Dartmouth Park & Kentish Town

Camden designated the Dartmouth Park Conservation Area on 4 February 1992 and adopted its appraisal and management strategy on 22 January 2009. A stretch of Highgate Road, first designated in 1985 as part of the Highgate conservation area, moved into it at designation, and Holly Village and the shops near Highgate West Hill followed on 21 March 2006.

The appraisal says most of its properties were built between 1840 and 1890, and it is clear about who built them. In the 1850s the Conservative Land Society bought land to the east and laid out Churchill, Spencer and Chetwynd Roads. In the 1860s Lord Dartmouth developed the land behind Grove Terrace to create Dartmouth Park Road, with spacious gardens and street trees. A local builder named Smerdon built Croftdown Road on the gardens of Croft Lodge, and much of the east end of Dartmouth Park Road and Laurier Road besides. Under all of it, a branch of the River Fleet runs along the central valley, culverted in the 1890s, which is why York Rise follows the line it does.

It is not all Victorian. The appraisal divides the area into ten sub areas, and several are twentieth century: the Brookfield Estate, designed for St Pancras Borough Council between 1922 and 1930 by A. J. Thomas, Lutyens’ principal assistant, on the model of Hampstead Garden Suburb; the York Rise Estate, completed in 1938 for the St Pancras House Improvement Society; the Edwardian mansion flats of Lissenden Gardens; and the 1970s Camden estates at Highgate New Town and the Whittington Estate.

What you may change

This is the point that most surprises buyers coming from NW3. Camden’s list of heritage Article 4 directions has only one for Dartmouth Park, made on 7 March 1980, and it does one thing: it removes the right to paint the outside of 33 York Rise, to preserve a painted sign on its flank wall. The replacement directions Camden brought in on 9 June 2026 covered Hampstead, Belsize, South Hampstead and their neighbours, not Dartmouth Park or Kentish Town.

So houses here have the ordinary permitted development rights of a conservation area and nothing beyond that. Two things still apply everywhere: a borough wide Article 4 direction means every basement excavation in Camden needs planning permission, and the Dartmouth Park Neighbourhood Plan, made on 2 March 2020 after 87.9 per cent voted for it, carries weight in planning decisions. The protected London view from Kenwood to St Paul’s also crosses the western part of the area.

Kentish Town

South of Dartmouth Park, Kentish Town is covered by several smaller conservation areas rather than one: Kentish Town itself, with an appraisal adopted on 11 March 2011, and Bartholomew Estate, Inkerman, West Kentish Town and Camden Square around it. Camden’s pages list no heritage Article 4 directions for any of them.

Planning position as at 22 September 2026

For secondary schools this is one of the best placed corners of Camden. Parliament Hill School, William Ellis School and La Sainte Union Catholic Secondary School all stand on Highgate Road, and Acland Burghley School is on Burghley Road. Parliament Hill and La Sainte Union take girls at 11 and William Ellis takes boys, but all four share the LaSWAP sixth form, which is mixed.

Camden has no catchment areas. Its admissions guides say its primary schools have none, apart from Abacus Belsize Free School, and that its community secondary schools have none and no feeder primaries. Community schools rank applicants by straight line distance after the priority groups, and Camden publishes the distance to the furthest child offered a place each year. That figure is a record of one year and not a boundary. Voluntary aided schools set their own criteria: La Sainte Union gives priority to Catholic applicants, and William Ellis offers some places for aptitude in music.

Two names that still appear in older guides are gone. Carlton Primary School closed in August 2021 and St Dominic’s Catholic Primary School closed in August 2023.

Admissions position as at 22 September 2026

Applications for September 2027 close on 31 October 2026 for secondary schools and on 15 January 2027 for reception. Check the current arrangements with Camden and with each school before you rely on anything here.

The stock is mostly Victorian stock brick villas and terraces, many of them now flats, with the Georgian houses of Grove Terrace and Highgate Road at one end of the scale, the Edwardian mansion flats of Lissenden Gardens in the middle, and the 1920s, 1930s and 1970s estates at the other.

Values are highest in the Georgian terraces and in the larger villas on Dartmouth Park Avenue and the west end of Dartmouth Park Road, and generally rise the closer a house sits to the Heath and Parliament Hill. Side streets trade above the main roads: a flat on Highgate Road or Kentish Town Road usually sells at a discount to the same flat a street away.

The absence of Article 4 control is worth weighing in both directions. It makes altering your own house simpler than in most of NW3, and it means the street around you is protected only by the ordinary conservation area rules. An intact run of original fronts is therefore worth something here, and a surveyor’s view of a neighbour’s alterations is worth having.

This section is Tessa’s reading of the market, not a sourced fact. For a figure on a particular home, ask her.