Author Archives: Kennington Runoff

The Tommyfield

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As all of the Runoff staff love a bargain, we recently paid a visit to the Tommyfield pub in Kennington Cross to take advantage of their £45 for 2 steak and Malbec night, which is available on Wednesdays and Saturdays. We invited Karen from Finance to dine with us as we have a lot of time for her, and she needed a night out after some  damaging comments about her Excel skills.

We started with some sourdough and olives (not included) which were a perfect complement to what was upcoming. The steak options are rump and sirloin and your scribe chose the latter as it costs more and therefore created an increased thrill of saving money. The options for sauce are chimichurri, peppercorn or blue cheese, and the peppercorn was chosen for its sharp, gravy like tangyness. Both steaks were served rare and we were pleased with the result: It was a good quality steak, browned on the outside and just pink enough in the middle. And a big slab for what you’re paying. 

On sides front, your scribe had a creamy, buttery mash and Karen had the chunky chips, describing them as not too chunky, crisp yet fluffy, and the rocket salad was particularly well dressed . She chose the chimichurri sauce and was quite proud that the bit of Argentina on the plate matched nicely with the lovely and full bodied Argentinean Malbec (which is £28 itself) – Finca La Colonia. In fact, so enthusiastic was Karen that she proclaimed, while in the middle of chewing her rare stake, ‘this is so amazing that I’ve totally forgotten about those spreadsheet comments’. OK. 

The Tommyfield is run by independent south London based Three Cheers Pubs, who run eight other swishy yet beautiful pubs, mostly in Clapham/Balham. A few years ago we met the owners at a pub wine tasting that we snuck into attended and they love what they do. So next time you’re considering Kennington Cross pub options, give them a try as we love the little guy as opposed to a pub run by a mega chain (without saying names, it’s that one across street with outdoor seating). 

The Tommyfield also have a star studded and cracking comedy night that we frequent where we’ve seen the talents of Harry Hill (he was there only this week), Joe Lycett and Aisling Bea. And the punters look like they just stepped off the set of ‘The Apprentice’, which is half the whole event.

And if steak isn’t your thing, they have two other special nights as well…

You are Going to Die @ Southwark Playhouse

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Life is hard, and once in a while all you really want to do is catch a play with a naked man sprinting around a smoking toilet. Such a play has arrived in our anointed patch and while this specific production might not be your pot of tea, it might open your eyes to the more mainstream offerings over at both branches of the Playhouse.  Of course we’ve checked it out for you.

You Are Going to Die was the breakout play at Edinburgh Fringe last year and was received with rave reviews. With the use of his body, the actor/creator takes us through a series of nude vignettes which feature different people at different ages. Themes of climate change, rejection and alienation in a fast moving world are abiding themes. His presentation is at times vulnerable and at others menacing and anarchic. With all this heavy material the piece (all 70 minutes of it) is, ironically, often humorous, especially when he addresses the audience directly. During our show he was able to tell off two late arrivals by only using his body. 

If penises swinging about isn’t exactly what you’re looking for on a night out, Southwark Playhouse has two local houses (the Newington Butts venue is shiningly new and we’ve reviewed it here) with a wide variety of quickly changing shows. At the moment they are also showing in interesting new play about football fans and in May an ‘adult fairy tale’ about Sappho. 

You Are Going to Die is on now until 4 May and tickets are £26. We can assure you, it won’t be boring but it isn’t for everyone. And the Borough outlet has a cracking bar which is open to the public.

Spending a Penny

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Many of you are probably thinking ‘will the Runoff EVER get around to doing a piece on public conveniences?’ Well, due to the popularity of a few Insta pics (if you haven’t already, please join us there as we’re loads of fun)  we’ve decided to create an article about the long closed Victorian public convenience in Kennington Cross, which is currently on the rental market.

The Kennington Cross WC was engineered by B. Finch & Co. in 1898 in a Victorian movement to make London a more hygienic place (read ‘so blokes wouldn’t pee in the street’). It features an array of beautiful marble and iron urinals with a glass tank on top, three cubicles, a mosaic tile floor and a booth for attendants. To keep the critters occupied while nature calls, at the street level there is a horse/cattle trough (1880) that precedes the WC. Sadly, Lambeth Council closed the toilet in 1988 but since then a headstrong group of volunteers have endeavoured to keep it falling to middle earth. Whoever rents this unique property will need to be conscious that it is, thank the urinal gods, Grade 2 listed. 

Over the past ten years, clever people have been turning disused toilets into equally clever things. There is a cute mini chain of wine/charcuterie bars called ‘WC’ and we’ve visited the one in Bloomsbury. The closest ours has to come to anything that interesting is when it was a pop up arts venue called ‘Arts Lav’ in 2017. At 387 square feet we think it might be too small to be converted into a bar or even a tea shop, but one person who got in touch told us that he was married in the toilets, so in reality it could be converted into anything. Whatever it might be, it will hopefully be developed into something that we can all visit and appreciate.   

