More From Brockley: Pictures from my walk on 18th March 1990 in Brockley. The previous post on this walk was Nunhead and Brockley. The pictures in this post are all from a small area of Brockley.
Mantle Rd, Brockley, Lewisham, 1990, 90-3f-31
Two men walk around a street corner into the sun, their shadows clean on the pavement behind them. Like many who lived# in the area the two men are black.
This Brockley Cross at the north end of Mantle Road and it slopes down under a railway bridge to Brockley Station. Two railway lines cross here and I think the 4 aspect signal was on the line from London Bridge to Brockley. The other line, according to Edith’s Streets, was a goods line and the area behind the hoardings was Martin’s sidings with room for 36 coal waggons. This was on land belonging to Martins Dairy at 4 Endwell Road, leased to leased to the London North West Railway and sub let to coal merchant Charrington Warren Ltd.
The steps at right lead to the side entrance to Endwell Court, a block features in my previous post.
Josies Cafe was next to the railway bridge on Mantle Road which is at the right of the picture. There was still a café here (no longer Josie’s) until around 2010, but since then this has been a small empty plot.
Josies Cafe seen from the opposite side of Mantle Road with the grassy bank leading up to the goods line which crosses Mantle Road here.
Brockley Paper Co, Mantle Rd, Brockley, Lewisham, 1990, 90-3f-35
I think this building housing the Brockley Paper Co was next to Josies Cafe, and has been demolished and replaced by a block of flats with shops on the ground floor. One of these at 1a Mantle Road is now the London Print Shop.
This small row was just south of Foxwell Road and you can see the railway bridge in the distance at right and the sign for Josies Cafe.
This block which included The Maypole Inn whose sign can be seen was demolished before 2008 – the pub closed in 2006. A block of flats was built on the northern part of the site around 2012, but I don’t know where the ‘low cost flats’ advertised here were located.
I walked to the other side of Brockley Station over the station footbridge and along Coulgate Street to Brockley Road and into Harefield Road. The building in the centre background is the back of a house on the corner of Foxberry Street and Coulgate Street,.
This post began with two men, so I’ll end it with two women who walked in front of me to cross the road as I was looking at the graffiti on the wall at the read of the corner shop.
This had the message ‘FREE WINSTON SILCOTT’ above a lot of less legible scrawls. Silcott was one of the ‘Tottenham 3‘ convicted in 1987 for the murder of PC Keith Blakelock on the Broadwater Farm Estate in Tottenham in October 1985, but had been nowhere near the scened. All three convictions were quashed in 1991 after it was found the police had fabricated their confessions. He remained in jail as he was convicted for an unrelated murder of a boxer and nightclub bouncer and was only released in 2003.
The Beer and Wine Trade Society decided in 1851 to provide an asylum for its elderly poor members and purchased land on the north side of Nunhead Green, launching an appeal to its members to build these almshouses. They were built at at a cost of around £3,000 as a terrace of seven dwellings to house 13 people. The Metropolitan Beer and Wine Trade Society almshouses, architect William Webbe, opened in 1853.
The accommodation was on a generous scale, with each having four rooms and a kitchen and a part of the garden behind to grow vegetables. As well as the accommodation the residents also received a weekly allowance.
The almshouses are Grade II listed and are now private homes.
Nunhead Library, Gordon Rd, Nunhead, Southwark, 1990, 90-3e-26
Nunhead Library was designed by Robert Whellock of Camberwell in an Arts and Crafts style and built in 1896. Since 1965 in the London Borough of Southwark where it is one of four libraries which were founded by philanthropist John Passmore Edwards and is still in use as a library. Edwards founded another 11 libraries in London, most no longer in use.
Nunhead had been a part of the ancient parish of Camberwell but became a separate parish in 1878 and became part of the Metropolitan Borough of Camberwell in 1900, which became part of the London Borough of Southwark in 1965.
