Tag: travel

Day 80 – Elephant & Castle – New Kent Road

Today’s excursion takes us on a tour of the very differing areas on either side of the New Kent Road and as such is one for both fans of pre- and post-war public housing developments and fans of tearing down the latter. This is because the area to the immediate east of Elephant & Castle and south of new Kent Road has been the site of arguably the largest regeneration project in the capital this century. In the 2010’s the massive and infamous Heygate Estate, built in 1974, along with other adjacent post-war social housing was demolished and the site has subsequently been redeveloped as Elephant Park, a mix of new private and social high-rise housing including, what is claimed to be “the largest new green space to be created in London for 70 years”. More details on that later.

We’re starting out today at the Bakerloo Line entrance/exit of Elephant & Castle Tube Station. This dates from 1906 and is in the classic Leslie Green style with façade of oxblood red tiles. The Northern Line station to the south was originally built sixteen years earlier but that has been rebuilt several times over the years whereas the Bakerloo Line building remains pretty much as when constructed. A girl, named Mary Ashfield Eleanor Hammond, born at the station on 13 May 1924 was the first baby to be born on the Underground network. Her second name, Ashfield, was from Lord Ashfield, chairman of the railway, who agreed to be the baby’s godfather, but also said that “it would not do to encourage this sort of thing as I am a busy man”.

We follow the roundabout to Newington Causeway and then complete an outstanding section to the north-west of E&C that includes most of the London South Bank University (including its Technopark).  Founded in 1892 as the Borough Polytechnic Institute, LSBU attained university status in the year of its centenary; 70% of UK students are Londoners and 80% of the total student body are classified as mature (over the age of 21 at entry). Circumventing the campus takes us via Keyworth Street, Ontario Street, Thomas Doyle Street, Rotary Street, Garden Row, Gaywood Street and Princess Street.

Arriving back the roundabout we head round on to the New Kent Road (NKR)where from the very off the new division between north and south of the road is starkly apparent.

We soon pass the beneath the southbound Thameslink rail line and immediately turn left down Arch Street which runs down onto Rockingham Street from where Tiverton Street and Avonmouth Street take us back onto Newington Causeway and Sessions House, the home of the Inner London Crown Court (2.5* on Google). A Surrey County Sessions House originally stood on this site from 1791, a sessions house historically being a courthouse where criminal trials (sessions) were held four times a year on quarter days. By the mid-19th century however it was sitting regularly and operating as the main County Court. Following local government reorganisation in 1889 the Sessions House was no longer within the bounds of Surrey and fell under the aegis of the London County Council which decided to rebuild and expand the facility. The current building was designed by the London county architect, W. E. Riley, in the classical style. Work began in 1914 but due to the First World War wasn’t completed until 1920. Following the Courts Act of 1971 the building was designated as a Crown Court venue which meant it could hear cases relating to more serious criminality.

Beyond the court we turn right onto Harper Road and proceed as far as the Baitul Aziz Mosque and Islamic Cultural Centre.

Then we head up Bath Terrace back to Rockingham Street and follow this, via Meadow Row, as it loops round to the north to return us to Harper Road. This part of the route takes us through the heart of the enormous 1930’s built Rockingham Estate. The following is an extract from one of the contributions to the BBC’s archive of WW2 reminiscences. In 1936 my mother and father moved to a newly built London County Council flat on the Rockingham Estate at the Elephant & Castle. We were allocated number 34 Banks House, which was at the foot of the stairs leading to four further levels. Forty-five flats in all. These were luxurious to what most people had been used to at the time – three bedrooms, a living room, kitchen, bath and separate lavatory. The blocks were surrounded by lawns and shrubbery. Since 2019 both Southwark Council and the Mayor’s Office have funded initiatives aimed at tackling crime and anti-social behaviour on the Estate and based on this visit I would say it looks in a reasonable state considering it’s getting on for 90 years old.

On the corner of Rockingham Street and Harper Road stands the Colab Tavern which (and this is the first of few misconceptions today) at first sight, based partly on the picture of Tommy Shelby on the sign, seems to be a place to steer clear of. Turns out though that this is one of the venues run by an eponymous Theatre Company that specialises in immersive and interactive theatre. (Having said that you might still want to give it a wide berth given that the company’s current production is a drag panto parody of Die Hard called Dead Hard).

