German Hospital, Chapel, Ritson Rd, Dalston, Hackney, 1989 89-7k-32
Founded in 1845 with German staff to provide medical services to German-speaking immigrants who had settled in parts of North London. English staff took over when the German staff were interned in 1940. It became a part of the NHS in 1948, and only closed in 1987. The Grade II listed buildings survive and were converted into affordable flats.
Man on van, Ridley Rd, Dalston, Hackney, 1989 89-7k-33
I wandered up into Ridley Road where business was beginning to slack off in the market for the day. This man having a cigarette sitting on the bonnet of a van saw my camera and asked me why I was taking photographs. We had a short talk and he insisted I take his photograph, so here he is.
Public Washing Baths, Shacklewell Lane, Shacklewell, Hackney, 1989 89-7k-34
I continued north to Shacklewell Lane and took this picture of the Public Washing Baths, built by the Metropolitan Borough of Hackney in 1931 when many houses in the area were without bathrooms. Many poorer families and single people lived in one or two rooms sometimes without any running water or gas supply in their rooms and shared lavatories and kitchens with other tenants of the buildings.
This bath house provided 24 baths for men, 16 for women and they will have been well used in the early years before slum clearance provided better housing for many in the area. They were damaged by bombing in 1940 and reopened in 1942 and only closed some time in the 1960s. It is now occupied by the Bath House Children’s Community Centre who bought it from Hackney Council in 2002. This is now part of the St Mark’s Conservation Area, designated in 2008.
Built in 1932 as the Albert Works for the printers Henry Hildesley by architects Hobden & Porri, it later became the Rona Fashions House of George Gowns Ltd, but by 1989 their name had been removed from the facade leaving the marks you can see on the horizontals of the building. I think it was then still in use for the rag trade but my picture has the end of the names ‘RONA ROON… and Bab… hidden by the trees of Shacklewell Green.
Robert William Hobden who died in 1921 and Arthur George Porri (1877-1962) whose practice was based in Finsbury Square were responsible for many commercial and public buildings across London in first third of the twentieth century but seem suprisingly little known – perhaps a good subject for some academic research.
Henry Hildesley the printers are best known for the many posters they produced, including some for London Transport and HMSO, with many produced to help the war effort in the 1940s. The building, now called Cotton Lofts is in the Shacklewell Green conservation area designated in 2018 and is now flats.
I can no longer remember the route I took to make the three final images in this post, but they were all made on 27th July 1989.
This terrace was built in 1882 and the conservation area statement calls it and other similar buildings in nearby streets “attractive and architecturally interesting”.
Founded in 1910, this Strictly Orthodox Ashkenazi synagogue owned by the Federation of Synagogues was closed and the membership merged with the West Hackney Synagogue in 1981. Used for some years by Roots Pool Community Association and Dalston Community Centre it was eventually converted into flats as Montague Court.
Possibly I may have taken a bus to pay a visit to Abney Park Cemetery, close to where this final image was made though if so I took no pictures on this occasion, or perhaps just to make this picture.
Shops were added in the front gardens of these houses built in 1878, and that now housing the artist’s house Madame Lillie was initially a carpentry workshop owned by the Wright family. In 1917, when Mrs Wright was a widow, her daughter Lillie opened a corsetry shop, which continued in business until she retired in 1970. In 1973 she sold the shop and house to her young artist nephew Paul David Wright. He converted the premises into studios for artists and a gallery space.
Dalston Doorcases to Marie Lloyd – On Thursday 27th July 1989 I took the North London Line to Dalston Kingsland and crossed the road into Ridley Market and walked along Colvestone Crescent and on to Montague Rd. I can’t now remember what had brought me to North London for this brief interruption to my series of walks south of the river.
Here there are four houses on both sides of the street with similar doorways to the pair in my photograph with these odd decorative figures supporting the lintel. Those further down the street have simpler largely geometrical designs.
I was unsure what to call these muscular male figures, hand on hips staring down at the ground with what appear to be victory wreaths of laurel leaves around their heads and a pair of rather fishy looking tails. A long and detailed study published by the Hackney Society, The Victorian Villas of Hackney by Michael Hunter tells me they are mermen, and provides other examples of ‘bizarre doorcases’ in the Victorian villas of the 1850s and 1860s in Dalston. These date from 1861-6.
There are several houses close to Dalston Lane at the south end of Cecilia Road that have converted shopfronts with consoles matching that at the top right of this shop and this was one of these.
Although the advertising for the News of the World and Silk Cut suggests this was once a newsagent and tobacconist, it looks as if it was by 1989 a junk shop.
This building on the corner of Stanford Mews is still there and has kept its decorative iron balcony railing though not the Eagle Shipping Services advertising and graphics. Its upper floor is now simply painted white while the ground floor has been converted into a ‘rustic health food cafe & shop‘, Healthy Stuff.
James Elves was a marble mason and called his premises at 164 Dalston Lane Carrara House, after the area in Italy famous for its marble. Born in Shoreditch he lived and worked here with his family from around 1900 at least until 1930.