Nunhead Railway station is in Gibbon Road and this Gents Hairdresser at 52 and Launderette at 54 (and the Fish & Chip shop at 50 whose frying times are in the corner of their window) are just past the bridge north of the station entrance. Rather to my surprise there is still Gents Hairdresser and a Fish and Chip shop here, though the Launderette closed around 2010 and is now two homes at 54 and 54a.
The two people sitting reading outside – before the age of mobile phones – are doubtless waiting for their washing to finish inside the launderette.
I went down Gibbon Road and turned left into Hathway Terrace, which turns into Kitto Road and leads on to Drakefell Rd. Somewhere here was this path with a broken-down fence leading to an area of prefabs.
In 201 Elisabeth Blanchet and Jame Hearn from the Prefab Museum photographed the interior of a prefab in Drakefell Road and posted a video of the resident, John De’Ath, who had moved in when these prefabs were new in 1948 and stayed there until his death in 2017, a very satisfied resident. You can read more about London’s prefabs and see a photograph of one of them in a GLIAS Journal, when in 2024 the two last prefabs there were awaiting demolition.
Telegraph Hill Park, Brockley, Lewisham, 1990, 90-3f-55
The 10 acres site the hill top on Kitto Road was created in 1894 thanks to George Livesey, chairman of the South Metropolitan Gas Company and a local philanthropist. It has good views to central London and south and east towards Croydon and Shooters Hill, which made it a great side for a semaphore station which was built around 1795 – as one of a series which formed an optical communication system from London to Dover and Southampton with large arms which could be moved to different positions to convey letters or codes.
The French had invented the system for their military and we copied it – and it was able to speedily deliver the new of Wellington’s victory at Waterloo (among many other messages over the years) back to London. The signal station was out of use by 1823, but the name it gave to what had previously been ‘Plowed Garlic Hill’ stuck.
Rather than take the views, I decided to make a picture that showed a hill. I don’t think it shows the part of the park which once had the telegraph station.
Mantle Road and Endwell Road meet at Brockley Cross, just to the north of Brockley Station, which is just down the hill which goes under the railway bridge at the left of Endwell Court. This rather isolated block appears to have been built as a mansion block with perhaps four flats and looks very similar now.
A small group of three semi-detached houses on the north side of Drakefell Road close to Brockley Cross have some rather unusually detailed ornamentation. This end of Drakefell Road was Penmartin Road until 1902, and I think these houses probably date from a few years before then. The houses are now flats.
As always, comments and corrections are welcome. More from Brockley in a later post.
The last image in my previous post was a general view of the north side of Deptford Broadway from close to the corner with Brookmill Road, and I commented on the ‘Antique Warehouse’ built for ‘Montague Burton, The Tailor of Taste’. I walked west along Deptfprd Broadway to take this picture from a closer viewpoint. As well as the antiques, this building was also in use as a Snooker Club, boast 16 full size tables and open 22 hours daily. Over the central door are the names Southampton and Bournemouth.
The name ‘Montague Burton the Tailor of Taste Ltd’ dates from the registration of the limited company in 1917 and was almost certainly originally visible in the large panel on the frontage although I can see no trace of it in my photograph. Burton’s architect Harry Wilson designed a whole range of similar variants of these Art Deco stores for towns and cities across the country in the 1930s, and there is a splendid ‘Spotters Guide‘ online – although it doesn’t mention Deptford. Over the central door are the names Southampton and Bournemouth, and stores often carried a list of a few of the leading branches across the frontage at the top of the ground floor windows. Burtons and Woolworths both built many branches in a Deco style and appear to have copied ideas from each other.
A slightly wonky view of No8 Deptford Broadway taken from the other side of the road. Almost all of these images were made with a 35mm Zuiko shift lens where the optical elements could be pushed both horizontally or vertically to enable me to produce images without converging or diverging verticals and play other small tricks with perspective. I still occasionally find myself trying to push other lenses in the same way and they don’t!