We turn left off Harper Road onto Falmouth Road which takes us down to Dover Street (the start of the A2) where we swing right towards the Bricklayers Arms roundabout. On the corner with Spurgeon Street is a rare example of a chicken shop that doesn’t try to trade under a name that has a tenuous association with KFC. I’ve also included this as a facile contrast and compare to the eating establishments that we’ll encounter on the other side of NKR.

Just before the roundabout we take a right onto Bartholomew Street then immediately right again down Burge Street which beyond the Cardinal Bourne Street cul-de-sac turns into Burbage Close. Coming out onto Spurgeon Street we turn left then return to Bartholomew Street via Deverell Street. Looming before us here is the giant Symington House, an eleven-storey ‘slab’ block on the Lawson Estate completed in 1962. It subsequently fell on hard times and in the 1980s, the Greater London Council (GLC) offered it to the private sector for just £1, to no avail. Though the GLC then modernised the building, in 2008 it was condemned by Southwark Borough Council. The booming London property market, however, saved it from demolition. The following year one of the flats became home to an installation by the artist Roger Hiorns, who had previously worked as a postman in the area. To make the piece, entitled Seizure, 75,000 litres of copper sulphate solution were poured into the flat. When it was drained a month later, every surface was covered with luminous blue crystals. Seizure was moved to the Yorkshire Sculpture Park when the flats were finally redeveloped. (The bottom pictures below were taken when I visited the installation in 2009.)

At the end of Deverell Street there’s another old pub reimagined (this time through the prism of post-modern irony).

I wasn’t in all honesty expecting to see any plaques on today’s route but at no. 17 Bartholomew Street Southwark Council have erected one in honour of the architect Sir Ernest George (1839 – 1922) who spent part of his life in this Georgian terrace house. Amongst George’s works were the current Southwark Bridge (1921), and the Memorial to Heroic Self-Sacrifice in London’s Postman’s Park.

Next up we’re back on NKR and soon turning north again on Theobald Street which runs along the rear of the Ark Globe Academy School. This is one of 39 schools run by the Ark Charitable Trust which was founded in 2002 and is a so-called all-through establishment, so basically primary and secondary school combined. According to the Department of Education website it currently has 1,315 pupils out of a capacity of 1,645 and the Ofsted inspection of 2021 classified it as Good in 4 categories and Outstanding in 2.

We proceed next along County Street, which runs parallel to NKR on the north side, passing yet another reconstructed boozer. Jumping to conclusions again , I assumed that part of the lettering above the door had just fallen off and in doing so had turned the Rising Sun into something rather more unwelcoming. It transpires though that this is a deliberate renaming of what is now a dedicated LBGTQ bar.

At the western end of County Street there’s another case of redenomination that could be easily misconstrued (if you have a suspicious mind like mine). The Grade II listed chapel on the corner with Falmouth Road was built as the Welsh Presbyterian Star and Cross Church in 1888. It is constructed of red brick and gauged brickwork with Queen Anne and Romanesque influences. It currently serves as the London base for the Brotherhood of the Cross and Star (see what I mean). According to their website, the Brotherhood of the Cross and Star (BCS) is not a church or new religious movement (or a group of Marvel supervillains from the 1970’s). It is the fulfilment of Biblical scripture relating to the manifestation of God’s reign on earth recorded from Genesis to Revelation and was established in Nigeria in 1956 under the spiritual leadership of Olumba Olumba Obu. As far as the building goes, the complete gallery survives internally and the stained glass is good quality but the external fabric is in urgent need of repair. Reportedly, the congregation is actively engaged in discussion with potential funders to develop a repair project.

One final look at the north side of the NCR before we cross over into the brave new world. This part of South London has long been a stronghold of the Latin American diaspora and here, in between another Chicken Shop and a Lebanese Grill, they have their own butcher shop, La Reina (“the Queen”).