The house is still there and also its porch, but the tiles – presumably marble – of the front path have been replaced with duller slabs.
A few yards south of Dalston Lane, these houses in Greenwood Road were looking a little the worse for wear in 1989 but are considerably smarter now. With three stories and a basement these houses are now largely converted into four flats.
Doorways, 96-98, Graham Rd, Dalston, Hackney, 1989 89-7k-42
I continued south to Graham Road where I found more of Hackney’s remarkable doorcases. The left hand door is 98B as I think there will he a separate door in the area below to the basement flat.
Michael Hunter has a picture of a similar pair a few doors down where he states that the Roman standards are based on pattern books of classical architecture, “but the extraordinary swags of solidified shells over the doors of… Graham Road defy analysis.“
The unfortunate door at right has since been replaced, but with another design that while preferable is still not in keeping with the building.
Doorways, 96-98, Graham Rd, Dalston, Hackney, 1989 89-7k-45
A closer view of one of the swags showing more clearly the shells and at the centre a lion’s head.
Marie Lloyd, plaque, 55, Graham Rd, Dalston, Hackney, 1989 89-7k-46
Finally for today, a rather simpler doorway in Graham Road with the GLC plaque recording that Marie Lloyd, Music Hall Artiste lived here. The dates are those of her life, 1870-1922.
Born in Hoxton in 1870 as Matilda Wood, she made her first appearances on stage when she was 14, taking the stage name Marie Lloyd the following year. So many of the old music hall songs we now know were made famous by here, not least for her remarkable use of nuance and double-entendre as well as displaying her undergarments in a way that respectable Victorians found deplorable but music hall audiences loved.
She moved into this house after her marriage in 1887 – but the marriage was not happy for long. After a disastrous bust-up she moved out from Graham Road in 1894.
As she sang ‘A little of what you fancy, does you good‘ but in her life she certainly became ‘one of the Ruins That Cromwell Knocked About a Bit‘ and at her funeral, thousands took the advice of ‘My Old Man‘ and followed the van to her burial from Woodstock Road in Golders Green to Hampstead Cemetery. Train journeys recently have often left me wondering ‘Oh Mr. Porter, what shall I do?
Saturday In Paris. It’s some years since I’ve been to Paris for the large Paris Photo show and the Mois de la Photo, though for a few years I went regularly. Partly I got bored with seeing the same work again and again at many dealers stalls in Paris Photo, and it also seemed increasingly dominated by the kind of large images for corporate walls that had little interest for me (but sold at huge prices per square foot.)
Paris Photo generally occupied me during a couple of days, but most of my time on my visit was spent in visiting the many other exhibitions around the city which was really saturated with photography with a huge fringe of events. One evening I managed to attend five openings, though by the last I think the wine was taking a toll, and to pack in almost 90 shows in a five day visit – and there had been others where a short look had led me to turn away. There has never been anything like this in Britain, perhaps the closest we have ever got to it was in the East London Photomonth.
The more interesting of those shows I went to I reviewed here on >Re:PHOTO and you can still find these reviews in the archives, along with every other post I’ve written on this site. And there are also posts covering many of our walks, along with some like this on My London Diary.
The walks around Paris were sometimes more interesting than the shows. I first came to Paris to visit Linda who was then staying in a student hostel to the south of the city in 1965 and we’ve returned quite a few times since we were married, always taking long walks as well as making the most of our weekly travel tickets (which cost little more than a day’s public transport around London.) Few pages of the Michelin Green Guide have been left unturned over the years.
On Saturday 15th November Linda and I left our cheap hotel close to the Metro at Barbes Roucechoaurt after breakfast and walked to the Rotonde de la Villette. As always I found a few things to photograph. We were on our way to visit shows by Gilles Raynaldy and then on to work by two photographers at a new arts centre in what had previously been the municipal funeral services.
The Metro took us to the centre of Paris for a short non-photographic interlude, including a nostalgic picnic in the Square du Vert Galant on the tip of the Ile de la Cite before another train took us to Galerie Vu and a show by Swedish photographer Lars Tunbjork, who I had met at the FotoArtFestival in Poland in 2005. Sadly he died in 2015.
Then we walked around the Marais, visiting a number of shows their, some rather briefly though others held our attention rather more, including work by Robert McCabe & Aurelia Alcais.
Some of the galleries were perhaps more impressive than the shows in them and this was true of the Galerie Karsten Greve in the rue Debelleyme (it also has galleries in Cologne and St Moritz which perhaps tells you something about who it’s audience is) which was showing work by Italian photographer Mimmo Jodice. I didn’t feel it was worth my writing about.
More to our taste was a show across the road in the Galerie Blue Square with remarkable images from the Global Underground project by artists Valera and Natasha Cherkashin.
