And like the prodigal child, or some random naughty kid, we are back and we hope you enjoyed our month of history writing, picked especially for you as they get the most hits the history of Greater Kennington is important.
As you may or may not know, our greatest ‘at risk’ asset in is the wonderful Cinema Museum located in Charlie Chaplin’s old workhouse. To celebrate LGBTQI+ history month they are putting on series of screenings one is coming up this Thursday (the 16th) seems particularly interesting. It’s a series of shorts about aging, coming out later in life, and disabilities. Afterwards there is a QA and we all have a chance to ask the directors and actors questions about making and acting in the films. And there’s a bar. We’ve been to a number of shorts screenings at the London Film Festival; they’re great fun and an intriguing way to learn more about how films are made.
If you’ve never been to the Cinema Museum it’s a treasure trove of cinematic ephemera and your ticket to this event will allow you access to check out some of it, from ticket stubs to chairs, lighting and props. And the films are shown amongst the collection. A great even night out regardless of sexuality or even if you’re not a film buff. Did we mention there’s a bar?
Doors open at 18:00 for a 19:00 start this Thursday and tickets can be purchased here for £8 a pop. A lot cheaper than the BFI.
From the archives, the fourth edition of our month of best history posts
The fourth in our series of images from Lambeth Archives Were you aware that for a brief moment in time greater Kennington (Walworth) had a world class theatre in Kennington Park Road? It’s marble clad limelight flourished for just 23 years before being briefly converted into a cinema, and then it lay derelict before being damaged by enemy action and then final action from Lambeth council.
Kennington Theatre was situated to the north of the park where a hefty block of flats currently reside. The frontage was executed in Portland stone, with the interiors highlighted by marble columns and fireplaces. As was the fashion at the time, the emphasis was on French renaissance and no small expense was spared on fittings and adornments.
Following what seemed to be a successful season of pantos and plays the theatre was closed and converted into a cinema in 1921. According to records it’s last license was granted in 1934 and then left derelict. Afterwards the Odeon group purchased the property and had designs on demolishing the building but this never transpired, and it lay derelict for a number of years.
The final nail in the coffin of Kennington Theatre came at the end of 1943 when the back of the now defunct building was partially damaged by a German bomb. As it was then deemed a hazard to the public it was purchased by Lambeth under a compulsory purchase order and bulldozed. The site is now occupied by a mid century block of flats. Next time you walk by, cast your mind back to the other century of Kennington panto goers who tread before you.
If you’ve ever wondered why listing buildings is important, now you know..
From the archives, the third edition of our month of best history posts
If you’re a new arrival in the area or your interests are not so much focussed on local history, you might not be aware that for almost two centuries London’s most acclaimed pleasure garden existed on our anointed patch. Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens has been celebrated in books and songs, and even featured at key moments of the recent Netflix hit ‘Bridgerton’. While we can’t do the legendary place justice in the space of a solitary blog, we can crystallise it’s meaning by the man at the helm of its glory days in the first half of the 18th century, and his name was Jonathan Tyers (1702-1767)
A young Jonathan Tyers subletted ‘Vauxhall Spring-Gardens’ in 1729 and undertook the hefty task of reimagining the slightly disreputable old gardens into an innocent and elegant venue for families and people of all classes. However, with an admission charge of one shilling in reality it was out of reach for most people. He was inspired by a meeting with artist and buzzkill moralist William Hogarth, who advocated the value of creating something that sent a moral message cloaked in the guise of humour and entertainment. We now refer to this as ‘family friendly’.
The egalitarian and polite nature of Spring Gardens was a welcome and needed riposte to a London that was violent, smelly and uncouth and it would kick start the civilisation of Georgian London. However noble, the Spring Garden regulars were still out for a bit of bawdy fun and didn’t take kindly to being preached to. Tyers had to think on his feet before the whole thing went belly up, and his masterstroke was that beyond the elegant supper boxes and promenading avenues he created a wooded and dark area called the Grove. We will leave it up your imagination what went on in the Grove, but let’s just say it was dark and proved very popular.
Assignations aside, what Tyers created for those who could afford it was a site for music, dancing, eating and drinking. The paintings in the supper boxes made it in reality the first public art gallery in Britain. On a typical night revellers could be entertained by performers, bands, fireworks, operas and masquerades. George Fredrick Handel became a kind of ‘artist in residence’ at the Garden and performed there regularly. When Tyers made profits he drove them directly into new structures and events, making the spot a ‘must see’ on a regular basis. After Tyers’ death in 1767 the Gardens were passed to his son and this initiated the very slow but inexorable decline of the place.