We cross over the NKR and enter its southern vicinity via Rodney Place where the final residential development of the Elephant Park scheme, the Wilderley, is well underway. Designed by architects HOK, The Wilderly is comprised of two buildings, The Tower (25 storeys) and Mansion Collections (11 storeys). Studios, one, two and three-bedroom residences are launching for sale in January 2025 with prices starting from £630,000 (but you do get access to a Wellness Studio and Gym and a Sanctuary Garden for that). The presence of a Simply Fresh outlet further underlines that we’re not in Kansas any more, Toto.

There’s still a bit of old London to explore before we get to Elephant Park in earnest however. Heading east on Munton Road and then turning left into Balfour Street we find ourselves at the rear of Driscoll House, the front of which faces onto the NKR. Built in 1913 as a women’s hostel, one of the very few, this was originally called Ada Lewis House, after the widow of money-lender and philanthropist, Samuel Lewis. Upon his death in 1901, Lewis left an endowment of £670,000 (equivalent to £30m today) to set up a charitable trust to provide housing for the poor. The building was acquired in 1965 by Terence Driscoll, founder of the International Language Club in Croydon who renamed it after himself. He repurposed it as an ultra-budget hotel (initially just for female guests) with around 200 very small bedrooms and communal bathrooms and toilets. In 1978, the policy was changed so that male as well as female guests were accepted. One floor was however reserved for female guests, and it was frowned on for men even to appear in the corridors of that floor. Up until the hotel’s closure in 2007 (a week after Terence Driscoll’s funeral), a single room cost just £30 per night or £150 per week, including breakfast and evening meal on weekdays, and breakfast, lunch and evening meal on weekends, which made it just about the cheapest place to stay in London. Following a successful campaign to save the building from demolition and have it listed it was refurbished and reopened as a hostel in 2012. The building currently houses refugees pending processing and is almost exclusively used for this purpose by the Home Office.

Switching southward on Balfour Street we head down to John Maurice Close and follow this east until it merges into Searles Road. This is home to what was formerly the Paragon School, built in 1900 following the demolition of The Paragon estate, six blocks of four storey semi-detached houses linked by a single-story colonnade, designed by Michael Searles (1750 – 1813) and built in1789-90 for the Rolls family. Searles went on to use the same name for a, now Grade I listed, 14-house perfect crescent in Blackheath. When the school opened it had no hot water or indoor sanitation and its headmaster was paid £26 a year. The school closed in 1988 and was for a number of years run by Southwark Council as a centre for Evening Classes and art studios before finally being sold for private development and converted into a residential building named The Paragon.

At the end of Searles Road we turn west on Darwin Street which eventually gives way to Hillery Close from where we take Salisbury Close up to Chatham Street. On the corner with Balfour Street the former Lady Margaret Church (1884 – 1977) became a branch of yet another Nigerian-based church, the fantastically-named Eternal Sacred Order of the Cherubim and Seraphim (ESOCS), founded in 1925 by Saint Moses Orimolade Tunolase. I wasn’t able however to find any concrete evidence that ESOCS is still active in this location.

After a quick look at Henshaw Street we continue west along Victory Place. Outside Victory Primary School (1913) is a plaque commemorating The Atlas Dyeworks which previously stood on this site and whose owners George Simpson, George Maule and Edward Nicholson, pioneered the production of Magenta-based dyes. Magenta, familiar to anyone with an inkjet printer, was originally called fuchsine and patented in 1859 by the French chemist François-Emmanuel Verguin. It was renamed to celebrate the Italian-French victory at the Battle of Magenta fought between the French and Austrians on 4 June 1859 near the Italian town of Magenta in Lombardy. That same year Simpson, Maule and Nicholson created an almost identical shade which they named roseine. A year later they also switched the name to Magenta having, according to some reports, acquired Verguin’s patent for £2,000. Some claim that Magenta is not technically a colour as it doesn’t have a wavelength of light and therefore is just a creation of the human brain. Notwithstanding that, it sits exactly halfway between red and blue on the RGB colour chart and in 2023 a shade of Magenta, Viva, was named as Pantone colour of the year.