Around the rue Vielle du Temple we looked in briefly at a number of shows, several of them aimed at the fetish market but none detained us long. On the rue du Perche we found John Bulmer’s ‘Hard Sixties: L’Angleterre post-industrielle, black and white and colour images from the 1960s in the north of England, mainly around Manchester where we had spent the first few years of our married life (all we could afford as a honeymoon was a day coach trip to the Lake District.)
It was getting dark and we took the Metro back to our hotel to change and then go out to meet Linda’s brother and his wife who live on the outskirts of Paris on the Grands Boulevards. We had planned to enjoy a three course meal at Chartier, but they weren’t feeling well so I was disappointed when we simply went to a creperie.
They left early to go back home and we took another Metro ride to Trocadero and walked down and across the bridge to stand under the Eiffel Tower, admiring its ring of blue stars to mark Sarkozy’s term as President of the European Council.
We then walked around the area, but it was late and the streets were dark and deserted. Eventually we came to a bus stop and after a wait of around 15 minutes a bus arrived and took us to the Place de Clichy.
Here the boulevard at least was still lit up and there were plenty of people as we walked on past Place Blanche and on to Place Pigalle, wandering past or hanging around the various sad-looking neon-covered come-on facades of sex shops and clubs. I took some more pictures, though with the large and obvious Nikon I kept my distance and concentrated on the signs. We walked back around a mile to our hotel and were exhausted after a long day.
South Lambeth & Vauxhall 1989: Yet again I’ve found some more pictures from my walk in South Lambeth on 19th July 1989, which began with Stockwell Park, Bus Garage, Tower and Mason. This time the pictures comefrom the end of the walk where I had wrongly remembered my route that day. I didn’t always develop films in the order in which they were taken and things sometimes got rather out of order in my files.
After taking pictures on Old South Lambeth Road I thought I had simply walked to Vauxhall Station without taking more pictures. But I now realise I had walked further up the South Lambeth Road an had then gone on to take some photographs in Vauxhall.
South Lambeth Library, South Lambeth Rd, South Lambeth, Lambeth, 1989 89-7h-66
In a previous post I wrote about the library and linked to an article on Vauxhall History about the fights by people in the area on several occasions to keep their library open. Thanks to their efforts the library, in the heart of Lambeth’s Portuguese community, is still open five days a week, though doubtless it will not be long before Lambeth Council tries yet again to close and demolish it.
South Lambeth Library, South Lambeth Rd, South Lambeth, Lambeth, 1989 89-7h-51
Despite the street name on the wall, South Lambeth Library is on South Lambeth Rd, and Wilcox Close is here simply a pedestrian way than runs along its southern side, with vehicle access to the houses in the Wilcox Cloase being from Kenchester Close, another street in the Mawbey Brough council estate built here in the 1970s – one of the times the community had to unite to save the library.
This picture concentrates on the highly ornamented frontage of the building. Particularly impressive are the decorated words TATE FREE LIBRARY.
South Lambeth Library, South Lambeth Rd, South Lambeth, Lambeth, 1989 89-7h-52
A final picture of the library in this post shows more of the library building, which is only locally listed, which gives it no protection. In a previous post I suggested that this was because it had been considerably altered since it was built in 1888, losing the copper cupolas on top of its powers possibly to meet demand for metals in the war and also losing a fine porch, probably to allow road widening. Historic England seem to be very reluctant to list buildings which have been significantly altered.
Wheatsheaf Hall, Wheatsheaf Lane, South Lambeth, Lambeth, 1989 89-7h-55
Opened in 1896 as the Wheatsheaf Congregational Church Mission and used until 1939 as a mission hall, it claims to have been the first free public library in Lambeth, though possibly this was in the small villa on the site before this, as South Lambeth Library opened in 1888. The building was Grade II listed in 1975.
In 1980 Lambeth Council began proceedings to evict the then tenants Cinebuild to develop it as a tenant’s hall and community centre which opened in 1988 and continues in use “for community and business meetings, meditation groups, faith groups, council surgeries, rehearsal space, weddings, christenings, birthday parties and bingo.”
Wheatsheaf Hall, Wheatsheaf Lane, South Lambeth, Lambeth, 1989 89-7h-42
Another view of Wheatsheaf Lane and the hall, which still looks much the same now. The pub glimpsed at left was The Wheatsheaf, reflecting the agricultural nature of the area, parts of which were still fields when this was first opened. It is known to have been here in 1788, though this building is Victorian. It closed as a pub in 2017 and is now a Brazilian restaurant.
St Anne & All Saints, Miles St, South Lambeth Rd, South Lambeth, Lambeth, 1989 89-7h-44
According to Vauxhall History, a chapel was built on this site in 1793 after much pleading from local parishoners who had to walk across marshland to get to St Mary’s Church next to Lambeth Palace. It was a dangerous route as this offered hiding places for robbers who would attack those walking through it.
They were allowed to build a private chapel and the cost of building was paid for by selling shares entitling those who bought them to seats in the chapel and leasing other seats. There were no free seats and the poor still had to cross the hazardous marsh.