The precise location of Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens only roughly matches the footprint of the current Pleasure Gardens (created in the late 1970’s), and it’s epicentre was at the current St. Peter’s Church. Rumours of redemption from carnal sin abound about the decision to place a church on this site, and we invite you to make your own conclusion. Tyers Street is a commemoration of his efforts, both lurid and noble.
And as you can see, dear readers, attempts to gentrify Vauxhall from a place of dissolute debauchery into something more agreeable to a wealthier public for profit making purposes is by no means a contemporary undertaking.
From the archives, the second edition of our month of best history posts
Fixate your eyes girls and boys, as we’re about to give you a little potted history of a lovely neo Classical institution in Kennington Lane with a funny badge on the front of it; Imperial Court.
1. The Licensed Victuallers School, Kennington Green
In 1794 the Friendly Society of Licensed Victuallers was established to educate the children of publicans affected by long term illness, incapacity, or poverty (take it from Peggy Mitchell, running a pub isn’t easy). As this was the era that proceeded free public education, publicans were keen to ensure their children’s education and well being. The school was so popular that admission was granted exclusively on the basis of a lottery, but over time the school was so oversubscribed that a larger building was required.
The original school was demolished in 1835 and the core of the building we have inherited was erected in 1836 (with extensions in 1890). The school was now able to expand its enrollment from 100 to 250 pupils, both boys and girls. The children were generally taught apprenticeships and educated from the age of 7-12 until they were 15, and then sent on their way with a small bonus for good conduct. The school moved to Slough in 1921.
NAAFI
Following WW1 The comprehensive welfare of Forces was put into sharp focus, and from 1921 to 1992 Imperial Court again served the public proudly as the headquarters of the Navy, Army, and Air Forces Institutes, or ‘NAAFI’. NAAFI existed (and on a much smaller scale still does) to provide catering and recreational activities needed by the British Armed Forces and their families posted overseas. This included mess services, selling British goods, and organising entertainment and activities.
Providing non combat services to troops and families required trained staff, on a voluntary and on a paid basis. To this extent NAAFI in Kennington served as a training centre for cooks, cleaners, caterers, and people interested in the logistics of getting auxiliary services to people overseas. Training at NAAFI was often undertaken by women, and their work in the war effort is duly celebrated at the Imperial War Museum (keeping it local).
3. Flats
Imperial Court was Grade 2* listed in 1980, so it is luckily beyond the grasp of the wrecking ball. After it was sold in 1992 it was converted into flats and now functions as a home to your neighbours.
Are you at that point in January where there isn’t much to do but you’re nevertheless scratching to get out of the house or office? So are we, so to address the scratch we just checked out the intriguing and timely show ‘Fake News’ at Southwark Playhouse. Not the new Playhouse in Kennington that we visited last summer (it’s a thing), but the original in Newington Causeway.
Originally presented to a sold out crowd at the Edinburgh Fringe, Fake News revolves around a budding journalist who’s just landed a plumb internship at the country’s foremost news organisation. With the audience acting as younger interns, Millennial Times is described to us as ‘the most lucrative and therefore respected media company on earth’ (we thought that was Kennington Runoff, but moving on). Given this, what the Times value most is the pursuit of clicks and money above ethics. But as long as people remain entertained, is this such a bad thing?
As our budding journalist finds himself increasing enmeshed in a hilarious and distressing workplace with Angus and Debbie, he struggles to find a story that will launch his career and prove that he deserves to be there. Eventually he stumbles across a story that might not only make his career, but might disprove one of the biggest news stories since 9/11. But is his revelation itself fake news and if so, does it matter if it makes people happy and shareholders richer? Of course we’re not going to tell you.
Fake News is on now and runs until 28 January and tickets can be booked here. A delicious irony is that it’s received rave reviews from some of the same news outlets that it bashes. Below is the writer appearing on Sky News. The running time is one hour so you can toddle on home and still make it an early night.
We here at the Runoff will be taking a break for the next month. But before you fall into apoplectic fits of anguish, don’t worry as we will be spoon feeding you with highlights from our history archives. We’re offering you these stories purely because they had the most hits give Greater Kenningtonians much more depth and context into our anointed patch. Enjoy!
We usually like to review the new exhibits at the Imperial War Museum, but had some understandable reluctance to check out their newest show. As it’s about war related video games as we didn’t think it exactly fit, lets just say, the sensitive demographic that we cater to. However, we found it fascinating and it dispelled, among other things, the dated myth that online gaming is a domain for spotty teenage boys.