And so, we finally head into the Elephant Park development area, having first skirted round it’s southern boundary via Heygate Street, Steedman Street and Hampton Street, crossing twice over the Walworth Road in the process. This 170 acre site was earmarked for a master-planned redevelopment budgeted at £1.5 billion from the mid 2000’s onward. As mentioned at the start, this led to the demolition of the brutalist Heygate Estate and adjacent social housing to be replaced with a mix of social and private-sector housing and green space of which Elephant Park forms a major part. Developer, Lendlease, has so far delivered 2,303 apartments and 8,600 sqm of retail space with a further 222 apartments, 1,000 sqm of office space and 400 sqm of retail space on the way. They have also recently opened the two-acre central park and Elephant Springs, an “urban oasis” featuring fountains, waterfalls, and slides (though as you can see below this is closed for the winter).

The area around Elephant & Castle has historically been very working class in character and in recent decades increasingly ethnically diverse. Driven by the development the demographics have been changing however with an influx of city workers and members of the South East Asian communities; both of whom are well catered for by the restaurants and bars of Elephant Park. (I never thought I would see the day when the Elephant & Castle hosted a Gail’s Bakery).

Elephant Park is traversed by Deacon Street and Ash Avenue. At the western end of the latter is Castle Square, a new public space and retail destination which is home to many of the traders formerly based in the old E & C shopping centre. The statue from the original Victorian Elephant & Castle pub which was demolished in 1959 now sits atop the main hub of Castle Square.

That shopping centre, designed by Boissevain & Osmond for the Willets Group, was opened in March 1965 and was the first covered shopping mall in Europe. It never quite lived up to the original ambitions of its developers to create “the Piccadilly of the South” though. In due course it came to be frequently voted the ugliest building in London (if not the whole of the UK) and its destruction in October 2020 was very much unlamented. That was definitely not the case for the adjacent Coronet Cinema which was demolished at the same, having survived since 1932. The current, since 2015, owners of the site, Delancey, are in the midst of a redevelopment plan for a new “town centre”, which is due to be completed in 2026. This is scheduled to include new housing at both affordable and market rent; a combination of shops, restaurants and leisure facilities, with existing shopping centre independent traders getting first right of refusal to return to the affordable retail spaces; a state-of-the-art new home for London College of Communication and a new entrance to the Northern Line Underground providing both escalator and lift access and designed to safeguard for any future Bakerloo line extension. Watch this space (see below).

So that just about wraps things up for this time and its via the existing access to the Northern Line that we exit (pursued by an Elephant).

Day 79 – Kennington Road – Kennington Park Road – Kennington Lane – Imperial War Museum

As promised, we’ve ventured back south of the river for today’s outing and specifically, as the more insightful amongst you may have twigged, we’re talking Kennington. The route stretches from the axis of Kennington Road and Kennington Park Road to the south to the Imperial War Museum in the north, taking in all the streets within the wedge formed by those two main roads. It’s a mainly residential area with a familiar mix of historic terraces and squares cheek by jowl with high-rise estates. In recent times, Kennington has been on something of an upward curve as those Victorian and Georgian terraces became available to young professionals at a significant discount to similar properties in other areas of London.

Having alighted from the no.59 bus at the southern end of Kennington Road we start today’s features rather inauspiciously with the abandoned south London outpost of the Department of Trade and Industry, although if you turn the corner into Kennington Park Road there’s a still active Job Centre Plus in part of the same building (can’t remember seeing one of those in any of the previous 78 jaunts).

A short way up Kennington Park Road we turn left into Ravensdon Street and then double back down Stannary Street which takes us past the Kurdish Cultural Central. (Don’t worry, we’ve got some more photogenic buildings coming up later.)

On the other side of Stannary Street is the back of the former Kennington Road School. This impressive Grade II listed Victorian edifice which faces onto Kennington Road is now a gated luxury apartment complex known (pour quelle raison ?) as The Lycee.

A little way further up Kennington Road we turn off into Milverton Street. As I’ve noted before, I don’t have much of an interest in cars but I was quite taken with this pink jobbie claiming a disabled parking space just off the main road.