Perhaps it was because it was a chapel for the rich and not the rapidly growing working class population of the area was that led to a fire which partly burnt the chapel down in 1856 and an incident of sacrilege of which details have not survived the following year.
In 1860 the Church of England decided to set up a separate parish of South Lambeth and to build a new church on the chapel site. They wanted to take over the chapel, and it took them 8 years to find all the shareholders and get the site conveyed to them. A slow process of rebuilding then began to turn the chapel into something more suitable for a parish church which was only completed in 1876 to the designs of architect R Parkinson. It was rebuilt again in 1958 after bomb damage in the Second World War.
The church was dedicated to St Anne probably as a tribute to Ann Beaufoy, the wife of George Beaufoy who had become head of the local vinegar factory in 1851 and had been one of the promoters of the new parish. It was his son Mark Beaufoy, who became MP for Kennington who chaired the meeting in his home in 1881 to found the Waifs and Strays Home, now the Children’s Society.
Behind the church is the tall tower block of BT’s Keybridge House on South Lambeth Rd, built 1975-7 and demolished in 2015. Few would mourn its passing but many wish its successor was rather better.
‘SCHOOLS ARE PRISONS’, Langley Lane, Vauxhall, Lambeth, 1989 89-7h-46
This was taken in Langley Lane but although the wall is still there the building behind it has gone and it is now just a car park at the rear of the imposing 5 storey block of the former LCC’s 1908 Lawn Lane Schools. Later this was Vauxhall Central Girls School which in 1957 this became one of two buildings of Vauxhall Manor Secondary School, a comprehensive 11-18 girls school. This merged with the Beaufoy School, a school for boys in 1983 to become the mixed comprehensive Lilian Baylis School, now on Kennington Lane The Lawn Lane building has now been converted to flats as ‘The Academy’.
A later post will I hope finish this walk with some pictures from Vauxhall.
Tradescant, Old South Lambeth Rd and Caron continues my walk on Wednesday 19th July 1989 in Stockwell and South Lambeth which began with Stockwell Park, Bus Garage, Tower and Mason. The previous post was Clapham Road and South Lambeth – 1989.
Houses, Tradescant Rd, South Lambeth, Lambeth, 1989 89-7f-24
I took a picture (not on-line) on the corner of Tradescant Road, and then walked down it, pausing to take this single image on my way towards South Lambeth Road. I think I took this picture of an exuberantly growing hedge and a spindly small tree largely because I was thinking about the name of the street and the history behind it.
John Tradescant the Elder (c. 1570s–1638) settled in Lambeth and with his son John is said to have founded gardening as we know it in England, importing many of the trees, shrubs and plants we now grow.
He had begun his career as a gardener to the Cecil family, one of Englands richest and most politically influential families and had laid out the gardens at the Early of Salisbury’s new house, Hatfield House in Hertfordshire, travelling across Europe to find new plants for it. In 1617 he helped finance an expedition to the colony of Virginia, and among the plants this brought back was one later named Tradescantia virginiania.
John the Elder in the following years travelled to Russia, bringing back the larch tree, to Algeria coming home with apricots, gladioli and horse chestnuts, to the Middle East for Lilac, as well as to Italy and Turkey and later to France from were he introduced the poppy and scented stock. Later his son also travelled to Viginia bringing home many plants including Virginia Creeper and added to the collections which were exhibited to the public and sold from their nursery.
The family also set up the first public museum in England in the 1630s, the Lambeth Ark or Musaeum Tradescantianum, dsplaying the many curiosities natural and manmade they also brought back from their travels. Thee family were tricked out of this after the death of the younger John and his wife by the wealthy collector Elias Ashmole who later gave it to Oxford University as the main founding collection of the Ashmolean Museum.
You can see more about the family and their huge contribution to gardening at the Garden Museum which is next door to Lambeth Palace in the deconsecrated church of St Mary-at-Lambeth, where the Tradescants are buried.
The Tradescant’s main house, Turret House, was demolished in 1881 and two streets, Tradescant Street (now Road) and Walberswick Street (named after the Suffolk village where some of the family lived) laid out on the site.
Girl, doll, shop, South Lambeth Rd, South Lambeth, Lambeth, 1989 89-7f-25
On South Lambeth Road I came across this young girl sitting on a stool and playing with a doll outside her family shop. I didn’t want to disturb her and took this picture as she was lost in play.
House, 99, Old South Lambeth Rd, South Lambeth, Lambeth, 1989 89-7f-13
The demolition of the Tradescant’s house which apparently had been long-abandoned and overgrown South Lambeth Road in 1881 enabled the South Lambeth Road to be straightened and widened in 1883, leaving a section of the old road to the east, now known as Old South Lambeth Road. No 99-105 South Lambeth Road are Grade II listed as an early 19th century terrace, with the listing noting their graceful railings which attracted me.
As you can see at the left of the picture some of these properties were in a fairly poor state in 1989. This was then the side wall of a shop, now converted to residential use and in rather better condition.
