The No 29 shaped a community [Pavlos Mastihi Panayioti]

AS it snakes its way from central to north London via Trafalgar Square, Camden High Street and Green Lanes, the No 29 might be dismissed as just another overcrowded bus that you have to wait too long for.

But for London’s Greek Cypriots who once made a point of settling along its route it’s the bus that has shaped an entire community.

Once known as the “Greek bus”, it is celebrated in From Camden to Enfield: A Cypriot Migration Story, a documentary by Anthea Mandis. The absorbing 45-minute film opens with people gathering for a trip down memory lane in the grounds of the imposing All Saints’ Greek Orthodox Cathedral in Camden Town.

“I wanted to bring a bunch of people together to reminisce about the importance of the route in their lives and bit by bit a documentary evolved,” explains Athena, an award-winning director and lecturer in filmmaking at Queen Mary University. “It’s a film of beginnings and endings, about how the Greek Cypriot community arrived, settled and moved on, and about what community means to us down the generations.”

Cypriots have been catching the No 29 since the late 1920s when they first started arriving in London after Cyprus became part of the British Empire. After coming off the boat train from Dover, they would board it at its then starting point of Victoria station and head straight for Soho and Fitzrovia, where work awaited them in restaurants and sweatshops and accommodation was cheap.

After the Second World War, the next major stop was Camden Town, another down-at-heel area full of opportunities, before it was all change as people began settling in the greener pastures of Haringey and beyond.

Drawing them all in like a magnet was All Saints, which was gifted to the Greek Orthodox church in 1948 as thanks for the Cypriot contribution to Britain’s war effort.

“It was not only a place of worship but the ethnic centre for Greek Cypriots,” says Fr George Zafeirakos to the camera.

“According to baptism records, between 1955 and 1970, 15 weddings took place on any given Sunday and the same number of baptisms. All the leaders of Cyprus have visited and spoken here, [including] Makarios, who came many times.”

By the 1960s, a thriving community had sprung up in Camden Town and many Cypriot-owned businesses flourished, including surviving restaurants like Daphne’s and Andy’s.

“We lived in quite an exceptional neighbourhood,” recalls Pavlos Mastihi Panayioti, whose father had a shop in Pratt Street making handmade shoes. In the same street there was “a Cypriot café, butcher, photographer and hairdresser – I was surrounded by Cypriot everything all of the time”.

But Christodoulos Stylianou, who arrived from Cyprus aged 15, talks of darker times, recalling an incident in 1959 when he and other youngsters fought off a gang of Teddy Boys in Bayham Street.

“The police arrived and [arrested us]. The elders contacted our MP, Lena Jeger, and she turned up to the police station around midnight. After hearing our story she turned to the police and asked where the Teddy Boys were. There were none. That’s how discrimination was then.”

Anti-Cypriot tensions had been heightened by the protracted EOKA uprising against British rule in Cyprus in the 1950s. “Every time a British soldier was killed in Cyprus, there were reprisals against the community in Camden with slogans like ‘Cyps Go Home’ appearing on the walls of Cypriot homes, shops and churches,” says Theatro Technis founder George Eugeniou, who, aged 18, had taken the well-worn route from the island in 1950 to join his sister in Soho and ended up working in a dressmaking factory in Denmark Street.

His Cypriot theatre, which was first based in Camden Mews before eventually moving to Crowndale Road, would become another important community hub, particularly after the catastrophic Turkish invasion of Cyprus in 1974 that led to an influx of thousands of refugees.

In the mid-1980s people began leaving Camden to live around Green Lanes, where most of the businesses were Greek Cypriot.

“Men and women who worked day and night bought a house. They sold that one and bought two further north,” says Fr Zafeirakos by way of explanation.

The actor and London Greek Radio (LGR) presenter Vasilis Panayi recalls the day he took the No 29 from Haringey in search of Theatro Technis.

“I spoke in English to a woman and when I asked where to get off, saying ‘Theatro Technis’ in Greek, she responded in Greek.”

LGR director Yiannis Kyriakidies adds: “Any time you took the 29 you’d hear Greek spoken – it was the Greek bus.”

Economic shifts witnessed a wholesale push of families and businesses further northwards to leafier suburbs like Palmers Green and Southgate in Enfield and, these days, Cheshunt. But there remains a visible Greek Cypriot presence.

“People and places come together and give it meaning,” says Athena, who was brought up in Tottenham and remembers always shopping in Green Lanes with her parents. “You arrive somewhere, you create a community, you have a sense of belonging to people who come from your place, share the same values, the same food and shop at each other’s shops. It is the heart of who we are.”

Although some older members of the community in the film, which was screened earlier this year at Theatro Technis as part of its Cyprus Week festival, might lament how their children “speak Greek but act English”, eschewing Greek TV and the family fish and chip shop, those from the second generation are proud of their roots.

“That journey from Camden Town to Enfield is a journey of affluence,” Chris Paouros tells us. “It’s saying, we arrived here, we moved to where we needed to be… We grafted and we moved up. It is a great immigrant story.”

• From Camden to Enfield – A Cypriot Migration Story was made with the support of University of Westminster’s Impact Case Study Support Fund. It is available to view at https://vimeo.com/378534520