Immediately opposite here is the home of Kennington Film Studios, according to their website, “a commercial film & photography studio in Central London (really ?), offering 3 sound-treated studio spaces across 4,500sqft and 1 podcast/vodcast studio. In a former life, Channel 4’s Richard & Judy and the BBC’s Saturday Kitchen were apparently shot here.

Cutting through the alleyway that is Aulton Place we return to Stannary Street then cross back over Ravensdon Street into Radcot Street which leads straight into Methley Street. These latter three streets form the main part of an estate that was built in 1868 to the design of architect, Alfred Lovejoy. The elegant three-storey terraces are distinguished by the alternating colours of the bricks in the arches above the windows and doorways. By the end of the 19th century however, when Charlie Chaplin briefly resided at no.39 (and is assumed to have attended Kennington Road School) the area had already become somewhat impoverished.

The building on the right above, which is in Bowden Street, although incorporating similar architectural stylings, was originally a pickle factory. I’m not sure when it ceased making pickles but the building became the home of The Camera Club in 1990. The Camera Club was founded in 1885 when the editor of Amateur Photographer magazine, J Harris Stone, called together the most prominent photographers of that time, to create a group that aimed at being “A Social, Scientific and Artistic Centre for Amateur Photographers and others interested in Art and Science.”

Opposite where Bowden Street joins onto Cleaver Street stands the former Lambeth County Court. Built in 1928, it was designed by John Hatton Markham of the Office of Works, in what Historic England describes as “an eclectic classical style”. The list entry goes on to state “Lambeth County Court was the first new county court built in a rebuilding programme begun in the late 1920s, in recognition of the inadequacy of many existing buildings, particularly in London, for facilitating the important work done by the courts; the lavishness of this example, by comparison with those built later, probably reflects the fact that it was built before the crash of 1929”. That listing (Grade II) was only granted in 2021, four years after the building ceased to act as a Court and a few months after I visited it when it was being used temporarily as art gallery space (the interior shots in the sequence below date from that visit). The site is actually owned by the Duchy of Cornwall and it appears that the listing put paid (for the time being) to their plans to redevelop into offices and apartments.

Turning right here brings us into Cleaver Square which was laid out in 1789 and was the first garden square south of the river. Until the middle of the 18th century, this was still open pasture forming part of an estate known as White Bear Field that was inherited by one Mary Cleaver in 1743. In 1780 Mary leased the land to Thomas Ellis, the landlord of the Horns Tavern on Kennington Common, who laid out and developed the square, originally naming it Princes Place. The houses around the square were built on a piecemeal basis between 1788 and 1853. As we alluded to earlier, by the 1870s the area had reduced in status, and the houses were overcrowded. The renaming as Cleaver Square occurred in 1937. The Prince of Wales pub in the north west corner originally dates from 1792 but was refaced in 1901.

At its eastern end Cleaver Square rejoins Kennington Park Road and here you’ll find the City & Guilds of London Art School. This was founded in 1854 by the Reverend Robert Gregory under the name Lambeth School of Art. It moved to this location in Kennington post-1878 and the current name was adopted in 1938. After WWII restoration and carving courses were established to train people for the restoration of London’s war-damaged buildings. A Fine Art programme was only developed in the 1960’s.

Continuing up Kennington Park Road we pass Kennington Tube Station. The station opened in 1890 as part of the City and South London Railway (CSLR), the world’s first underground electric railway which initially ran from King William Street to Morden. Since then surface building has remained largely unaltered although there have been several reconstructions and extensions underground. Travel between the surface and the platforms was originally by hydraulic lift, the equipment for which was housed in the dome. In 1900 King William Street station was closed and a new northern extension connecting London Bridge with Bank and Moorgate was created. Seven years later this was extended further to Kings Cross and Euston. After WW1 the Hampstead Tube which ran from Edgware to Embankment was extended to Kennington and merged with the CSLR to form what in 1937 came to be known as the Northern Line (with its two separate branches between Kennington and Camden). In 2021, after 6 years of construction, a new extension of the Charing Cross branch of the Northern Line was opened, running between Kennington and Battersea Power Station. It was the first major change to the tube network since the Jubilee Line extension in 1999.