War Games: Real Conflicts, Virtual Worlds, Extreme Entertainment is a show displayed in 10 parts, or levels, starting with the psychology of why people have a long history of gravitating to games involving tactic and strategy. We are then shown a live action game, Wolfenstein 3D (1992) next to Sniper Elite 5 (2022) to see how profoundly gaming has changed over the years. This is where we encounter two enormous screens showing war games and developers telling us in laymen’s terms (it has to be very laymen for us) how they are based on real environments, and they show us how users can play for a few minutes or plan a campaign that takes years to complete. The mind boggles.
The largest room touches on some of the inevitable ethical complexities involved in developing products based on crushing people’s heads and then running them over. Apparently one of the largest growth areas are games which involve saving people affected by war, which is a relief. And increasingly developers are creating figures which can be succinctly personalised to give gamers a feeling that they have agency with that figure. Video games often reflect the anxieties we face at the time they were created and can be seen as mirrors of the age. For example, imagine a videogame fronted by a resurrected Liz Truss with Covid, running around cutting off everyone’s heating.
The most enjoyable element of this exhibit can be found on Level 10 (this room is only open until the end of January) which has dozens of retro video consoles from 1980 up until the current day which you can play for free. We saw Sega, Atari, Commodore 24, X Box, Nintendo 64 and others. We won’t tell you which era we played as you’ll then be one step closer to knowing who we are. But suffice it to say that War Games is a sophisticated spread of immersive installations about a culture that many of us know little about.
For those of you who’ve given IWM a wide berth over the years for moral reasons, we understand your reluctance. However, it is not a temple of jingoistic celebration, and if anything it is dedicated to the human spirit and survival. Galleries dedicated to the Holocaust and women on the home front are very poignant and reminders of the profound impact that conflict has on the innocent.
War Games: Real Conflict, Virtual Worlds, Extreme Entertainment is on now until 28 May and is totally free.
Several parts of UK lay claim to the legacy of Mary Wollstonecraft. The philosopher, writer, visionary, feminist and mother left tracks in Spitalfields, Yorkshire and there is a blue plaque in her honour just outside Greater Kennington. What is less reported is that she spent a number of her formative years living in Walworth, just off the Walworth Road.
By the mid to late 18th century what is now Elephant & Castle and Walworth became fashionable with the middle classes as it was surrounded by market gardens and provided easy access to the City. The result of moving around (and being female) meant that Mary was denied a systematic education, and this was the groundwork for her ultimate life defining work, ‘A Vindication of the Rights of Woman’. But living in our area made her more curious about the world around her, to the consternation of her father.
In 1775 Mary was introduced to the Blood family who lived in Newington Butts. Her friend Fanny Blood evolved into an inspiration for Mary and over the next decade inspired her unconventional life. Mary managed to remain close to Fanny for a period until life with her father became too unbearable, and her mother found her lodgings at the home of translator Thomas Taylor in Manor Place, Walworth.
After an abbreviated life of writing and advocacy Mary died at 38 and left a number of unfinished manuscripts and pieces of work. She also left a 11 year old daughter Mary Shelly, who would go on to write ‘Frankenstein’ when she was just 21. For over a century Mary’s personal life overshadowed her achievements in a manner that would not have happened if she was a man.
A few artefacts of Mary’s era exist in the Cuming Museum (which we wrote about in 2020) at the Walworth Heritage Centre a stone’s throw from her previous abode. Among them is a calling card that Mary left for the Cuming family. If you do happen to find yourself on Walworth Rd imbuing your life with the legacy of Wollstonecraft, we recommend that you take a break by visiting the yummy Shawarma Hut. The history books are unclear as to whether Mary herself actually dined at Shawarma Hut, but we like to think that she would have.
When Time Out, or as we like to call it, ‘that listings site from a bygone era’ described the new show at Newport Street Gallery as ‘stupid, lazy, arrogant, crap art’ we knew we had to get over there as soon as possible. This very controversial show is called ‘The Currency’ by Damien Hirst and features 10,000 of his dot paintings in several eras of existence. These range from physical paintings to photocopies and then cinder, as the artworks are torched on the first floor.
For people not aware of Mr. Hirst’s oeuvre, he has spent a large amount of his career preserving dead animals in formaldehyde, sticking diamonds of skulls, and exterminating flies. We reviewed a previous show at Newport in October, 2020. An abiding theme of Hirst is the repetitive nature of objects and their cycle from inception, to life, to being fetishized and worshiped, and eventual meaningless demise.
