If you’re in Camden on a Saturday night and things aren’t going too well, or you want to extend your night by an inexpensive hour or two, get yourself down to the Marathon Bar.

The Marathon Bar is a stone’s throw from Chalk Farm tube station. On a weekday it is a quiet fast food outlet. It does a wicked steak and kidney pie and chips (note: make sure you put a tonne of salt, vinegar and mouth ulcerating chilli sauce on top) and reviews of the Marathon Bar suggest the kebabs aren’t bad either.

But on a Saturday evening it comes alive. Strange you might think for a fast food outlet, but the Marathon Bar has two rooms, and on a Saturday night the dining room in the back, is cleared of its tables as the night beckons, and a couple of saxophone players start playing over records. Soon the backroom is packed, people dancing on the spot, and in groups, there’s no space for anything more vigorous. The magic of the Marathon Bar is its mixed clientele, which one person on the next has quite rightly called ‘mentalist’. There’s such a random assortment of off the wall people. One night, on this occasion outside of the bar on the street, I found myself in a group which included a forty year old woman on crack and a sixty year old velvet wearing Ethiopian tailor. At the same time the crack head was rubbing her body up against mine flirting with me in the most embarrassingly overstate way I have ever seen, the tailor was telling us about how he had the power to cause tsunamis whilst offering bits of weed to people for free. Even the shyest will find it difficult not getting into a chat with someone.

Address
Marathon Kebab House, 87 Chalk Farm Road, Camden, London, NW1 8AR.

Telephone Number
44 (0)20 74853814

• The Marathon Bar on Youtube.
• Get Cape Wear Cape play and crowd surf the Marathon Bar!

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