Further up the road from the tube station is the mock-tudor styled Old Red Lion pub which was built in 1933 by the London brewers Hoare and Co. (acquired later that same year by Charrington’s). This is another Grade II listing, on account of being one of the best preserved remaining examples of the interwar “Brewers Tudor” style of pub architecture with many original features still intact; including (for unknown reasons) a built-in painting of Bonnie Prince Charlie landing back in Scotland in 1745.

Opposite the pub on the east side is the parish church of St Mary Newington. For much of its history the parish of Newington was in the county of Surrey and was the County Town until Kingston-on-Thames superseded it in that role in 1893. The current operational church building was opened in 1958 and stands beside what remains of its predecessor, the latter having been burnt out in a 1941 air raid. That Victorian church was consecrated in 1876 and described, at the time, by Sir George Gilbert Scott (yes, him again) as “one of the finest modern churches in London”. The postcard from 1910 in the sequence below shows the church as it was when constructed; following the fire only the clock tower and the low section of the arcading between the two horse carts were left standing.

Turning west off Kennington Park Road we’re into an area of public housing starting with Cornwall Square which leads into Kennington Way which merges into White Hart Street that takes us out onto Kennington Lane. A right turn and then another into Cottington Street brings us to a green space which incorporates the small but perfectly-formed Queen Elizabeth Jubilee Garden.

Beyond this, Opal Street takes us through a public housing estate where (and why not) the various blocks and access routes are all named after Shakespearean characters. So you’ve got Othello Close, Isabella House, Hamlet Court, Portia Court, Falstaff Court, Ariel Court and Dumain Court. If like me you couldn’t place the last one, he’s apparently a Lord at the court of the King of Navarre in Love’s Labours Lost.

To the north of Kennington Lane, on Renfrew Road, is another Grade II listed former courthouse. Lambeth Magistrates’ Court (originally known as Lambeth Police Court) was built in 1869 and designed by Thomas Charles Sorby in the Gothic Revival style and is the earliest surviving example of a Criminal Magistrates Court in the Metropolitan area. Since 1978 it has been home to the Jamyang Buddhist Centre which “provides a place for the study and practice of Tibetan Buddhism in the Mahayana tradition following the lineage of His Holiness the Dalai Lama”. (Image on the right below from Jamyang.co.uk)

From Renfrew Road we move on to Gilbert Road followed by Wincott Street, Kempsford Road and Reedsworth Street which takes us back on to Kennington Lane.

Chester Way, Denny Street and Denny Crescent nestle in the apex of Kennington Lane and Kennington Road and this little triangle forms another part of the Kennington Conservation area. The properties here were built immediately before WWI for the Duchy of Cornwall estate and the Dutch style 2-storey red brick cottages which comprise Denny Crescent are now all Grade II listed.

Couldn’t resist this photo of Adam West as Batman teaching Road Safety in Denny Crescent in 1967. (Credit to https://www.theundergroundmap.com for unearthing that one).

Back on the other side of Kennington Lane is the Durning Library which was purpose built in 1889, designed by Sidney R.J. Smith the architect of Tate Britain, (once again) in the Gothic Revival style. It was a gift to the people of Kennington from Jemima Durning Smith, the daughter of the Manchester cotton merchant, John Benjamin Smith, who in 1835 became the founding chairman of the Anti-Corn Law League, and Jemina Durning, an heiress from Liverpool. Amazingly, it still operates as a library today, despite having been under threat of closure for the last 25 years.

Bang on the junction of Kennington Lane and Kennington Road stands another grand Victorian-era pub – The Doghouse. It was previously known as The Roebuck (which is what you would probably have to be to get from here to Big Ben in 20 minutes as their website proclaims).

Kennington Road (aka the A23) was constructed in 1751, a year after Westminster Bridge was opened in order to improve communication from the bridge to routes south of the river Thames. With the growing popularity of Brighton as a resort in the later eighteenth century it became part of the route there, used by George IV on his excursions there and later for the London to Brighton Veteran Car Run. Many of the original Georgian terraces built alongside the new road still survive. Sadly, I was unable to find out any information on these carved heads adorning the windows of one of those terraces.

