Posts Tagged ‘Coal Line’

Consort Road Peckham

Thursday, January 12th, 2023

The previous post on this walk on Sunday 12th February 1989 was Gold Bullion, Victoriana, Flats, Insurance and Vats – Peckham.

House, Consort Rd, Peckham, Southwark, 1989 89-2e-16
House, Consort Rd, Peckham, Southwark, 1989 89-2e-16

Back in the 1930s there were at least five Albert Roads in London, along with a number of Albert Streets, Albert Mews etc and the authorities embarked on an orgy of renaming to sort out the confusions that could arise. Albert had been particularly popular after Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha had married Queen Victoria in 1840 and at the time of his death in 1861, and some, such as Consort Road, were renamed to reflect their original dedication.

15 Consort Road is Grade II listed and described as “Mid C19, recently restored” and it rather looks as if my picture was taken during that restoration, with the house in excellent condition but the garden rather lacking. Its listing is perhaps more about its part in a group of similar houses rather than its individual merit, and 11,13 and 17 are also listed.

Rather better known now is its new neighbour, 15 and a half Consort Road, an long, low and unobtrusive house now alongside the right hand side of this house with a wood-covered frontage extending a little closer to the road. From the front it rather looks like a garage which someone forget to put in the door, but it was a truly innovative building by Richard Paxton Architects in 2002, shortlisted in the RIBA Awards 2006, and featured on TV’s Grand Designs.

House, Consort Rd, Peckham, Southwark, 1989 89-2f-64
House, Consort Rd, Peckham, Southwark, 1989 89-2f-64

Two railway lines with three bridges cross Consort Road just a few yards from each other, one leading from Peckham Rye to Nunhead and the other from Peckham Rye to Queen’s Road Peckham, along which is now planned to build an urban linear corridor park, the Coal Line, which I visited in 2015.

The bridges and the area around them have changed considerably since 1989. But I think the viaduct is of the line to Nunhead and this house on the edge of the workhouse site has since been demolished.

Consort Works, House, Consort Rd, Peckham, Southwark, 1989 89-2f-65
Consort Works, House, Consort Rd, Peckham, Southwark, 1989 89-2f-65

Limited were in a post-war building on Consort Road just a little south of the railway bridges and I think they made waterproof products using rubber on glass cloth. Their building replaced some older Victorian terrace housing, some of which was still there at the right when I made this picture. I think the company under a slightly different name is still in business elsewhere.

These buildings have all been replaced by modern flats and an industrial unit.

Closed Shop,  Consort Rd, Peckham, Southwark, 1989 89-2f-66
Closed Shop, Consort Rd, Peckham, Southwark, 1989 89-2f-66

This shop was obviously on a street corner, almost certainly one of the four corners with Consort Road and Brayards Rd. I was interested in the shapes and the tiling as well as the fly posting and crude graffiti – which appears to be two practices at producing the final result at right, perhaps a stylised ’68’. The doorway with a rusticated keystone seemed unusually tall and narrow. It was probably Victorian although the shopfront seemed later.

Gold Diggers Arms, pub, Brayards Rd, Consort Rd, Peckham, Southwark, 1989 89-2f-62
Gold Diggers Arms, pub, Brayards Rd, Consort Rd, Peckham, Southwark, 1989 89-2f-62

The Gold Diggers Arms was a sizeable pub on the northeast corner of Brayards Road and Consort Road and was still in business when I made this picture. It had been here since at least 1871, but closed in 2001 and was demolished in 2005. The site is now a modern development, Dayak Court, flats above ground floor commercial premises.

The Hooper Hall, Consort Rd, Peckham, Southwark, 1989 89-2f-53
The Hooper Hall, Consort Rd, Peckham, Southwark, 1989 89-2f-53

Hooper Hall at 111 Consort Road opened as a mission of St Mary Magdalene in St Mary’s Rd in 1907, which was destroyed by a land mine in 1940. Worship continued here and in the church hall while money was raised to build a new church, opened in 1962 and itself replaced in 2011. The mission has lasted rather better.

A notice tells us that in 1989 it was used by both St Mary Magdalene and the Peckham Christian Fellowship. Later it became home to the Christ Miracle Gospel Ministries International but was put up for sale in 2012, and I think the church moved to Edmonton. A fence was put up around Hooper Hall around 2015 as if building work was about to begin, but little seems to have happened since. It appears still to be available for sale.


This walk will continue in a later post. The first post on this walk was Aged Pilgrims, Sceaux, Houses & Lettsom.


Nurses, Coal, Art, Biafrans & Sunflowers

Monday, May 30th, 2022

Nurses, Coal, Art, Biafrans & Sunflowers – Saturday May 30th 2015 was another varied day of events and protests across London.


Filipino Nurses tell Daily Mail to apologise – Kensington.