Old South Lambeth Rd, South Lambeth, Lambeth, 1989 89-7f-14
This section of Old South Lambeth Road is named on Google Maps as Heyford Terrace, although I think this is simply this long row of 8 terraced houses on the east side of the street, separately numbered from the rest of this short road. I think they were built as terraced housed but are now flats and are late Victorian, built not long after the rerouting of the road in 1883.
The houses at the end of the road are in Heyford Avenue, I think also developed around 1890.
House, 119, Fentiman Rd, South Lambeth, Lambeth, 1989 89-7f-15
I walked down Dorset Road and then turned left into Meadow Road to take me to Fentiman Road where I made my next picture about a quarter of a mile later. I’m rather surprised I didn’t find anything to interest me in that distance.
This house is in one of two similar short terraces immediately west of the junction with Meadow Road and I now think is No 119. The eleven other houses have similar decorative elements though the gables are varied with three patterns. I think then that many now had vigorously overgrown front gardens like this making hiding much of the ground floors, though now some are cleared for parking cars.
House, 104, Fentiman Rd, South Lambeth, Lambeth, 1989 89-7g-62
The houses opposite on the north side of the road here are rather larger and detached. Those at 106-112 are listed as is the church on the east side of this house. I think I photographed this rather than the listed buildings as for the reflection in the car and the tree shadow in the lower part of the image.
Caron’s Almshouses, Fentiman Rd, South Lambeth, Lambeth, 1989 89-7g-63
A few yards further along Fentiman Road are Caron’s Almshouses, founded in 1618 by Noel Caron, Dutch Ambassador to the court of King James 1, and a popular local philanthropist who lived in South Lambeth.
Originally on Wandsworth Road, Caron’s Almshouses became unsuitable for elderly people and moved to these new buildings in Fentiman Rd in 1854. The buildings were leased to the Family Housing association in the 1990s and repaired and modernised for local women in need and officially reopened by the Dutch Ambassador in 1997.
I included these last two pictures in a post on a previous walk made two days earlier in 1989, and I’m unsure now on which of the two walks in the same area they were taken on.
Greenwich Walk: On Thursday 18th October 2018 I walked with two or three other photographers from North Greenwich Station to the centre of Greenwich and made the pictures in this post. You can see many more of them in a post on My London Diary, Greenwich Walk.
Recently on >Re:PHOTO I’ve published a series of posts about my walks in London back in the 1980s, along with some of the pictures I took then which are now in my albums on Flickr. The most recent walk I’ve featured has been in Brixton and Stockwell and began with Stockwell Park, Bus Garage, Tower and Mason, and I’ve still to finish the posts on this, and will do so shortly.
But I’ve continued to walk around London, if less frequently than before in recent years. My walks now are rather shorter in length and duration and are mostly together with a few friends, other photographers who sometimes lure me into pubs on the way (I’m easily tempted.) And we almost always end up with a meal together in one.
Photographically things are rather different too. I don’t even always take any photographs and am no longer working on the kind of extended projects which I had back in those earlier days, recording the fabric of the city and in particular those areas undergoing substantial change – such as the whole of London’s docklands.
Back in the 80s and 90s I always worked with at least two cameras, one with black and white film and the other with colour. So far I’ve included very little of the colour work in those posts here, in part because I was working on a different project with the colour. You can see more of the colour work in the online project initially put together as a dummy for an as yet unpublished book in the early 1990s, ‘Café Ideal, Cool Blondes & Paradise‘.
More recently several web sites have published features using mainly these colour pictures from my Flickr albums sometimes along with some of the black and white. The most recent of these is on Flashbak, ‘34 Photos From A Walk Around Tooting, South London In 1990‘. It puts together images from several visits to the area and includes a few black and white images of people on the streets, In the introduction Paul Sorene comments “What we love about Peter’s pictures is that he shows us the everyday things we saw but didn’t much notice. Now that we get to look again, things looks strangely familiar.” I think this is about the 12th set of my pictures on that site.
But now I only take one camera on my walks, and always work in colour as the camera is digital. I could easily switch the images to black and white, but have only done so extremely rarely.
The other large change for me is the ease with which I can now make panoramic views, no longer needing to carry a separate camera for these, just the right lens. Many of the images from my walk on Thursday 18th October 2018 are panoramic with a horizontal angle of view of around 145 degrees even though they have a ‘normal’ aspect ratio of 3:2 as they also have a large vertical angle of view. Just a few are cropped to a more panoramic format.
Finally, here is the paragraph I wrote about the area in 2018:
I first walked along here back in 1980, and have done so a number of times since, though in recent years much of the riverside path has been closed as the old wharves are being replaced by luxury flats. It is still an interesting walk, though it has lost virtually all of the industrial interest it once had. A River Thames that is rapidly becoming lined by new and largely characterless buildings is at times a sad state, but there still remain some liminal landscapes and surprising vistas.
