Crouch End crappy? Maybe now, when it's chock full of media types. They say the best time to burgle a house there is on BAFTA night, as all the residents will be involved in a vast West End love-in.
Never used to be crappy, though, and I should know - I was born and raised there, and have fond memories of the old village, as was.
We were treated to exotica like Vivien Stanshall, who lived up the road, and Long John Baldry, long before Dave Stewart and Annie Lennox burst forth upon the world. June Tabor used to work in the local library (though I can't say I ever registered the fact at the time). For music, as Fionn recalls, the King's Head was THE place for music and stand-up. But, as Micca says, it was also home to the urban leftie long before Islington came to stand for all that. As a child I remember a fellow who looked just like Lenin, dressed in a goose-shit green corduroy suit and using a walking cane, clicking down the street past my house twice a day. My father said he was some leading light of the Communist Party and completely bonkers. Tariq Ali had a flat two roads away when he was still the revolutionary firebrand, and the local middle classes looked upon him with the sort of awe and loathing the Telegraph used to reserve for Tony Benn!
My mother's parents were licensees of the Railway Tavern, which used to attract a lot of trade from the art college. "Bloomin' hairies that don't spend enough of their grants," was my grandfather's view. My father's mother, though she lived in Crouch End, would always head to Highgate for her weekly intake of gin - she having been a major turn at the Finsbury Park music hall and thus a cut above the "hippies and lefties" that were taking over the area. The irony is, she's now buried less than 50 feet from Karl Marx, and must surely be spinning there!