Nurses, Coal, Art, Biafrans & Sunflowers

I began the day travelling to High Street Kensington, just a short walk from the offices of the Daily Mail. It has the largest circulation of any UK newspaper but is also the UK’s least reliable source of information. Recently The Factual analysed 1,000 articles from each of 245 major news sources from around the world although mainly from the USA and including international news organisations such as Reuters and AP. The Mail came out with the third lowest score of any with a Factual Grade of 39.7% compared to the average of 61.9%. In a table listing all the results, even The Sun does a little better, as do the Daily Express and RT News, though all of these are way below average while The Guardian was above average along with the BBC, though neither among the top scorers.

Nurses, Coal, Art, Biafrans & Sunflowers

We don’t have a free press in this country, we have a press largely controlled by a small number of billionaires who, as these figures show, use it largely as a source of disinformation and the promotion of their prejudices – including homophobia, racism and misogyny. Articles are more generally written as click-bait rather than with any desire to inform or educate, and it was hardly surprising when in 2016 it was sanctioned by the International Press Standards Organisation for violating professional norms for accuracy and in 2017 Wikipedia editors decided it was a “generally unreliable” source.

Nurses, Coal, Art, Biafrans & Sunflowers

I was there for the start of a long protest by Filipino health workers outside the Daily Mail over its reporting of the Victoriano Chua case which insulted Filipino NHS workers as a whole despite the vital contribution they make to the NHS. The demanded the Daily Mail apologise for its racist comments and to recognise the contribution that they make, keeping our NHS afloat. As someone who a dozen years earlier had been looked after in intensive care by a Filipino nurse I feel very grateful to them, though angry at the UK government for not training enough nurses and doctors – and in particular for removing the training bursary for nurses which has now made the situation much worse. But I did feel they were asking the leopard to change its spots.

Filipino Nurses tell Daily Mail apologise


Walking the Coal Line – Peckham

Rye Lane

I left the Filipinos as their protest was still building up and journeyed across London to Peckham Rye where we were invited to take a tour of the proposed Peckham Coal Line elevated linear urban park between Peckham Rye and Queens Road Peckham stations as a distant part of the Chelsea Fringe Festival events – something vaguely related to the annual flower show.

The Coal Line was frankly hugely over-hyped, particularly in comparing it to New York’s ‘High Line’, and the walk was largely close to but not on the actual proposed line. The former coal sidings on the viaduct which inspired the project are next to a working rail line and could only be seen looking down from neighbouring buildings.

As I commented: “The walk is essentially an urban linear park that would make a useful short cut for some local walkers and cyclists, and could also be a part of a longer leisure walk from Brixton to the Thames. I hope it comes into existence, as the cost would be relatively low and it would be a useful addition to the area.

But I still enjoyed an interesting walk, visiting both the Bussey Building in the former industrial estate Copeland Park south of the line and the multi-storey car park to the north which now houses a cafe, a local radio performance space and another rooftop bar next to the Derek Jarman memorial garden and has good views of Peckham and central London. And having followed the official route to Queens Road Peckham I walked back a different way vaguely along the Coal Line at ground level, finally travelling more closely along it in an Overground train that took me to Canada Water and the Jubilee Line to Waterloo.

Walking the Coal Line


UK Uncut Art Protest – Westminster Bridge

UK Uncut met outside Waterloo station for their mystery protest taking direct action at an undisclosed location. Police liaison officers tried to find out where they were going and what they intended to do, but nobody was talking to them. Finally they set off and marched the short distance to Westminster Bridge where they spread a large piece of cloth on the roadway and painted a banner telling Parliament that collecting dodged taxes would bring in more than cutting public services.

They lifted up the banner and then ‘dropped’ it over the side of the bridge. It was a long run to take a picture of it hanging from the bridge, and I’m not sure worth the effort. It would have been better to have lowered it on the downstream side so as to get the Houses of Parliament in the background.

Another group of protesters in Parliament Square were protesting against the plans to get rid of the Human Rights Act, and some of the UK Uncut people had joined them before the end of the ‘Art’ protest. In May 2022 the government announced it was getting rid of the act and replacing it with a ‘British Bill of Rights’ which will allow the police to “perform freer functions“, Leading charities concerned with human rights have condemned the changes as affecting “the ability of individuals to hold the government and public bodies to account by bringing cases when their human rights have been breached.” They state “The Human Rights Act has greatly benefited a vast number of people from across society, improving their health and wellbeing; ensuring their dignity, autonomy, privacy, and family life; and overall improving their quality of life.” Many see the changes as yet another move towards fascism and a police state.

UK Uncut Art Protest


Biafrans demand independence – Trafalgar Square.

Biafra came from the Kingdom of Nri of the Igbo people, which lasted from the 10th century to 1911 and was one of Africa’s great civilisations before the European colonisation.