The Zuiko lens was a good example of this type of lens, but not entirely simple to use; it was a “manual lens” and you viewed the subject and made any necessary lens shift with the lens at its widest F2.8 aperture, then pressed a small lever to stop down the lens iris to the smaller aperture needed for the exposure. At full aperture the corners of the image were not sharp, and sometimes I failed to stop down sufficiently (or at all) to bring them into proper focus.
For this image I didn’t quite get the camera back vertical and the verticals in the building diverge, something rather less common in photographs than converging vertical. The shopfront here clearly goes across one building and a part of its neighbour (the rest of which housed the Dover Castle pub) and its missing panel allows us to view the lower part of the first floor window. Both these buildings have now been replace by a rather mediocre modern development
Deptford Seventh Day Adventist Church, New Cross Rd, New Cross, Lewisham, 1988 88-10f-12
Continuing west, Deptford Broadway turns into New Cross Road where this charming building was built as a private house, but around 1900 the New Cross Equitable Building Society – which was founded elsewhere in New Cross in 1866 – moved in. It remained here until the Registrar of Friendly Societies closed it down in 1984, for unsafe financial practices involving large borrowings which later became rather normal.
The building then became the Deptford Seventh Day Adventist Church as my photograph shows; in 1991 they bought and moved to rather large premises on the corner of Devonshire Drive and Egerton Drive, the former St Paul’s, built as an Anglican Church in 1865-6 by the prolific church architect S S Teulon which closed in 1978, and was then used by other church groups and scouts until becoming Greenwich Seventh Day Adventist Church. Since 1994 470 New Cross Road has been the Iyengar Yoga Institute
Zion Chapel, New Cross Rd Baptist Church, New Cross Rd, New Cross, Lewisham, 1988 88-10f-13
More or less next door at 466 is this short passageway leading to Zion Chapel. Its Grade II listing places it in Brockley (its electoral ward) and dates it 1846. The listing does not mention the gateway and lantern which I think add greatly to its appeal – and which my choice of viewpoint was carefully chosen to include and emphasise.
Seventh Day Adventist, Baptist, Church,New Cross Rd, New Cross, Lewisham, 1988 88-10f-15
Another picture shows the Adventist Church, the house flanking the passage to Zion Chapel and its lantern and gateway, with at the left a part of Addey & Stanhope School. Both schools were ancient foundations in Deptford, Stanhope School being founded by the vicar of Deptford, George Stanhope in 1714. Addey School was only founded in 1821, but the money came from the will of John Addey (1550-1606), the Master Shipwright at Deptford Dockyard who left £200 for the poor of Deptford. The two schools were merged in the late 19th century and moved to this location in 1899. It has since expanded considerably.
Fire Brigade Union, 435, New Cross Rd, New Cross, Lewisham, 1988 88-10f-01
This house along with the others in the blocks on both sides of Mornington Road now look considerably smarter than in 1988. It appears to have once been some kind of offices of the Fire Brigade Union, FBU, founded in 1918. But it made me feel rather strange…
Two doors down, at 439 was the site of the 1981 New Cross Fire which killed 13 young black people, with one survivor taking his own life 2 years later. The police investigation of the fire which concluded, according to Wikipedia “that there was no evidence of arson and that the fire was believed to be accidental” enraged the black community and lead to a “Black People’s Day of Action” with 20,000 people marching from New Cross to Hyde Park. The Wikipedia article states ‘The New Cross fire, described by Darcus Howe in 2011 as “the blaze we cannot forget”, is significant as a turning point in the relationship between Black Britons, the police and the media, and marks an “intergenerational alliance to expose racism, injustices and the plight of black Britons“.’
New Cross Rd, New Cross,, Lewisham, 1988 88-10g-63
This doorway is still there at 455 New Cross Road, though looking just a little different and now with a metal gate. It seems a particularly elaborate entrance to the flats above the shops, and there was something about the light in the segment window above the door which made me see it as the dome of a head, some great intelligence incorporated into the building. Or perhaps I was hallucinating.
