Until last December, this glamorous gastropub used to be a dingy drinking den, in the grim estates of Camden's poorest area. Now slightly richer customers - intellectual escapees from the British Library just a few yards away on Euston Road, for instance, or, in future, travel-weary visitors from Paris who get off the Eurostar at King's Cross - can enjoy delicious food and drink prepared by the two French sisters, Sabine and Vanessa, who've wrought the Gallic transformation. But as we head for our table, mouths watering at the prospect of scented creme brulee with lavender, we hear a quiet grumbling from the bar. Two men in football scarves give us cross looks before slouching out into the night, slamming the door.

The gentrification of the Coffee House is symbolic of the larger-scale smartening up of the whole King's Cross area. In theory, it seems like a good idea to spruce up a place notorious for deprivation, crime, prostitution and crack dens. But, in practice, it's annoying a lot of the neighbours.

While drinkers from the pre-revamp Coffee House, resentful of the new middle-class clientele, are said to be howling "give us our old pub back!", their neighbours from other Somers Town estates have been protesting equally fiercely against the £2 billion redevelopment plan for a 67-acre stretch of land just behind King's Cross and St Pancras Stations.

The latest plans for the old railway wasteland, put together by the property developer Argent, are for a scheme which has taken six years so far, has only just got a first burst of planning permission from Camden Council (with more permissions still to come from Islington Council, the Mayor's office and the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister). If all goes according to plan, it should be ready in time for the London Olympics in 2012. As Argent chief executive Roger Madelin says, it's the largest new build of central London for well over 150 years. At least, it will be if it goes ahead. But this isn't the first attempt to do something with the land. Previous developers have spent decades and fortunes trying. The Sunday Times reported last month that more than £50 million had been spent since the 1980s on various plans that never got off the ground.

At the Camden Council planning permission hearings in March, protesters called the scheme a "homage to greed". Instead of providing more cheap housing for impoverished locals who are now overcrowded on the tired old estates (whose reputation as the last word in social housing is now long forgottten), they complained that the scheme was only going to bring 2,000 new homes, mostly for posh single professionals. Instead of creating local employment, they said it was just going to create 25,000 jobs for incoming commuters. Among other things, there were also complaints that the area's three historic gas-holder rings were to be moved (though they won't be lost); that the plans had too many offices; that the buildings envisaged weren't green enough; that the area wouldn't have an Olympic-size swimming pool and full-size football pitch (just a 25-metre pool); and that it didn't have enough community centres or a mosque.

"The high-rise, high-density Office City proposed for south of the canal is woefully lacking in creativity and sensitivity," raged one protester, Paul Braithwaite. He fulminated against "Gordon Gekko-like greed-driven proposals for bland offices .... [and] 50-metre-high tower blocks [which] will dwarf and block sunlight over the canal".

"In Somers Town it seems to me that most of us believe that the whole scheme has been willed upon us by Argent and could sound the death knell of our community," Dave Hoefling, a local resident, mourned in the letters page of the Camden New Journal.

Yes, but. Whatever is wrong with these development proposals, they at least represent a way forward from the current Somers Town bind - living on the edge of the city's biggest patch of wasteland, under-employed and underpaid and suffering all the ravages of poverty. It's all very well to get sentimental about the close-knit community, the droppings-in from one flat to another, dusters in hand, the lending of cups of sugar and teabags, the whole Cockney way things used to be. But locals would do well to remember that outsiders who have to pass through this transport hub area every day do so only reluctantly and as quickly as possible because of its reputation as a hangout for bagsnatchers and addled knife-wielding teen crackheads.

King's Cross is long overdue for change. However much residents now want to preserve their community exactly as they remember it, it might get better if it gets richer. Their children will almost certainly be grateful if, a generation hence, the only knowledge they have of local poverty is from looking at the sepia photos on the walls of the Somers Town Coffee House.

Your comments:
Hi, I'm the author of the Camden Lady blog - thanks for the link in your article today. I think you're a little unfair on us though, and have posted in my blog on that. This is a surprising safe, and increasingly well-off area - more I think due to the efforts of the local council and the police than anything else. It's hard for me, or many of the neighbours, to see how a big office centre next door will help the area at all, though a considerate development, including a mix of housing and more public space would be great. Cathryn Symons, Camden Lady

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