Turning back onto Reedworth Street offers a clear view of the monolithic 23-storey Fairford House erected in 1968. This is one of three towers which constitute the Cotton Gardens estate, the other two being Ebenezer and Hurley. They were designed by the architect George Finch and constructed by Wates using a pre-fabricated system. I guess I don’t really need to labour the contrast with some of the other residences highlighted here.

We’re retracing our steps a bit next; back along Kempsford Road then up the full length of Wincott Street to return to Kennington Road. Resuming northward we almost immediately turn off onto Bishops Terrace before making a tour of Oakden Street, Monkton Street and St Mary’s Gardens. A rare bit of horticultural content now. This shrub growing out of the pavement on one stretch of St Mary’s Gardens is widely known as the Rose of Sharon (aka Hibiscus Syriacus). The Latin name derives from the fact that it was originally collected for gardens in Syria though it is native to southern China. It is also the national flower of South Korea.

Sullivan Street and Walcot Square bring us back to Kennington Road for a final time before heading off towards Elephant and Castle along Brook Drive. We turn south again at Dante Road and make our way to the Cinema Museum on Dugard Way via George Mathers Road. On the way we pass the Osborne Water Tower House. The tower was built in 1867 to provide a 30,000-gallon water supply for the nearby Lambeth Workhouse where more than 800 destitute families were once housed and where seven-year-old Charlie Chaplin lived with his impoverished mother. It was rescued from dereliction in 2010 and converted into a five bedroom home at an estimated cost of around £2 million (which doesn’t include the £380k purchase price); a project that was featured on the TV show Grand Designs. The refurbishment included the restoration of the tower and the addition of a two-level glass cube on top giving views across central and south London with the largest sliding doors in Europe installed. Having been initially marketed at £3.6m it was eventually sold for £2.75m in 2021.

The Cinema Museum museum occupies the former Victorian workhouse building referred to above. It was founded in 1984 by avid collectors, Ronald Grant and Martin Humphries and is the only museum in the UK devoted to the experience of going to the cinema. It houses an extensive collection of memorabilia relating to the history of cinemas (as opposed to film) in the UK from plush velvet seats, impressive illuminated signs and elegantly tailored usher’s uniforms to movie stills, posters and cans of film. Understandably, much is made of the Charlie Chaplin connection. The museum puts on several screenings a month of classic and cult films, many on 16mm. I would particularly recommend the Kennington Noir programme which runs on the 2nd or 3rd Wednesday in the month. A few years ago I helped out a few times as a volunteer manning the bar but I decided that was best left to those who live locally. You can only visit the museum through a pre-booked guided tour or by attending one of the screen events so the interior shot below is from a pre-Covid visit with @eyresusan.

We return to Dante Road via Holyoak Road then cut through Longville Road to St Mary’s Churchyard and follow Churchyard Row, which runs alongside, down to Newington Butts which joins Kennington Park Road to the Elephant and Castle roundabout. Before being appropriated as the name for this short strip of road, Newington Butts it’s own hamlet within the parish of Newington. It is believed to have been named so because of an archery butts, or practice field in the area (in case you were thinking of something else). Standing on the western side of the Elephant and Castle junction is the Metropolitan Tabernacle Baptist Church. The Metropolitan Tab­ernacle is an independent reformed Baptist church whose history goes back to 1650, thirty years after the sailing of the Pilgrim Fathers. The present site was acquired for the Tabernacle, in the mid-19th century, partly because it was thought to be the site of the execution of the Southwark Martyrs (3 men who were burned at the stake for heresy in 1557during the reign of the Catholic, Queen Mary I). The pastor at the time was Charles Haddon Spurgeon (1834 – 1892) who preached to crowds of up to 10,000, had 63 volumes of his sermons printed and led the Tabernacle to independence from the Baptist Union. The original Spurgeon’s Tabernacle was burned down in 1898 and rebuilt along similar lines. It was later burned down for the second time when hit by an incendiary bomb in May 1941. In 1957 it was rebuilt on the original perimeter walls, but to a different design.

