On 18th March 1990 I took an early train to Vauxhall and then travelled east on the top deck of a 36 bus to Camberwell Green. I saw the buildings at the crossroads there and rang the bell to get off the bus to make a photograph.
Here I crossed the road and walked a few yards to take this picture looking across the start of Denmark Hill to Camberwell Green and the start of Camberwell Road Most of the buildings in my picture can still be identified although their uses have changed. That ornate National Westminster Bank is now Camberwell Green Surgery, and Kennedy’s Sausages are long gone, their site now occupied by Technozone.
The Grade II listed Baroque Revival bank was built in 1899 for the London and County Bank, which after a series of mergers with other banks including the London and Westminster Bank shortened its name the the Westminster Bank in 1923 and merged with the National Provincial Bank to form the National Westminster Bank in 1970.
But I was on my way to Peckham and after taking a single frame crossed back to the bus stop and took the next bus along Camberwell New Road to Peckham High Street and walked down Rye Lane.
Here the lighting was right for was an impressive array of architectural styles and eras on the west side of the street, from plain late Victorian to more ornate turn of the century, 1930s and probably 1950s or 60s.
The range of buildings represents the establishment of Rye Lane as one of South London’s shopping streets in the late 1870s, but outstanding for me was Peckham Indoor Market. As I wrote in an earlier post here:
“Peckham Indoor Market was built around 1938 or shortly after as Rye Lane Bargain Centre with an imposing frontage for a narrow arcade leading back to a large covered market. It’s a style that rather makes it look like a cinema. Across the top is the message ‘Come Rain Or Shine It’s Always Fine at Peckham Indoor Market’.
In the early 2000s the market at the back was reduced in size with part now redeveloped as flats but the front section remains and is now Rye Lane Market, housing over 50 small shop units.”
The Morning Star at 231 Rye Lane was built in 1871 and is now the Nag’s Head, having changed its name to cash in on the BBC TV comedy ‘Only Fools And Horses’, though I think the BBC made them paint over a reference to this high on the frontage. The pub was South London’s most famous Darts Pub in the 1970s and 80s.
But I was really photographing ‘The Triangle’ which had been a favourite meeting place for Mods and their scooters.
20 Gordon Road was built as the Camberwell Workhouse in 1878 when a competition for their design was won by architects Berriman and Sons Ltd. It housed 743 able-bodied inmates. Women were employed in laundries and men broke stones and chopped wood. Taken over by the London County Council in 1930 it became the Camberwell Reception Centre, closing around the end of the 1970s. Minor buildings on the site were demolished and the main buildings converted into flats.
This was later simply a casual ward, and took in many normally sleeping rough and only seeking accommodation in bad weather or desperate for a meal. Many tramping the roads preferred to sleep rough as to get a meal and a bed for the night men were expected to then to join the permanent residents working most of a day breaking up stones to mend roads or chopping wood – or in the laundry for women.
There were still ‘tramps’ in the 1950s who would knock at our back door in oouter London and my mother would talk to them, give them a mug of tea and fill their water bottle if they had one, but few people would make them welcome – and some set the dogs on them. We only had a cat, and my mother was a charitable woman. Tramps would often make chalk marks on pavements to tell others which houses to visit and which to avoid.
Tramps would often run away before finishing their work – and this was a criminal offence which could put them in prison for up to a month were they caught until the 1970s.
A bench from Gordon Road is now in the London Museum together with a good account of how ‘casuals’ would be treated, at least after the National Assistance Board built a waiting room at ‘the Spike’ in 1952 – though they think the bench was only provided after 1964 when a report noted that chairs were ‘brandished as weapons in altercations between waiting applicants’.
It quotes two of the casuals:
‘Upon arrival at Gordon Road, you had to wait with dozens of other dossers in a dingy, unheated outhouse containing nothing but a few benches. You might have to wait here for several hours, even all night‘ The waiting room was often overcrowded and violent: ‘Last night sat for three hours before the porters called us in. Quite a few drunks, same old faces, singing, swearing, bottles breaking, glass all over the place. One goes flying through the window and I duck as it flies over my head. Five or six porters come rushing in, they grab the drunk and push him out the gate.’
Those admitted were then given a hot bath – many were very dirty and infected by lice – before being fed. The Camberwell Reception Centre only finally closed in 1985 and was still derelict five years later when I made these pictures.
The Star of India was a Victorian pub on the corner of Gordon Road and Brayards Rd, dating from before the 1871 census. It was closed and demolished around 2000. A block of 12 flats on the site was completed by Habitat for Humanity using 1500 volunteer days in 2009. The flats were sold on completion to Hexagon Housing Association and New World Housing Association.
More from this walk in a later post.
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