In 1994, five years after I made this picture the Stockwell Park Community Trust was created in response to the high crime rate and poor housing services on the Stockwell Park Estate and surrounding areas. The estate was then ranked by the UK government in the worst ten estates in the country. Tenants on the estate got together and formed a Tenant Management Organisation to get funding to refurbish the estate which had been built around 1970 for Lambeth Council.
The Community Trust held a ballot and gained a 97% vote for them to manage the £220 million investment and managed not only to retain all the social housing but to create another five units as well as building some new private housing to help with the finances.
Working with others in the community they also tackled crime and drug dealing on the estate, reducing these massively. The estate was transferred from Lambeth to Network Housing Group in 2007 and is now managed by SW9 Community Housing.
The graffiti here refers to the well-known case of George Davis, sentenced in 1975 to 20 years for an armed robbery which for once he had no part in. Though there were probably many other Georges who were also fitted up by police.
A block of 23 acres ofland of the west side of Brixton Road was leased in 1804 by Randle Jackson, barrister-at-law and an expert on Indian affairs and Robert Slade. In 1804 they split the estate, Jackson taking the northern part. In 1832 Jackson also acquired a stretch of Stockwell Park Road.
Only a few houses along Brixton Road were built before Jackson’s death in 1837, and it was only after this around 1840 that the two streets Lorn Road and Groveway (then Grove Road) were laid out on what had been gardens and outhouses. Lorn Road forms the approach from Brixton Road to St Michael’s Church on Stockton Park Road.
These Grade II listed houses date from the 1840s and are described as cottages ornés and are very much in a Gothic style. Perhaps rather over-exuberantly Gothick.
A wider view of the two houses. There are quite a few other listed houses and others of interest from the mid and later 19th century in Lorn Road, Groveway and Stockwell Park Road which were build on the Jackson estate, but I took few pictures.
Slade Gardens gets its name from Robert Slade, proctor-at-law, who took the southern part of the estate he had leased with Randle Jackson and was suceeded by his two sons. Slade’s younger son Felix is rather better-known than his father for the art school which he enable by a bequest to University College London in 1871. The Slade School of Art was one of the earliest schools to admit women on the same basis as men.
The site was acquired by the London County Council after the Second World War when many of the houses on the site had been badly damaged by a flying bomb which killed 11 people. The LCC bought up the remaining houses and demolished them. It was opened to the public as a park in 1958 and the adventure playground is on part of the site.
Much of the ideas behind adventure playgrounds came from the ‘Junk Playground’ estatblished by Carl Sorenson in 1943 near Copenhagen, based on his observations of how children actually played on waste ground, building sites and bomb sites etc. The movement spread to this country and a number of such playgrounds were set up in urban areas in the decades after the war. Play leaders encouraged imaginative play and tried to prevent serious accidents as well as discouraging drug use.
I think this adventure playground was set up around 1970. In 1999 it became independently managed by local residents and a voluntary committee was formed and the playground was set up as a new charity.
This house has its main frontage on the Stockwell Park Road with this fairly recent extension at the side along Lorn Road.
The other half of this semi-detached house, probably dating from the late 1840s is grade II listed, but this half is not, probably because of this extension as the two halves look almost identical from the frontage on Stockwell Park Road. But although very different in character this seems to me an interesting addition.
House, 41, Stockwell Park Rd, Stockwell, Lambeth, 1989 89-7e-62
Another house in the area with considerable individuality, 41 Stockwell Park Road described as an ‘Irregular stuccoed early C19 house’ is Grade II listed. The house is on the corner of Groveway and I think was probably one of the first built on the road, probably in the 1840s.
It has a much less sympathetic building attached, a plain four storey modern block you can just see at the right of the picture but this has not prevented its listing – and no reason why it should. But sometimes there seems to be a large element of architectural snobbery in listing decisions.
Back in Stockwell: It was the 17th July 1989 before I was able to return to Stockwell and take up my wanderings around south London where I had left off on 4th June.
Stockwell War Memorial, South Lambeth Rd, Stockwell, Lambeth, 1989 89-7c-26
Coming out from Stockwell Underground I turned left and came to the war memorial, then on a rather scruffy triangle of grass and litter between the South Lambeth Road and the A3 Clapham Road. This has since been tidied up as Stockwell Memorial Gardens with a mural celebrating others who died in WW2 including war hero Violette Szabó, GC and a the Bronze Woman statue by Aleix Barbat, a tribute to all black Caribbean women.
The Stockwell War Memorial was erected in 1922 to the design of Frank Twydals Dear which attracted praise at the time for its excellent proportion, refined detail and simple lines.
The figure of Remembrance is by sculptor Benjamin Clemens and the clock with a face on all four sides of the tower was donated by the father of one of the 574 men named on the memorial who died on the Somme on 9th August 1916, aged 19, Frederick H S Caiger. He was the only son of Dr Caiger, superintendent of South Western Fever Hospital.
The mural is on the Security Archives in my picture, one of eight deep level shelters built for WW2. Stockwell was used to house US troops. The bunkers were 100ft underground and had 8000 bunks, canteen and hospital facilities.
