The People’s Museum Somers Town is a hub of activity. Friends, neighbours and colleagues — all on a first-name basis — bustle in and out of the space, interjecting with their thoughts, to share a joke or talk about ongoing projects. ‘It’s a cross between a community centre and an activist space really,’ says Diane Foster, director of A Space for Use — People’s Museum, Somers Town.

Foster has been a resident of Somers Town for some time. ‘I lived here from 1987 with my mother,’ she says, ‘and have since gone away and come back’. But in recent years, Somers Town has found itself positioned at the epicentre of an area poised for large-scale redevelopment. ‘From an architect’s point of view,’ Foster explains, ‘it’s between the tracks — it’s bounded by major roads and the stations of Euston and Kings Cross.’ This, she observes, has also meant the area has retained its ‘hiddenness’, including a rare pocket of social housing in central London. Indeed, approximately 70 per cent of the 5,000 residents of Somers Town live in socially rented homes.

‘I could see the area was rapidly changing and I became aware it was a fragile space,’ Foster recalls. In this context, from 2013 she began recording oral histories and engaging in participatory film-making with local people which would form the basis for a website, a film and, ultimately, a museum.

‘You can get on a train and be in Paris an hour,’ one contributor to the project noted. Indeed, it’s almost as though Somers Town is situated on a ring of gold, Foster remarks. ‘It’s an area ripe for development but also a residential area that is so determined by social housing.’

And so, beset by all this development, it was clear to Foster that ‘all the people of Somers Town were feeling was the pain and inconvenience of it, rather than benefits’. This common theme ran through her conversations with local people.

‘I just want some green space,’ one resident commented. ‘It’s been 30 years constantly that we’ve had development in this area,’ said another. Some more critical comments — ‘Don’t squeeze us out, communities need to stay and get a slice of the action’ — were subject to censorship. When plans to display posters with these sentiments on hoardings surrounding a local development were curtailed, it stood at odds with the radical history of Somers Town and the people who shaped it.

One of these figures, Irene Barclay, the first woman to qualify in the UK as a chartered surveyor in 1922, pioneered social and housing surveys grounded in engagement with residents, a break from the cursory external surveys produced by councils at the time. Her approach to rehousing entire households to retain community bonds is reflected in her 1976 book People Need Roots.

Barclay worked closely with a priest and housing reformer, John Basil Lee Jellicoe, who founded the St Pancras Housing Association. Like Barclay, Jellicoe recognised the importance of connecting with residents. Identifying the pub as the living room of the people he became a pub landlord declaring: ‘The pub is my pulpit.’

The St Pancras Housing Association, and more broadly the housing estates in Somers Town, are symbolic of an idealistic movement of the 1920s and 30s, reflected in their design, planning and running.

Yet today Foster identifies a clear class dimension to the vulnerability of Somers Town’s heritage. ‘I think most middle-class areas do keep their heritage,’ she says. ‘In working class areas, they think they can just destroy everything.’

‘Why should not ordinary people have things of beauty?’ She recalls the words of the architect of Sidney Street Estate, Ian Hamilton, highlighting the inclusive spirit that underpins the design of Somers Town’s housing estates.

A key example of this lies in the courtyards of Somers Town estates, with washing posts arranged in a circle so that residents can socialise while hanging up their clothes. The posts, topped with decorative ceramic finials designed by the renowned artist Gilbert Bayes, also convey a story or poem associated with each courtyard. One represents the poem Four and Twenty Tailors Went to Kill a Snail, and another the tale of Sleeping Beauty, earning Sidney Street Estate the epithet the ‘fairytale estate’. ‘To me they’re beautiful symbols of a movement that was for the people,’ Foster remarks.

Sadly, a number of finials are now missing from the estate. For Foster, this embodies the vulnerability of Somers Town’s heritage. ‘I just felt that no one was protecting things in this deprived area,’ she explains. ‘People don’t have the voice that they have perhaps in more wealthy areas where people have more time on their hands, or money, or influence.’

‘How can these beautiful objects just disappear?’ Foster asked. She tasked herself with the recovery of the finials — a number of which now form a key centrepiece of the museum’s collection, the largest of its kind, rivalling those of the Victoria & Albert Museum and the British Library.

‘I’m not a historian; I didn’t go out to set up a museum,’ Foster insists. Indeed, the People’s Somers Town Museum was established in a peculiar way, from the ground up, rather than top-down. ‘When you ask about the future, people talk about the past, and so the history and heritage of the place became very interesting to me,’ she says. Underpinning the ethos of the museum is this idea of documenting heritage, recognising value and recording change.

For some time, King’s Cross has been touted as ‘a new Palo Alto’, with the likes of Google and Samsung setting up a UK base in the area. ‘These incoming tech companies cast this idea of what the area could be,’ says Foster, ‘but I want people passing through to know this area already has a history, has a character. Preserve it and look at it.’

That isn’t to say she thinks nothing should change. ‘I’m not saying we have to preserve everything in aspic,’ she clarifies. There is a real sense of looking forward, taking a contemporary approach, while respecting the existing heritage. One project in collaboration with EDIT Collective, an all-women architects’ group, embodies this. A heritage trail for Somers Town will use augmented reality to develop 3D replicas of the area’s missing artwork.

For Foster, the real value comes from extending the museum into the public realm like this. She recalls the removal and sale of gothic iron Victorian gate, evidence of the area’s industrial history as a railway goods area. ‘But that belongs to here,’ she said. So, when another version of the gate became available, Foster spoke to the council, and it is now being reintroduced in a new estate development, restoring a piece of the area’s heritage to the public realm.

‘Those achievements for me are even more important than perhaps the museum because they are in the public area and it affects the environment,’ she says. ‘So that for me is a great win.’ Perhaps the People’s Museum Somers Town heralds a new hybrid of museum and community space — A Space for Us — extending beyond the bricks and mortar to the surrounding streets and communities.