Re-photo

The third post on my walk in Kennington and Brixton on Sunday 6th May 1989. The posts began with Hanover, Belgrave, Chapel, Shops, Taxis. The previous post was On the Road to Brixton.

No 326, with two doors above each other with steps to the upper door with a balustrade. Many of the houses along here date from the first development along the road and are good examples of early-mid 19th century houses and most have some intresting features but are perhaps not distinctive enough to deserve listing.

The house now looks much the same as when I photographed it. I suspect this unusual arrangement with steps up to the front door was how this house was built. While many houses from the period have basement flats, this appears to have been built with its ground floor rather higher, perhaps becuase of the risk of flooding from the River Effra. But if so, why was a similar approach not used for neighbouring houses?

I walked a little back up Brixton Road to Thornton Street, though too much has changed for me to positively identify the exact location of J & P Motors on this fairly short L-shaped street. I think it was probably on the north side of the bottom of the L behind what is now the worker’s co-operative, Brixton Cycles.

There was a splendid utilitarian simplicity of this building which appealed to me, and which I enhanced with its symmetrical gates and No parking signs.

Back on Brixton Road, Evereds Bathrooms had its showroom in two shops at 308-10 Brixton Rd. The buildings here are still standing but no longer in use as a shop. For some years since 2011 the Victorian shopfront built as a house agents in 1879 has been in use as an art gallery, SHARP Gallery (Social, Hope and Recovery Project) which has shown the work of over 120 artists, many of whom use mental health services and is supported by the South London and Maudsley NHS Trust. Both the early nineteent century house and these shops are Grade II listed, along with 312.

Both buildings at 304 and 306 Brixton Road have survived, but in 2013 planning permission was granted for changes to the Eagle Printing Works, and the fine semi-circular panel including the building date of 1864 and its wrought-iron decoration was removed – a piece of vandalism that should never have been approved.

Apparently the printing works a few years later became a sub district Post, Money Order and Telegraph Office, and it was from here that Sherlock Holmes sent his first telegram.

I turned off the Brixton Road where I had spent some time wandering back and forth and struck off to the east along Loughborough Road. The first picture I took was of the Loughborough Hotel, described in more detail on a previous walk, a well known music venue, closed in 2008 and has been converted into flats, with a café gallery on the ground floor.

From Fiveways I continued along Lilford Road, again stopping to re-take the impressive porch on its corner with Minett Road, also featured in a previous post. I chose a very similar viewpoint but the lighting was quite different as it had been overcast for the earlier image.

I can’t remember why I made the detour, though possibly it was just the sheer pleasure of seeing an area with so many fine buildings again. Or it could have been to find a pleasant place to sit and eat my lunch, as I walked as far as Myatts Fields before returning to Loughborough Rd.

On Loughborough Road I was in a very different London, the Loughborough Estate, redeveloped after much of the area was devastated by wartime bombing. The first stages of the rebuild were in five-storey red brick blocks typical of 1930s LCC estates of that era, solid and with decent sized rooms but uninspiring visually. There height was kept to five floors as they had no lifts.

From 1954-7 more of the estate was developed with a mix of high and low-rise modern buildings designed by the LCC Architects Department which included nine eleven-storey slab blocks which became a model for later LCC estates. They even gained approval from John Betjeman who Layers of London quotes as writing “When one compares their open-ness, lightness, grass and trees, and carefully related changes of scale from tall blocks to small blocks, with the prison-like courts of artisans’ dwellings of earlier ages, one realises some things are better than they were… Maybe it has no place for someone like me, but it gives one hope for modern architecture.”

Not everyone shared Betjeman’s enthusiasm, and by the time I made these pictures the area had gained a reputation for crime, one of a number of estates in London about which some people expressed shock that I was walking around taking pictures. More about my walk in a later post.