A New Look Kings Arms

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At the Runoff we don’t usually take requests as that would make us no better than, say, a wedding singer. However, we’re nothing if not inconsistent, so when the King’s Arms in Kennington Lane asked us to visit their new beer garden as it is the biggest in Kennington that left us feeling intrigued, so we popped open the hatch to our subterranean office and toddled over there to see if the statement was true. 

The inside of the King’s Arms has its usual group of locals who’ve been going there for a long time (maybe not when it was a gay bar), but the very spacious outside is a younger brood who were watching sport on the many TV’s and generally just enjoying themselves. All of the spaces, including 4 enclosed banquettes, are bookable. And since it is fully outside it isn’t as noisy as more enclosed spaces. The drinks are nothing to get too excited about, but we had a very well priced and drinkable Cruzcampo, from Spain. People were also having cocktails and wine, 

As the weather gets nicer, al fresco King’s Arms is a good alternative to being indoors, and an even better alternative to a certain pub in Kennington Cross with outdoor seating that masquerades as independent, but is in reality just another outlet of a faceless mega chain. King’s Arms, if you’re reading this (and if not, you really should be) the only area of development we suggest is to take down the fencing facing Kennington Lane so the world can see that you, in fact, have the largest beer garden in Greater Kennington. Salud! 

UnEarthing the Elephant

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The capacity for our community to transform and evolve is sometimes more than us mere humans can absorb. To those who don’t visit Elephant and Castle regularly, it can be unsettling to see how it’s changed over the past 10 years. 

We recently discovered a charming, 22 minute short film called ‘UnEarthing Elephant’ about the people and community that sprung up in Elephant and Castle shopping centre. Shot in 2017, it’s both a celebration and an elegy to a shopping centre that people knew was doomed but not when. The touching and at times funny personal stories of love/hate relationships are mixed with tales of how the shopping centre never really worked until saved by small, independent shopkeepers, many of whom were immigrants to the UK. 

Credits to the amazing Eva Sajovic, who created the piece and narrates most of it. 

And we’ll never forget the erotic massage chairs……

Vauxhall’s Invisible Bridge

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We love nothing more than a barmy idea that never comes to fruition, and one almost came into fruition in that very bastion of barminess, Vauxhall. In  1963, London County Council were accepting applications for a never to be realised bridge to replace the current Vauxhall Bridge. As the objective was to ease congestion and overcrowding, the Glass Age Development Committee submitted a plan for a 300 metre, seven storey glass edifice called ‘The Crystal Span’.

The vision for the recumbent skyscraper was to create a wide berth for cars on the ground level, and above it, create an extension of the Tate Gallery, a shopping centre, roof gardens, an open air theatre and residential development. So as you can see, paying over the odds for a tiny Vauxhall flat above traffic fumes and noise is by no means a recent phenomenon. Structurally, the bridge would have been made of a pair of double-decked concrete boxes for the road sections, that in turn supported the buildings above. A glass curtain surrounding the bridge and enclosing the pedestrian spaces would have hung from the sides of the bridge structure.

The Crystal Span caused a bit of a stir and some support, but in the end, sadly, LCC declined to pick up the estimated £7 million (£132 million in 2024) construction costs, and the scheme was abandoned. In the office we had a little pool going to guess what clever nickname this project could have had if it had bee executed. Of the ones that can be printed, we had the ‘crystal protrusion’, ‘dead Shard’ , ‘Passport to Pimlico’ and ‘carbon monoxide alley’. 

Walcot Stores

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In Greater Kennington we are blessed with a complement of independent coffee shops such as Change Please in Elephant Park, Kennington Coffee Shop, Urban Botanica, newbie Capheum, and of course the mighty Bouquets and Beans. We’re proud to announce another has joined our serried ranks and is located in an oft looked overlooked part of our area, at the top of Walcot Square near Brook Drive. 

We made our surreptitious trip to Walcot Stores coffee shop on a Sunday morning. On the Lords’ day it’s difficult to entice Runoff staff to work, so we asked our accounts guru and self confessed party boy Phil if he’d like to join us for ‘a drink or two’ on Sunday morning. He arrived looking confused and crestfallen, but willing to act as our additional pair of eyes. Walcot is very clean, bright, and inviting. They sell gift cards and crafting things, with chirpy owner Millie defining her gaff as a ‘creative café’. She also confirmed it as a place where people can take a break if they want to work outside of the home. Dogs are allowed. 

