Walcot Square and its little sister St. Mary’s Gardens in north Kennington hold unique histories in our peculiar patch of the planet and serve as reminders of the altruistic nature of our forbearers. In an era where most of our patch was run by the Duchy of Cornwall,  this bit of damp farmland was  bequeathed by Edmund Walcot with the intention of helping the poor. We love that.

In the late Georgian era small landowners sold the end of their land on Kennington Road to developers keen to build boujie suburban homes to wealthily folks keen to escape the bustle and pollution of central London. Little did they know that the industrial revolution was swarming their direction and Greater Kennington became the repository of smelly factories that London needed but didn’t want to inhale.  So those rich folks moved to Clapham or Dulwich, and good riddance.

We’re now in the early 19^th century and the slightly weird trapezoid nature of these squares reflect  the roads that were around them, which needed to navigate  the Georgian homes in Kennington Road to deliver what they were producing. By this time the boujie homes were multiple occupancy, later housing Charlie Chaplin and his family.  The fields were drained in the 1830’s and the homes we see today were built for families in need. Little architecture exists from this exact period as people didn’t want to risk building on spots surrounded by vinegar works and tar factories.

We’ve now unquestionably whetted your appetite to explore these quirky squares, and to take a break you could do a lot worse than having a cuppa at the delightful Walcot Stores coffee shop. Walcot Stores was once a small grocers, the kind which once predominated in our  area. Its former life is wonderfully captured in this clip from 1990 films ‘The Krays’. Trigger warning – There are references to UHT milk and a guy from Spandau Ballet kicking the shit out of someone.  

We recently attended the moving exhibit Childhood and War at the Imperial War Museum and can definitely recommend it. This expansive and well thought out exhibit is by no means just for kids, but the presence of them was unexpectedly delightful.

Childhood and War covers how children were affected by war from WW1up to the conflict in Ukraine. The WW1 room features a doll that we quite frankly found terrifying, and features a hastily abandoned children’s unmade bed. If you’re expecting the unmade bed of Tracey Emin, its over at the Tate and would be wildly inappropriate for this setting. The exhibit is in places immersive, and puts you into a wartime living room and a cold war kitchen. An example of its nod to adulthood, there is an interactive rotary phone that anyone under 45 wouldn’t have a clue how do use and we witnessed a nine year old punching the digits, dismayed that it didn’t light up.

One reason that this exhibit is interesting to local history buffs is that long before the era of £15,000,000 flats, in WW2 Greater Kennington was very much a working class set of neighbourhoods and replete with children. Given its location many of these kids would have been evacuated to rural and more middle class areas, and films document this well. A reimagined evacuation rail carriage is especially powerful.

As you scroll through the exhibit you get a sense of what children lose during war but also their resilience. War is a confusing experience for them, but also draws out innate toughness and beauty. Expect to see wartime artwork by children, letters, and even art created by optimistic German children in a detention camp. The last section deals with the impact of war on children very recently, including Syria and Ukraine.

And as we’ve been banging on about for almost a decade, the IWM is by no means a celebration of warfare but if anything serves as a reminder of the determination of those affected by war including Jews, women, infrastructures, and in this exhibit children. And over the years IWM has been incrementally evolving into a memorial of the horrors of war as opposed to a celebration of military might.  As it’s the lazy days of summer what’s better than seeing a scary doll or a smelly unmade bed?

Childhood and War is on now until 27 February 2027 and like everything in life, including this website, is totally free.

Today we find ourselves in the sun drenched serene summertime courtyard of the Jamyang Buddhist Centre in Renfrew Road to check out their new café called ‘Kindness’. Frequent readers might recall that there was a previous café on their premises run by the brilliant Louie Louie, which managed to go bust shortly after we reviewed it. We accept no culpability in that outcome.

The Buddhist Centre occupies an old courthouse that once prosecuted the likes of the Kray twins and IRA terrorists. With that background it’s a glorious asymmetry that the building should now be sufficed with serenity, and for the first time in ages now mostly open to the public. After sticking our noses in rooms where people were meditating, an employee intervened/stopped us and offered a small tour. Still extant are the Victorian corridors and waiting rooms of the courts, with the primary room transformed into a Buddhist library which is open to the public. And most wonderfully the previous prison cells have been turned into Air BnB spaces! And as some of you’ve only witnessed a prison cell without really being given the option to leave, these feature original doors that you can open and close at times of your choosing.

Moving on to the Kindness café, it started appearing on our radar when a fan sent us the pic below of a customer with the most amazing hairstyle, which is already being copied by people here in the office. In August the café is open only at weekends and is a tranquil hideaway in an otherwise untranquil Greater Kennington. We enjoyed a rich, decadent carrot cake full of nuts and buttercream icing. Otherwise it’s a lunch venue serving affordable vegan/veg fare and for a good cause. But please don’t undertake the unkind pursuit of walking into a room of blissfully quiet meditators and blurting out ‘amazing, look at all the PERIOD FEATURES’, as it just becomes awkward.