This post about my walk on Sunday 13th November continues from A Mission, More Bermondsey St & Guinness
Gardens, Neckinger, Silver Sea, Special Girls & Deaf Boys – 1988
We have the Luftwaffe to thank for Leathermarket Gardens, opened to replace a bombsite where formerly there had been a tannery and a warehouses in 1958. Kids at that time had long been making their own adventure playgrounds on derelict sites such as this, it was then opened by the council as a public garden with a rather tamer children’s play area. Perhaps the wooden posts on the mound here are the remains of parts of this. The shed-like building at left is Bermondsey Village Hall, a community centre run by a trust and I think fairly recently erected when I made this picture.
To the right of the hall is the Guiness Trust’s Snow Fields Estate block, and towering above that Guy’s Hospital. Now I think the Shard would be higher still.
Mastermail House was the home of Direct Addressing Ltd at 8 Morocco St, and has I think been completely replaced by more recent buildings. It is now at the back of the White Cube Gallery on Bermondsey St, and the street leads on to City Walk developed around 2007, its blocks of flats including Antonine Heights. Properties here have been found to have similar cladding to Grenfell Tower.
Back in 1988 Morocco Street was a dead end, but you can now walk through along City Walk to Long Lane.
These two arches on the entrance to a council estate reminded me of whalebone arches I had walked under in Whitby. At the left you can see the word SHELTER on the wall, a residue from World War 2. These flats were typical of the large council blocks built in the mid-1930s by Bermondsey Borough Council.
Although my contact sheet confidently states this was the Aylwin Estate, I now recognise it as Neckinger House on the Neckinger Estate, on Neckinger, named after the river now long underground, close to the end of Grange Walk. This large estate was completed in 1938 on the site of old tanneries.
I turned up Neckinger, taking a picture (not on-line) of the row of Victorian houses leading to the distinctive Victorian pub on the corner with Abbey Street. The Fleece was here from 1869, but closed in 2000, and was then converted to residential use. The buildings next door to the pub are in my picture above and have also survived and been converted. The Silver Sea restaurant was fairly comprehenisively rebuilt around 2009 and the rest, which early had become a garage and hand car wash, shortly after.
The Silver Sea Chinese Restaurant there in 1988 had replaced an earlier eating establishment there in 1940, Mrs Emma Florence Evans Dining Rooms, but 156 was still the premises of W R Jewiss, described in the street directory as a chain tester – but you can read rather more in my picture. Also at 156 in 1940 were Broadbent & Mobbs, motor engineers, but a sign at the end of the building in the picture suggests that Jewiss was by then the only business.
Maltby St leads up to run alongside the long railway viaduct coming from London Bridge station that divides the area in two. The viaduct is still there, but both sides of the street have been completely redeveloped.
There are still two school gateways on Pope Street, one with the legend SCHOOL-KEEPER and this one for SPECIAL GIRLS. The building behind them is now Old School House but most of the rest of the large school site has been redeveloped.
Pope Street gets its name not from the Vatican but from Sir Thomas Pope (c1507-1559) who was one of those responsible for confiscating the properties of religious institutions and somehow managed to end up owning around 30 of them. One was Bermondsey Abbey, and he demolished most of it to build himself a grand mansion, Bermondsey House, where Queen Elizabeth came to visit him in 1570. Later he sold it to the Earls of Sussex. It was in a rather unsavoury area, particularly with the smells from the tanneries and the house was neglected, eventually became a ruin which was demolished in 1820.
Almost the whole block between Tanner St, Riley Road and bounded on two sides by Pope St was occupied by Riley Street Schools, with a fine tall four floor building from 1874 on the corner of Tanner St and Riley St. Later this became part of Southwark College and was then demolished, I think in the 1990s. Part of the site in the early twentieth century was Riley Street Mentally Defective Council School – and it may be this was what made the girls “special”.
I think I walked back down Tower Bridge Road to the Bricklayers Arms and then along to the junction with Albany Street without taking any more pictures, though I may well have taken a bus. I wandered around a few streets then walked back west to where I found another school gate, this one reading DEAF BOYS.
This gate is still there just off the Old Kent Rd in Mason St, but it has lost its legend and the upper parts of the wall, and now leads into the back of Charlotte Court on the Old Kent Road, a gated Victorian school conversion.
This was the site of the innovative Asylum for the Support and Education of the Deaf and Dumb Children of the Poor, and Mason St takes its name from the Rector of Bermondsey Henry Cox Mason who joined with the Dissenting Minister of Bermondsey John Townsend (whose street is on the east of the site) to found the Asylum in 1792 in a smaller rented building on Grange Rd. The school moved to its own building on this site in 1809,
The asylum was rebuilt in 1886 and most of the activities moved to a larger site at Margate and the Old Kent Road building again remodelled, with the ground floor used for physically handicapped children and the second floor for the deaf. It was taken over by the LCC in 1904 and finally closed in 1968.
More from this walk in a later post.