Right next door to the Tabernacle is the London College of Communication (LCC), part of the University of the Arts London. It took up residence here in 1962 when it was known as the London College of Printing and its emphasis was on the graphic arts. Since then it has developed courses in photography, film, digital media and public relations and it took on its current name in 2004 to reflect this expansion. (No Grade II listing for this one as yet :)).

Beyond the LCC we turn onto St George’s Road and then make a series of crossings between this and Brook Drive. First up is Oswin Street followed by Elliotts Row. Hayles Buildings on the latter are artisans’ dwellings that were built in 1891 and 1902 by the Hayles Charity which today is part of the Walcot Foundation based in Lambeth.

Lamlash Street which links Elliotts Row to Hayles Street has, rather charmingly, been turned into a community garden.

West Square, which together with Orient Street, Hedger Street and Austral Street forms another pair of connections between St George’s Road and Brook Drive, is four sides of (mainly) Georgian terraces surrounding a communal garden (open to the public for once). The name comes from Colonel Temple West who died in 1784, bequeathing the land to his wife and eldest son, who shortly thereafter granted leases to build houses on the site. The garden is notable for a number of splendid and ancient mulberry trees.

Geraldine Street, which leads off of the north-western corner of the square offers a good view of the dome of the Imperial War Museum (IWM).

….and from here we can cut through into Geraldine Mary Harmsworth Park which occupies the former site of the Bethlem Royal Hospital. The 15 acre site was purchased by Geraldine’s son Harold in 1926 and opened as a park dedicated to her eight years later. Geraldine had 14 children in total, 11 of whom survived infancy, which she had to bring up in increasingly straightened circumstances due to her husband’s alcoholism. Harold, her second son, and eldest son, Alfred, went on to become the owners of The Daily Mirror and The Daily Mail and Viscount Rothermere and Viscount Northcliffe, respectively. Much of the credit (or blame depending on your perspective) for the rise of so-called popular journalism in this country rests on their shoulders.

In 2015 Australian artist, Morganico, was commissioned to create a sculpture with peace as its theme out of a diseased plane tree in the park. Had I done this walk just a year earlier I might have seen it still standing but, unfortunately, in 2023 it had to be felled as it was starting to rot.

As you may have surmised, The Imperial War Museum is the final item on the agenda for today. In 1917 the Government of the time decided that a National War Museum should be set up to collect and display material relating to the Great War (which was still being fought). Because of the interest from Dominion nations, many of whose subjects had fought and died in the war, the museum was given the title of Imperial War Museum. It was formally established by Act of Parliament in 1920 and opened in the Crystal Palace by King George V on 9 June 1920. From 1924 to 1935 it was housed in two galleries adjoining the former Imperial Institute, South Kensington then on 7 July 1936 the Duke of York, shortly to become King George VI, reopened the museum in its present home, formerly the central portion of Bethlem Royal Hospital, at the bequest of the aforementioned Lord (Viscount) Rothermere (aka Harold Harmsworth).

At the outset of the Second World War the IWM’s terms of reference were enlarged to cover both world wars and they were again extended in 1953 to include all military operations in which Britain or the Commonwealth have been involved since August 1914. In 2017 this remit expanded still further with an exhibition, People Power: Fighting for Peace, which told the story of how peace movements have influenced perceptions of war and conflict. The museum was itself the site of a disarmament demonstration, in 1983, organised by Southwark Greenham Women’s Peace Group.  The two guns in front of the museum were installed there in 1968. One came from HMS Ramillies which first saw action in 1920 during the Greco-Turkish War and was later used against Italian land forces and warships in 1940. The other, initially mounted on HMS Resolution, which also saw service during the Greco-Turkish War, was remounted in HMS Roberts, an important unit in the naval forces assembled for the invasion of Normandy in June 1944. 

Finally, just going back to the subject of exhibitions; although I didn’t see the one mentioned above I have been to a couple of excellent ones this year including one on the day of this visit showcasing the work of war photographer, Tim Hetherington, who tragically died in April 2011 from injuries sustained when photographing unrest in Libya. The exhibition is closed now but some of the videos included in it, such as Liberian Graffiti, are available to view online.