The strains and pains produced by the capital’s ravenous growth are nowhere more vividly distilled than in and around Denmark Street, that tiny avenue off the north end of Charing Cross Road known to many for many years as London’s Tin Pan Alley. The street’s long history as a hive of creativity, especially the musical kind, has been written and re-written countless times, and with mounting poignance since 2013 when Camden Council gave permission for a Crossrail-driven redevelopment scheme that some fear has already sealed a fatal change in character.

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Once upon a time, Denmark Street was the rugged, beating heart of the UK's music scene. It's where NME's was based, it's where Bob Marley bought his first guitar and it's where David Bowie parked up his camper van. The Kinks, The Rolling Stones, Elton John and Jimi Hendrix all laid their tracks down at Tin Pan Alley's recording studios and now a crowdfunding campaign has launched to help fund a new film entitled 'Tin Pan Alley Tales', telling the history of the famous musical street. 

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ONE of the last independent guitar makers in historic Denmark Street has packed up his shop for the final time.

Tim Marten – who began working in Andy’s repair shop in 1978 – has toured the world with Led Zeppelin and Kinks frontman Ray Davies.

Mr Marten has been forced to leave because of a major development of the street – also known as Tin Pan Alley – by developer Consolidated.

The 62-year-old said: “It’s not come as a surprise but it is something that has been hanging over us for a long time. The sword of Damocles has finally fallen and we have to go.

“I am left in a bit of a panic with nowhere to go. The stuff is going into storage while I take some time off to try and find alternative premises. But with the prices in central London being what they are I think it is unlikely that I will find anywhere that I can afford.”

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When Johnny Rotten pulled out a marker pen in the early days of Punk and started daubing words such “awful”, “headache” and “sick” over some newly-decorated walls he was inadvertently ensuring the entire building’s long-term preservation.

The cartoon drawings and graffiti he scrawled all over the 1970s hangout of the Sex Pistols - a former silversmith’s workshop attached to a townhouse in London’s Denmark Street – have helped the building be awarded Grade 2* Listed Status, a rare accolade.

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There are two very different views about the redevelopment of one of London’s most famous creative clusters : Rebirth opportunity or dystopian hell?

On a building site gazed over by the latticed middle finger that is Centre Point, Amy Lamé, writer, entertainer, sometime Pink List National Treasure and recently appointed as London’s first “night tsar” by Sadiq Khan, explained to a hi-vised, hard-hatted showbiz camera crew why flattening a patch of a conservation area has been a good idea. “This is incredibly exciting,” she enthused: “We’ve got the infrastructure. London’s changing and having a night tsar is part of that. What a wonderful opportunity.”

That infrastructure is Crossrail. That opportunity is to be most conspicuously realised as what is shown in CGIs as a glass and gold-coloured construction to be called the NOW building: perhaps NOW as in POW and in WOW. It will grace what site developer Consolidated Developments has suggested will become “the equivalent of New York’s Times Square in London”, a cultural piazza at St Giles Circus, beckoning from the teeming, expanding Tottenham Court Road transport junction where Oxford Street and Charing Cross Road meet.

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It says something about the rate of change in St Giles that when I step out the tube at Tottenham Court Road, a station I’ve used for 25 years, I don’t have a clue where I am. For centuries, this corner of seedy London has acted as a wild annexe to the West End, and from 1999 I worked here at Time Out, often ending up after a show or gig on Hanway Street for a late-night livener.

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