Hirst’s interest in the repetitive nature of dots is well established, and last year he gave 10,000 people the option to buy an NFT .jpg dot painting for £2000. The NFT could then be traded for an original 8×10 work. About half the punters traded it for an original and the remaining suckers folks stuck with the NFT option. It is these physical works which are on display in monumental floor to ceiling displays and ultimately dispatched into ashen bits above Vauxhall.
The exhibit is peppered with TV screens featuring live footage of the works being prepped and torched. When the fires aren’t on, there are clips of Mr. Hirst in conversation with actually responsible people such as former Bank of England boss Mark Carney and Stephen Fry, with topics ranging from the absurdity of the art market to the meaningless value of money. Try telling that to the single mum who can’t heat her home at the moment. But we digress.
Damien Hirst: The Currency is on now until 30 October and is free. Even if you find the theme distasteful, the exhibition itself is quite thought provoking as the paintings/photocopies begin to incrementally disappear. There is also a great gift shop. The fact that over the past 12 months the NFT market has crashed is just a side giggle. However, we at the Runoff would never capitalise of personal loss as that would make us no better than a Florist.
Next time you go for your constitutional in Kennington Park, take a moment to inspect two unloved fountains which you’ve probably walked past a thousand times but never taken notice of. Their creation and endurance are interesting reminders of the people and events that have unfolded in our hallowed patch over the years.
In the southwest corner of the park you can find part of a fountain which was donated by philanthropist Felix Slade in 1861. This is the same Slade who founded the school of art and a number of professorships. Slade lived in Aulton Place, and the story goes that while walking through the park he asked for a glass of water and was handed dirty water in a chipped glass (with Aulton Place only over the road he could have just popped back home but let’s not get stuck on tiny details). When he saw kids playing in the park without access to clean water, Slade to took to the task like a duck to, well, water.
Slade’s solution for the lack of clean water was laudable but perhaps a bit over the top for a working class Victorian neighbourhood. He funded the erection of an elaborate fountain on a plinth in red Aberdeen granite with brass handles, a large bronze urn, and his own monogram stamped over it, lest people forget who put it there. The handles were nicked shortly thereafter, followed by the urn. When the urn was replaced it was nicked again and then went from being a fountain to a curious oddity and relic of the past. The ornate base remains and is a reminder of the gulf of understanding and wealth that exists in Greater Kennington to this day.
A bit further up into the park you can see the column which is the remains of Tinworth Fountain. It was created in 1872 in buff terracotta by the Doulton Factory in Vauxhall and was the centrepiece of an ornate sunken garden located where the basketball courts currently reside. It was almost totally destroyed in WWII and put back together without its resplendent and overflowing bowl, which moved and then lost. After being relocated several times it found its current home while still sporting its grand central feature, a sculpture depicting the pilgrimage of life. Sadly the sculpture was knocked over and completely destroyed in 1981. The column that we see today was later used as target practice by local youths.
Our beaten and bombed column still stands and if you look closely you can see the painstaking efforts made to both restore and destroy it. Some very clever soul even decided to replace some of the unglazed buff terracotta poured concrete. Nevertheless, Kennington Park has meant many things to many people over the years, and our battered little monuments stand as eternal reminders of that.
We recently attended the intriguing exhibit ‘Queer Art(ists) Now’ at Space Station Sixty Five in Kennington Cross. Now if you’re thinking ‘but I’ve never heard of this place’ then you can be forgiven. It’s a very underused artist run space and gallery in the car park (don’t we take you to the most glam places) of Kennington Film Studios. Which we all know as the legendary studio where ‘Richard and Judy’ was once filmed.
Queer Art(ists) Now brings together 70 artists out of 300 applications and 1000 pieces of art and showcases the best in Queer art at the moment. They have also commissioned five artists to create bespoke works for the exhibit. The works are remarkable for their diversity and cover a range of mediums including oils, photography, film, textiles, papier mache, traffic cones, and discarded items.
At times, exhibits like this can devolve into preachy diatribes about oppression, or become overtly political and worthy, which leaves people a bit deflated or alienates those who don’t come from that community. This exhibit is curated in such a manner that it has a certain levity and playfulness about it, and makes you question your assumptions. There are works about the trans experience, body image, gender politics, sex, and the intersection between ‘straight and gay’ and what that means. The variety means you’ll likely come across something pleasing regardless of your tastes or sexuality. On our visit we were greeted by a young man dancing in a dressing gown and they were giving away free permanent tattoos.
Queer Art(ists) Now is totally free and open Wednesday to Saturday 12 – 8 Until 8 October. They also have a variety of merch on sale to peruse. And why this great exhibition space isn’t used more regularly is one of life’s great mysteries. Like why you never see any baby pigeons or the sudden craze for Greggs branded clothing.
