Peckham, March 1989
It was March 1989 before I had time for another walk in London after my walk on 12th February. I was still then teaching full-time and and this kept me busy, and the weather wasn’t always good at the weekend. If it was forecast to pour with rain most of the day I stayed home, and there were some weekends too when the trains were not running and getting to London took too long to be worth doing. But I did manage two walks in march, the first a long wander around from Peckham to New Cross and the second in the City and Shoreditch.
From the metal shutters on these shops you can see that this walk was on a Sunday. I preferred working on Sundays, particularly for busy shopping centres such as Rye Lane as the streets would then be empty with few shops opening. This allowed me to concentrate on the buildings without the distraction of people in the picture or walking in front of my camera.
In the morning the sun was shining on the buildings on the west side of the street and you can see long shadows from the lights projecting in front of ‘Lipstick’. Film of course didn’t have EXIF data but I suspect that ardent meteorological detectives could tell be exactly the time and day from the shadows, but I think it was likely to have been around 10 am. Back then I often caught the first train to London on Sundays, which left a little after 8am, so could be in Peckham after catching a bus perhaps by 9.30. And I will have got off the bus quite close to here, before walking east along Peckham High Street and Queens Road.
My next stop to take a picture was in Lugard Road, where just a few yards to the south of Queens Road I found the premises of Evan Cook offering Export Packaging, Removals and Storage with some interesting girders above their wide gates and linking these to the factory building. I was puzzled by these and could not work out what purpose they served.
This works has since been demolished and replaced by flats, and there is now also Evan Cook Close. From my photograph I thought the business was called Evan Cooke with an ‘e’ and I can’t understand what the final character is. The company, first incorporated in 1903 was dissolved in 2015 but the works had gone long before.
I continued down Lugard Road, turning into Hollydale Road and making my way to Dundas Road where I found these pre-fabs, which I think are LCC temporary housing. In 1963-4 the LCC designed temporary housing together with the Timber Development Association as a temporary solution to the then acute housing problem.
Designed to last 15 years these homes came as two boxes which were craned onto piles of paving slabs and did not need dug foundations. The two boxes were than bolted together. The walls were asbestos covered with plastic and both roof and floor were made from plywood sheets sandwiching polystyrene insulation. They had a hall, living room, two bedrooms, kitchen and bathroom.
Some were still being lived in 50 years later, but these in Dundas Road have long been removed and replaced. I walked along Dundas Road to St Mary’s Road, pausing to take a picture of St Mary Magdalene Church which I have not digitised as I think I took a better picture of this now demolished building on another occasion.
This block of workers flats were commissioned in memory of amateur jockey Reginald Sassoon, whose mother was a friend of housing reformer Elizabeth Danby who was working with architect E Maxwell Fry and doctors Innes Hope Pearse and George Scott Williamson on the Peckham Experiment in the neighbouring Pioneer Health Centre. Fry was responsible for the building but collaborated with Denby over the interiors.
The flats, opened in in November 1934, were designed to provide an ultra-modern well equipped living space for families, with 3 three-room flats and one four-roomed flats on each of the five floors. The curtain wall to the plate glass staircase tower was decorated with a glass mural of a horse and rider by Hans Feibusch. The interior was considerably altered in the 1980s when it was taken over by Southwark Borough Council. Surprisingly this block by one of the UK’s most distinguished modernist architects only got its Grade II listing in 1998.
Doctors George Scott Williamson and Innes Hope Pearse ran the Pioneer Health Centre in Queens Rd, Peckham from 1926-9, signing up 950 local families at 1s (5p) a week and offering various exercise activities, games and workshops and regular medical checkups as well as other medical services. The positive results led them to open a larger purpose-built centre a short distance away in St Mary’s Rd, designed by Sir Owen Williams, Grade II* listed as ‘Southwark Adult Education Institute’.
The centre was too comprehensive in its approach to fit in with the National Health Service and too expensive to keep going outside the NHS and it closed in 1950. When I took this picture it was a leisure and adult education centre for Southwark Borough Council, who sold it in the 1990s to be converted into luxury flats. But the Peckham Experiment remains a superb example of what a proper national health service could and should provide, with truly holistic approach to keeping the people fit and healthy.
I continued up St Mary’s Road to Queens Road, where the next post on this walk will begin.
