The previous post on this walk on Sunday 12th February 1989 was A Market, Chapel & More Houses – Peckham
You will look in vain for this school on Bellenden Road now. The school, a special school, moved to a shared site with Archbishop Michael Ramsey School,Camberwell in 2013 leaving the building empty. It was demolished in 2015 and replaced by Cherry Garden special school, which moved out of Bermondsey to here.
I’m unsure as to the date of this school, though it was clearly postwar, possibly dating from the 1960s. Perhaps surprisingly it was not mentioned by Cherry and Pevsner in their London 2: South volume though it seemed to me to be clearly of architectural interest. Southwark Council described it as “a distinctive post-war school” but wanted to knock it down so went on to say “it is not of sufficient quality of construction nor is it sufficiently unique to warrant the particular protection given by listing“. I can’t comment on the structural soundness from the four pictures I took but can’t think where you can find a similar building. It gets a rather deprecating comment in the Holly Grove Conservation Area Appraisal, “Highshore School, immediately adjacent to the conservation area, was built using standardised lightweight constructional systems and open site-planning principles which undermine the established morphology of street frontages“, not fitting in neatly with the Georgian housing in the area.
This house is on the corner of Higshore Road and Elm Grove and I think its address is 64 Elm Grove. It is certainly a very impressive and substantial late Victorian house with a quirkiness I found appealing enough to take a second frame.
I didn’t photograph the listed houses in Highshore Road, perhaps suffering from a surfeit of rather standard Georgian or early Victorian houses in the area. Fine though they are I didn’t feel a need to photograph all of them.
The Post Office Depot is rather less usual and carries a ‘Historic Southwark’ board as well as being Grade II listed. This is possibly the earliest building in what was then known as Hanover Street, built in 1816 as the Friends Meeting House, apparently on the site of a pond. It was considerably enlarged in 1843.
These buildings are stll there at the north end of Rye Lane, though now with different shops, but almost all the buildings visible on Peckham High Street in the picture have gone. There is still a bank at 65 Peckham High Street the extreme corner of which can just be seen but the rest of the buildings including the Midland Bank have gone, with a walkway here now leading to the Peckham Pulse Leisure Centre built in 1998.
I took another picture of these shops from a slightly different viewpoint to one I had made a month earlier which I wrote about aat some length in a post on that earlier walk. The building housing ‘Stiletto Ecpresso’ has been replaced since 1989 by a taller and rather less interesting structure but the rest still look much the same, though with different uses.
Had I been aware of the changes that were soon to take place in this area I would have made more than this picture at Canal Head. This was the start of the walk along the route of the Peckham Branch of the Surrey Canal, at the back of what is now the The Drovers Arms, roughly at the south-east corner of the more recent Leisure Centre.
The Drovers Arms has the address 71-79 Peckham High St and tucked away down a short driveway at its read is this building at 71, now a dental surgery, Peckham Dental Care. The building at right with a bricked up and painted over doorway is the pub, which has a rather grander and more useful entrance on the High Street, opened in 2000.
The main building at 73-79 was built around the end of the 19th century, according to Historic England by architects J & J W Edmeston, for the London and South Western Bank. The Edmestons were a family of architects working in London, of whom the best known was probably James Edmeston Jr (1823-98). I think 71 may be a little earlier.
This walk will continue in a later post. The first post on this walk was Aged Pilgrims, Sceaux, Houses & Lettsom.
