manufacture and finishing off. The circular shape proved ideal, giving maximum
floor space and light for the minimum number of bricks.
In
addition to the ‘big guns’, there were other piano firms operating on a much
smaller scale, many of them little more than small assembly shops in back kitchens,
with parts bought in ready-made. One old piano maker said, “Sometimes, on a Friday afternoon, you could
meet the boss of one of these small factories hawking a piano round the
district in the hope of selling it for cash, twenty pounds or so, to pay the
wages and the rent. Piano firms were in all sizes - whales and minnows.”
 |
| Watercolour by Thomas Shepherd: A Piano Manufactory c. 1831 |
Towards
the turn of the century, however, the tide turned. By 1912, Germany had come to
dominate the market, exporting sixty-five times more pianos and piano parts than
Britain. There was a small revival here immediately after the First World War,
though this was soon affected by the rise of the gramophone, cinema and radio.
Collard & Collard left Camden Town in the 1920s and their round factory was
occupied over the following years by garment firms, engineers and printers.
In 1993 the local telephone book listed a few piano shops in North
London, piano removers and tuners - but no piano manufacturers at all. Until
vacating their premises in Bayham Street in 2014, the sole survivor of the
piano industry in Camden Town was Heckscher & Co, a firm which began making
parts in Germany in 1869. They came to London in 1883 and rented, then bought
their first warehouse from the Marquis of Camden (!). They still supply piano components
but not on anything like the scale of their heyday.
The site of Collard and Collard’s piano factory in Oval Road is now Grade
II listed, restored and has been reborn as an office complex known as the
Rotunda.
References:
Londoners by Celina Fox (1987)
One
of the major industries of 19th century Camden Town, piano-making started
in the West End before moving, first to the traditional furniture-making
district of Tottenham Court Road, and then gradually northwards into Camden
Town. Soon there were dozens of factories, all working to meet the demand for what
had become a symbol of domestic respectability in Victorian society. After all,
a married couple’s second biggest purchase, after a bed, was a piano!
