New Cross – Shops, Closed Pubs & Baths: The four shops at the left of the picture are still there on New Cross Road at 257-263, but the buildings at right have gone, replaced by a grassed area on the road leading up to Sainsbury’s petrol station and three shopping warehouses. The antiques shop still looked much the same until around 2017.
Before the site to the right which stretches to New Cross Gate station was developed for Sainsbury’s most was a railway goods yard and works. Planning permission was granted for the development in 1995. Old maps show this site was a public house back in 1914 and it was The Railway Tavern which was still open in a picture from the 1940s which clearly is this same building.
New Cross Rd, New Cross, Lewisham, 1988 88-12b-21
This large detached house at 288 New Cross Road next to Deptford Town Hall is now a part of Goldsmiths University. It was built in 1842 as Hope Cottage and at least from 1914 to 1940 until later was the District Postal Sorting Office.
Unfortunately the long text on the door is impossible to read, but I suspect it told you to ro round to the back instead.
New Cross Baths, Laurie Grove, New Cross, Lewisham, 1988 88-12b-23
A fine Victorian swimming baths, slipper baths and laundries provided by St Paul’s Deptford vestry in 1895-98 using their powers under the 1846 Public Baths and Wash-houses Act, designed by local architect Thomas Dinwiddy and well described in its Grade II listing text.
New Cross Baths, Laurie Grove, New Cross, Lewisham, 1988 88-12b-26
The baths seemed to me rather overegged with those little turrets and the wall with its rather ornate and substantial piers was a temptation I could not resist, outlining its rather phallic profile with the darkness of its doorway behind.
The premises were firmly divided into two halves for men and women, and of course I chose a post with the word ‘MEN’ in a rather fancy font for this picture.
Laurie Grove, New Cross, Lewisham, 1988 88-12c-51
These rather solid and heavily built houses are opposite the baths in Laurie Grove and I think probably were built around the same date.
New Cross Rd, New Cross, Lewisham, 1988 88-12b-12
These shops at 297-309 New Cross Road are apparently still there, though restored or rebuilt in a way that removes both the various signage and the individuality of the units, producing a long coherent terrace extending from to 289 to 321 (287 still seems a little different.)
There was more character when I photographed the row, with what I think is an unlit neon sign ‘GREY FOR HMV’ and ‘EATWELL’S THE REAL BUTCHER’ who had declared war on rising prices and were you could save money. A cooked meat and sausage specialist, they supplied hotels, canteens and shipping.
New Cross Rd, New Cross, Lewisham, 1988 88-12b-16
Some way along New Cross Road was the London Tyre Warehouse, its adverts covering the side of The Fox public house at No. 62. In business here since at least 1851 it closed around 1997 and planning permission was granted to change the pub and the warehouse to a place or worship including a free food distribution centre.
It is now the Bethesda Building owned by Christ Faith Tabernacle International.
My walk on Sunday December 18th 1988 began on Lewisham Way in New Cross, where I think I must have got off a 172 bus from Waterloo and begun by walking a short distance south-east down Lewisham Way.
Lewisham Way, New Cross, Lewisham, 1988 88-12b-41
A Mattress, Pub, Cinema, Listed Pipe & Naval Baroque: This shop was on the corner with Malpas Road, and there is still a shop there, looking a little different but still selling second hand furniture the leaning post was seeking, though that post is gone, with a street sign in a fairly similar position. And the pavement is now often crowded with secondhand furniture.
This was the second of two frames made here as my first picture on the walk.
New Cross Rd, New Cross, Lewisham, 1988 88-12b-42
I turned around and walked back up Lewisham Way to New Cross, taking no more pictures until I came to the junction with New Cross Road, where I found this fine group of buildings on the north side of the street. At left is the New Cross Inn at 323 New Cross Road. There was a pub on this site at least by 1783 but this impressive but unlisted building dates from 1890. It does appear to be an area where the worst prejudices of Nicolaus Pevsner prevented many fine late Victorian buildings getting a mention.
Next to the right is the site of the former New Cross Kinema built in 1925 to seat 2,300. You can read more about the building on Arthur Lloyd’s Musical and Theatre History Site. It closed as a cinema in 1960, and much of the building behind the facade demolished for an office building. It was empty for some years but when I made this picture was a furniture store. Its first floor dance hall became an Irish dance hall, the Harp Club which also hosted an indie music venue lower down. In 1989 the nightclub The Venue opened there, soon becoming a leading music venue with groups including Oasis and Radiohead playing there as well as Carter the Unstoppable Sex Machine – you can find some long lists on the web. The exterior was restored in 2006 and The Venue took over the ground floor as well. It had to close for Covid and I think has yet to re-open.
At the right is the former Midland Bank, built in 1903 and Grade II listed, probably the least interesting of the three buildings.
New Cross Rd, New Cross, Lewisham, 1988 88-12b-43
The door and window of a shop on the New Cross Road, cluttered with advertisements and fliers which reflect the large local population of African and Afro-Caribbean heritage. I’m only sorry that the ISO 100 Kodak TMX tabular fine grain film I was using has failed to record the finer details, lost in its grain pattern.
Part of the problem may have been that it was a rather dark corner, and I probably made the exposure with the lens at fairly wide aperture where the resolution would not have been as good as usual. I think it’s another example of where a larger format or digital would have done better.
New Cross Rd, New Cross, Lewisham, 1988 88-12b-44
Pagnell Street drops steeply down from New Cross road and this slightly odd window is actually on the first floor of a block of flats, probably council-built in the 1950s or 1960s with shops on the New Cross Road frontage. Empty when I photographed it, in recent years this has been a restaurant. At right you can see the ground floor of the building.
New Cross Inn, pub, New Cross Rd, New Cross, Lewisham, 1988 88-12b-31
In the foreground is the decorated ventilation pipe which is a listed building while the New Cross Inn behind is not. The pipe and lamp post, made in 1897 by MacFarlanes of Glasgow apparently derives from a design by noted Glasgow architect Alexander “Greek” Thomson for Glasgow’s Egyptian Halls. This column once stood on top of underground public toilets nearby on the junction with Lewisham Way. The pub is another noted music venue in the area.
This is at the top of Clifton Rise, where supporters of the Socialist Workers Party gathered to oppose the National Front march on 13th August 1977. Police stopped them here and used horses to try to push them down the hill away from the march route. The SWP had refused to cooperate with other anti-fascists in the various London Anti-Fascist Committees who together with many local residents were able to oppose the march more effectively, preventing it reaching its destination of the centre of Lewisham. Unfortunately I was away from London at the time or I would probably have been there. Camerawork magazine – I was a subscriber – devoted the whole of its Issue 8 to it, and you can see it in the Four Corners Archive if you don’t have a copy.
Deptford Town Hall, New Cross Rd, New Cross, Lewisham, 1988 88-12b-32
Deptford Town Hall was designed by Lanchester, Stewart & Rickards in 1905 for the Metropolitan Borough of Deptford which existed from 1900 until 1965. Its baroque style includes various figures on the frontage including a ship’s prow and a depiction of a naval battle as well as statues by Henry Poole of four naval figures including Drake and Nelson, appropriate to the naval history of the area.
After 1965 it was used for various purposes by Lewisham Council and was acquired by Goldsmiths College in 2000.
Deptford Town Hall, New Cross Rd, New Cross, Lewisham, 1988 88-12b-22
Apparently according to the Grade II listing these are “Tritons as corbels supporting large oriel bay with carving of ship and marine symbols at its head.”
My walk in New Cross will continue 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.