Scallywag was a pine furniture showroom which had started in an old church in Camberwell in 1970 and moved here in 1985 becoming the largest pine showroom in Europe. It is now based in a rural location in East Sussex as well as in the USA.
Opposite the war memorial on Clapham Road were these two architecturally very different buildings, TDA House and Mecca Bookmakers.
TDA House at 211 was built as the Stockwell Palladium cinema which opened in 1915 but was rebuilt as the Ritz Cinema in 1937. In 1954 it became Classic Cinema and in 1969 the Tatler Film Club showing uncensored blue movies, reverting to the Classic for a couple of years before closing in 1981. A snooker club for some years it then became TDA House for the Tigray Development Association supporting Ethiopian refugees and in 2017 became an Ethiopian restaurant.
Next door at 213 Mecca is now Ladbrokes.
Stockwell Lane, Stockwell, Lambeth, 1989 89-7d-53
I didn’t go up Clapham Road but turned into Stockwell Road, walking along her and making this picture just after I had turned into the narrow Stockwell Lane. It shows quite a mixture of buildings, with a recent house close to where I was standing, the back of a row of shops on Stockwell Road and a white building on the opposite side of the road which then had shops on its ground floor, but which is where Stockwell Green United Reform Church moved to after selling its premises on Stockwell Green.
The tower beyond is Birrell House, with an address on Stockwell Road but set well back from it, now managed by Hyde Housing, who took it over from Lambeth council after a vote by residents in 1999. The block, approved by the London County Council in 1964 was an addition to the Stockwell Gardens estate with 68 flats on 18 floors was named after Miss Elsie Birrell, London Undergroud’s first female porter who worked at Stockwell Station during the Second World War.
Garden, Stockwell, Lambeth, 1989 89-7d-56
Stockwell in the past was noted for its gardens, particularly the botanical gardens of the Tradescant family and I could resist these fine specimens (certainly not Tradescantia) filling a fairly small front garden near Stockwell Park Crescent.
Villas, 2-4, Stockwell Park Crescent, Stockwell, Lambeth, 1989 89-7d-46
Stockwell Park Crescent was laid out in the late 1830s and many of the houses in it date from the 1840s. These were large houses for the middle classes many of whose heads will have worked in the city but wanted to live in the ‘country’ in places such as Stockwell. The small attic rooms will have been for the servants. These were villas rather than the terraces common in urban London and on a crescent which aimed for a more informal and romantic landscape.
Although basically plain, there are classical details on the frontage rather than actual columns, extending to the eaves which give a classical facade. The pair is Grade II listed.
Epping Forest Centenary Walk 2009: London is in some ways a ‘green city’ with over 3,000 parks of varying sizes within the boroughs which make up Greater London. These range from pocket handkerchief areas to large commons and royal parks such as the roughly 2500 acre Richmond Park.
Wanstead Flats
London Mayor Sadiq Khan supported London being designated as the world’s first National Park City in 2019 and announced plans to increase the amount of ‘green space’ to 50%. This isn’t a huge target as according to the capital’s environmental records centre “Roughly 47% of Greater London is ‘green’; 33% of London is natural habitats within open space according to surveyed habitat information and an additional 14% is estimated to be vegetated private, domestic garden land.”
One of the Montague Road Estate flats had misssiles on its roof for the Olympics
In order of size, starting with the largest they categorise this as Other Urban Fringe, Parks And Gardens, Natural And Semi-natural Urban Greenspace, Green Corridors, Outdoor Sports Facilities, Unknown and amenities with other minor contributions. Some 22% is classified as Green Belt which gives some quite strong protection against development, though my borough is currently proposing to build on a little of it.
The walk goes on a bridge across the North Circular Road
The protection of green spaces in and around London has a long history, back to the Norman conquest when kings set up royal hunting grounds convenient to their palaces in Westminster and further afield. These were called forests, though most were mainly open land rather than full of trees; the name was a legal term meaning only the king had the right to hunt deer in them. One of the larger areas, established by Henry II in the 12th century was Epping Forest, part of an even larger Forest of Essex.
Memorial to a famous evanglalist Gypsy Rodney Smith born in a bender here
Enclosures began to threaten the future of the forest at the start of the 19th century when around a third of the remaining forest was allowed to be privatised for building development and farming by the lords of various manors in the forest. By 1870 around two thirds of the forest had been enclosed.
Warren Pond
By this time many people had become worried about the loss of the commons, particular after neighbouring Hainault Forest had been sold off by the Crown, the trees removed and the area turned into poor agricultural land. More and more people were coming out from London during their free times to enjoy the green spaces in the outskirts and preservation societies were set up.
Queen Elizabeth’s Hunting Lodge
The City of London became involved after it bought land at Manor Park for the City of London Cemetery. Traditonally the city had organised Easter Monday stag hunts in the forest, but they now became commoners with the right to graze animals, and began legal actions agaimst lords of the manor who had enclosed forest land. Eventually Acts of Parliament allowed them to purchase the forest manors and an court in 1874 ruled that all enclosures made since 1851 were illegal.