Biafra was incorporated into Southern Nigeria by the colonialists in the 1884 Berlin Conference and then became part of the united Nigeria in 1914. Biafrans declared independence from Nigeria in 1967, but lost the long and bloody civil war that followed, with many Biafran civilians dying of starvation.

Biafrans demand independence


Mass rally Supports National Gallery strikers – Trafalgar Square

After a large rally in Trafalgar Square, National Gallery staff striking against privatisation marched towards the Sainsbury Wing, holding a sit down and short rally outside after police blocked the doors to the gallery. The gallery doors were then locked.

Candy Udwin, a PCS rep at the National Gallery had been sacked for her trade union activities in connection with the plans to privatise gallery staff and the opposition to it by staff. Exhibitions in the Sainsbury wing have already been guarded by privatised staff, and the security there is also run by the private company. After 100 days of strike action the dispute was finally resolived in early October 2015 after the appointment of a new gallery director with terms and conditions of service protected and Udwin returning to work.

Mass rally Supports National Gallery strikers


Six years ago: 30 May 2015

Sunday, May 30th, 2021

May 30th, 2015 was one of those days where I travelled around London stopping off for various reasons en-route. As always on such occasions I give thanks to the GLC for their efforts which resulted in the London-wide travel card before they were sadly eliminated by Mrs Thatcher, leaving the city largely rudderless for a crucial 15 years when it fell behind other cities in the world – except of course for the financial City of London which further cemented its reputation as the corruption capital of the world.

London is very much a world city, and my first event, outside the Daily Mail offices in Kensington reflected this, with protest by Filipino health workers over their coverage of the case of Victorino Chua, a nurse found guilty of murdering two patients and injuring others. The newspaper used the case to insult Filipino NHS workers who have for years formed a vital part of the NHS. When I came round in intensive care in 2003 it was to see a Filipino nurse who greatly impressed me with his care and attentiveness over the next few days.

It had taken around an hour for me to get to Kensington, and the journey across London to Peckham Rye was around another 50 minutes. I was there not for a protest but for the proposed Peckham Coal Line, an elevated linear urban park whose proponents compared in extremely misleading publicity to New York’s ‘High Line’ walk. And while the public were invited to walk the Coal Line, we were largely unable to do so as it is still an active part of the railway network – and one I took a train along after following around its length and back on existing local roads and paths.

Despite that it was an interesting walk, including a visit to the roof of the multi-storey car park and the Derek Jarman memorial garden. Part of the proposed walk is already open to the public as a small nature reserve, cleared beside the railway line for a massive inner-ring road – part of the proposed London Ringways motorway scheme which was fortunately abandoned after the terrible impact of building its earliest sections including the A40(M) Westway in Notting Hill became clear.

A train from Peckham Rye station took me along the route of the Coal Line to Queen’s Road Peckham and then on to London Bridge, and the Underground to Waterloo where I met with UK Uncut who were to go to an undisclosed location for some direct action. This turned out to be Westminster Bridge, where the protesters blocked the road.

The then unrolled a large yellow banner and began to fill in the slogan that had been marked out on it with black paint. After some parading around on the bridge with it, they then lowered it over the upstream side of the bridge and lit a couple of smoke flares. I’d run down across the bridge and a little along the embankment in front of St Thomas’s Hospital to take pictures of the banner drop.

The banner drop was really on the wrong side of the bridge for photographs and it seemed something of an anti-climax. It was hard to read the banner and its message ‘£12 bn more cuts £120 bn tax dodged – Austerity is a lie’ ” was perhaps a little understated. I think may of those present had expected something rather more direct, both in message and action. I went on with many of them to join another protest in Parliament Square which was just coming to an end, against government plans to get rid of the Human Rights Act.

It was then a short walk to Trafalgar Square, where on the anniversary of the 1967 declaration of Biafran independence, Biafrans were calling on the UK government for support in getting back the country which they claim was taken away from them by the Berlin Conference in 1884 and incorporated into Southern Nigeria. They say Biafra was successor of the Kingdom of Nri of the Igbo people, which lasted from the 10th century to 1911 and was one of Africa’s great civilisations before the European colonisation. As well as backing the call for independence the protest also remembered those who died in the Nigerian-Biafran War.

In the main body of the square, striking National Gallery staff and supporters were holding a rally after PCS rep Candy Udwin was sacked for her trade union activities against the plans to privatise gallery staff.

At the end of the rally, people moved towards the Sainsbury Wing, where security is already run by a private company and exhibitions guarded by outsourced staff. Police blocked the doors to stop them entering, and they sat down to hold a further rally blocking the gallery.

Mass rally Supports National Gallery strikers
Biafrans demand independence
UK Uncut Art Protest
Walking the Coal Line
Filipino Nurses tell Daily Mail apologise