This pub is Camden's most iconic, which is largely thanks to the people who were buying its beer a decade ago: Noel Fielding, Johnny Borrell, hundreds of anonymous indie men who will have since buried their winklepickers deep underground. And, of course, Amy Winehouse. Today, a silhouette of the singer stands in a top floor window to welcome fans from around the world, there to live out the full Amy experience.

This building site is one chunk of the local area that's been razed to make way for the new Camden, a place where you're more likely to find polished marble floors than plaited leather bracelets and gas-mask bongs. For decades, Camden Lock has been a place synonymous with subculture—it's the closest thing cyber goths have to a Westfield—but it's slowly being painted beige. Building has already started on 170 new luxury homes—only 14 of which will classify as affordable housing .

I take a pint into the cramped walled garden, and the bleep of a reversing truck cuts through the chatter. I look up, and an orange crane swings over my head like I'm about to be plucked as an amusement prize. The claw settles over a plot of land next to the pub, a soccer field–size patch of nothing.

What's odd in this case is how smoothly it's gone. When gentrification's threatened other London institutions, grassroots groups have retaliated. Take Dalston's Passing Clouds: Campaigners occupied the building and organized a march of hundreds of people before developers finally took control of the site. Or iconic gay pub the Royal Vauxhall Tavern, where London night czar Amy Lame directed a successful campaign to get the building listed status. Here, an e-petition to stop the redevelopment of Camden Lock Village got a matter-of-fact response from the mayor's office and that was that.

The story's nothing new : Developers find an area rich with cultural capital and buy up a load of space that strangely always contains a fixture of the local creative scene (in this case, the Camden Lock Village Market). They then build very expensive apartments on that space, which in turn raises the value of surrounding property, pricing out small businesses and long-term residents. Another pocket of London not purpose-built for millionaires gone forever, confined to old Facebook photos where you have weird hair and only one chin.

Isn't Camden supposed to be an emblem of counterculture? A north London Christiania, only the street dealers' weed isn't actually weed; it's balled-up toilet paper wrapped in more toilet paper. A place of faintly anarchic-looking crusties and people who live on boats—surely among that lot there'd be types who'd get bang into collective action and set up dedicated workbenches for placard-making? People who'd rally against the man to keep Camden cranky?

Exactly when and where punk began is a contentious topic, but many of the people who like to argue about that stuff would say it started in earnest in July 1976 at the Camden Roundhouse. Which, believe it or not, was once a nucleus of London counterculture. The Ramones played there one evening, and then the following night at Dingwalls, just down the road. Supposedly Chrissie Hynde and members of the Clash, the Sex Pistols, and the Damned were in the audience that second night, getting inspired. The Clash shot the iconic cover of its debut album in an alleyway by its recording studio Rehearsals Rehearsals, now part of Camden Market. The Specials also rehearsed and lived there.