We came for a caffeine kick, and Phil had an Americano which he described as rich and smooth, and your scribe had an Earl Grey. A variety of milk and substitutes were also offered, and presented in 60’s retro crockery. Of special interest were the fresh and tasty pastries. Phil had the GF coconut and almond ‘mini mouthful’, where your scribe opted for a blueberry oat crumble bar. The bar was moist and sweet with a big hit of ground almond. There were a range of good looking pastries with Millie explaining that savoury items, such as overnight oats and foccacia bread, are also available. Isn’t this sounding so of the moment! 

Walcott Stores is located in an old neighbourhood grocery shop and we have stolen unearthed a photo from its earlier incarnation, below. Walcot is a fine place to work, catch up with friends, or grab a quick coffee/bite on the go. And Phil, if you’re reading this, we hope you’ve taken away a valuable lesson from this experience, as things aren’t always what they appear to be. Except quality coffee.   

Shopping and (kind of) Dating

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We’ve been big fans of Solo Craft Fair since they opened in Elephant Stores (in Elephant Park) a few years ago, and were here to tell you about an upcoming yummy event. In case you don’t know, Solo is a collective of 60 mostly female owned small businesses selling all sorts of things you don’t really need but must have, from earrings to gift cards to candles.

On 31 March, Solo will be having another instalment of their Blind Date With a Book event. This got us very excited as many of us in the office have vast experience of blind dates (and on a number of those we wish we’d been blind ourselves) However, when we reached out to SoLo they explained that there is no actual dating involved. What it cleverly entails is selecting a wrapped up book with written clues about the book on the wrapping, and you select based on your moods. One might contain a £10 voucher. You then take the book away and go on dates with it by reading it. A lot cheaper than dating an actual human with no worries about drunken date photos popping up on Instagram. 

As dating can be emotionally and physically draining, you could do a lot worse than grab a toastie or hot drink at Little Louie, also in Elephant Stores. And while you’re there why not pick up a a French school desk or a giant reclaimed letter ‘A’? 


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Bert Hardy @ Photographer’s Gallery

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If you’re not a regular Runoff reader (and if not, we kind of feel sorry for you), you’ll be aware that it is with a heavy heart that we recommend activities outside of our anointed patch. But recommend we are, and it the retrospective show of Bert Hardy at the Photographer’s Gallery, and we wrote about the man last year.

For many years Hardy worked for Picture Post magazine and his speciality was war photography. In between war work, Hardy would return to his native Southwark to photograph everyday life in post WWII Elephant and Castle. This culminated in his most celebrated tome of work ‘Scenes from the Elephant’, published in 1949. While this show is about his entire oeuvre of work, there are a number of photos from ‘Scenes’ 

Bert Hardy: Photojournalism in War and Peace is on now until 2 June. Admission is a spiffy £6.50 also also gains you admission to the Deutsche Bourse Photography prize and some other thrilling bits of photo fun. And if the concept of the West End is daunting and bleak, the Gallery is just around the corner from the equally bleak Oxford Circus tube, but worth it. 

The Best Places to Eat in Greater Kennington #1

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(+ One Sunday Roast)

ADULIS

For the past fortnight Runoff staff have been fainting in the corridors in anticipation of the top spot. Or it could be the small amount of air available in our underground offices. We can announce that the best restaurant in Greater Kennington for the fifth year is Adulis in Oval. For over 25 years Adulis has served up tender and well cooked meats, huge kirchat platters, zingy stews, great service, and all the wait staff have great hair. And they were serving tasty vegetarian fare long before it was cool.

If Eritrean food is new to you, or even if it isn’t, the best launching point at Adulis is the sampler plate  called ‘Kirchat’ (there is a vegetarian version as well). It is fundamentally a selection of their best meat and veg dishes served on a platter usually featuring Kifto, which is tender meat in Ghee and to die for. All of the dishes have have a sweet and sour, almost vinegary tinge to them. They gladly pimped our 2 person serving up to 3 as we had a third diner, and the pic is below.  Please don’t let our bad photo below put you off, as not all Eritrean dishes look like cat food.

The dish above is served on a platter with a base of bread called ‘injera’, which is a leavened pancake made with sourdough (and if you run out you can get more for free). Almost all meals here are served with it and the whole shebang is to be eaten with your good hands (or cutlery for the timid). We also recommend the chicken stew ‘dorho’ with loads of herbs and further recommend the prawns. They also have some fine looking vegan options.

On the drinks front, we usually have the Kenyan beer ‘Tusker’ or a South African white. Having said that, the speciality of the house is their Adulis honey wine. We’ve had this previously and let’s just place it in the category of ‘experimental’. The place has a slightly retro Eritrean feel to it with memetoes both current and from the past. The staff are very friendly and a good chunk of the punters are (tick!) Eritrean themselves. The place also wafts with the aroma of their coffee and popcorn ceremony.

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