Under the Epping Forest Act 1878 the forest ceased to be a royal forest and became managed by the City – as it still is. The Crown lost its right to venison and commoners lost some of their rights too, but the City Conservators were obliged to “at all times keep Epping Forest unenclosed and unbuilt on as an open space for the recreation and enjoyment of the people.”
The preservation of Epping Forest was the first major victory in Europe for the modern environmental movement. Four years later it was endorsed by Queen Victoria, who although it was no longer royal but in the hands of the City of London, nevertheless stated “It gives me the greatest satisfaction to dedicate this beautiful forest to the use and enjoyment of my people for all time“.
On the 100th anniversary of the Epping Forest Act in 1978, the Friends of Epping Forest began a annual series of anniversary walks from along a route they established from Manor Park Station to Epping. The Friends were originally formed to oppose the routing of London’s orbital M25 through the Forest, leading to it being put in a tunnel. But they have been less successful in opposing some other breaches of the 1878 Act, and in 1989-94 a large section of the south of the forest was lost to build the M11 link road, and during the London 2012 Olympics a temporary police station was allowed to be built on Wanstead Flats.
Epping Station at the end of our walk
I walked the Epping Forest Centenary Walk with some of my family and a friend on Bank Holiday Monday 31 August 2009, and you can download a leaflet including a map (though I’d advise also having the OS Explorer 174) of what has now been renamed the Epping Forest Big Walk. According to this it is 14.1 miles (22.7km) but we managed to walk rather further, possibly partly because we got a little lost at times. Of course you can do the walk in stages rather than all on the same day. If you want to walk with others you can join the free Big Walk this year on Sunday 17th September 2023 to be led by experienced guides!
Built 1937, architect F E Simpkins Sunlight Laundry is a fine example of Art Deco ‘moderne’ style which unfortunately some architectural historians have turned up their noses at – perhaps why this building and some others are unlisted. Clearly this should be.
The Sunlight company was founded in 1900 and expanded with branches across London and after a merger in 1928 became a national business. Until the 1960s much of its work was for middle class domestic homes, but the wider ownership of washing machines shrunk the market and it concentrated on hotels, factories and other commercial clients. Later it also became a major contractor to hospitals.
There are another three pictures of this building online (click on one of these images to go to the album to see them), and I’ve also photographed it on other occasions when passing, though usually I’ve gone past on a 37 bus and not stopped.
Sunlight became part of the Danish Berendsen group and in 2013 changed its name to reflect this. It continues in business internationally and in the UK is the leading company in textile and laundry services to the hospitality and healthcare sectors. The company was acquired in 2017 by the French laundry services group Elis, whose name and logo now label its frontage.
Trinity Homes is a Christian Charity which provides accommodation to both single and married couples over the age of 57 who are members of a Christian denomination. As it states on its frontage it was erected in 1822-4 and was built and Endowed by Thomas Bailey. Additional homes were added in 1860. Initially it was The Trinity Asylum for Aged Persons. The building is Grade II listed.
Bailey was a cut-glass manufacture in the City of London and lived in Bethal House on Trent Road in Brixton Hill behind Corpus Christi Catholic church, built on land given by Bailey. His house, built in 1768, became part of the RC primary school built on the site in 1902 but has since been demolished.
The Assembly Hall is at the west end of the Town Hall complex and this striking sculpture relieves a huge plain brick wall area. This rather plain building is covered by the Grade II listing of Lambeth Town Hall and I think dates from 1935-8 when the Town Hall was raised and extended. The striking sculpture on what the listing text calls a particularly handsome rear elevation is ‘Youth rising from the Past‘, by Denis Dunlop (1892–1959).
Lambeth Town Hall, Acre Lane, Brixton 89-5l-35-Edit
Lambeth Town Hall seen from Acre Lane, though my more usual views of it have been either from Windrush Square or in close-up from the bus stop on the opposite side of the road during those long waits for a No 37 bus.
I’m not a great fan of the rather pompous clock tower of this Grade II listed town hall designed by Septimus Warwick and H Austen Hall and built in 1905-8. Edwardian Baroque always seems to me a period where architecture lost its way and was given excessive funding thanks to our plundering the wealth of the Empire.
Granada Brixton, Brighton Terrace, Bernay’s Grove, Brixton, Lambeth, 1989
Opened in 1898 as the Empress Theatre, designed by Wylson & Long, it was reconstructed in Art Deco style by Andrew Mather, reopening in 1931 as the New Empress Theatre. It showed films on Sundays when live performances were not allowed. It closed as a theatre in 1957 and after alterations opened a month later as a cinema. Granada Brixton became a Bingo Club in 1967 and when this closed was used as a furniture store. It was demolished in 1992 and the rather ugly Pavilion Mansions built on the site.
This walk continues along Brighton Terrace in a later post.
