The Forgotten Zoo of Greater Kennington

From the archives, the third of our month of best history posts

If you find yourself in Pasley Park in Walworth then you’re standing in the grounds of the Royal Surrey Zoological Gardens, London’s first ever public zoo. In 1831 a man named Edward Cross moved his private collection of animals from the Strand to Walworth to create what was a huge public spectacle covering 13 acres. Previous menageries, such as those poor animals on display for a select few at the Tower of London, were fortunately no longer profitable at the time and began to close. 

summer-of-fashion-1844

The Zoo was set in the grounds of Surrey Manor House (the street ‘Manor Place’ being a nod to this) and featured carnivores including lions, bears and baboons contained under a giant 300 foot glass conservatory, which was at the time the largest such structure in England.  A similar massive structure was erected for herbivores. Also featured were moveable aviaries, a three acre lake and a waterfall. While not quite as vast as the newer recruit in Regents Park, the Zoo was nevertheless insanely popular with the public. 

In the early 19th century competition for public diversions was fierce, and our zoo had to counter the attractions of the newly opened zoo in Regents Park and the more libidinal call from our own Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens. The zoo branched out and began to host historical re-enactments, such as the eruption of Mount Vesuvius and the Great Fire of London. These were highlighted by nightly fireworks which must have added an odd element of frivolity to depictions of destruction and ruin. Also added were assorted gardens with hanging plants where people could promenade. Today  this is better known as ‘cruising’.

Gardens1851

Sadly (well, not for the animals),  our own landmark zoo could not compete with two influences. One was the inexorable rise of its aforementioned cousin in Regent’s Park, the other was the general decline in Pleasure Gardens in mid Victorian times, which also saw off Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens. By 1857 (followed two years later by Vauxhall) and after just 26 years the Zoo ran out of money and was sold. It had a few incarnations after that, such as being the first home of St. Thomas’s hospital, but was effectively lost forever.

By the way, Pasley Park is a pint sized, petite and pristine little park and a delightful place to work, walk or wander.  Our team strolled over it on our way to review foodie hotspot Louie Louie  which we’ll be telling you about in a few days, you lucky devils. 

January 2025 update. Louie Louie has joined the giant foodie hall in heaven but there are a range of great and ethnic places to inspect in Walworth Road. 

The Era of the Adventure Playgrounds

From the archives, the second of our month of best history posts

If you’ve ever had a mosey around the Ethelred Estate and the former Lillian Baylis school site (now luxury flats but don’t get us started) you’ve probably noticed a rather fanciful and fenced off adventure playground. It’s a smaller, updated version of what was a much more sizeable playground on the site, and we’re here as always to tell you of its fascinating history. 

Junk playgrounds took off after WW2 and our offering was located on the site of a bombed school building. Forward thinking folks thought it would be clever to use these fallow sites as areas for kids,  and also wisely substituted ‘junk’ with ‘adventure’  With a little help from the LCC, a determined coterie of Greater Kennington volunteers and children developed the large site mostly by using discarded detritus from the war. The concept was, instead of covering the site in concrete, to create a system of walkways, tunnels, ropes, enormous slides, and old tyres to play in. Included in the new Lollard Adventure Playground were handmade huts for children to undertake crafts when the weather wasn’t so great. The kids even grew vegetables there. 

Now, to our 2023 eyes unsupervised nine year olds playing with giant bonfires and pushing around rusting cars might not be our precise definition of ‘safety’, but it must have been great fun for the kids. The concept at the time was to encourage children to learn by expressing themselves while also learning to avoid risks. This, so the thinking went, would foster confidence and independence. Our adventure playground occupied more or less the entirety of the school site and entertained thousands of local children until, sadly, Lambeth wanted the plot back for a school in the 1960’s. At least it wasn’t for luxury flats.

Due to a lack of funding from Lambeth, the playground was mostly closed in 2013 and since has served as a haunting and eerie relic of its former self, now rather resembling a sad and deserted amusement park from a Scooby Doo* episode. The playground is now run by a noble but underfunded charity and is only open on very specific days for free access play. The mission remains to provide a unique space in which children can enjoy varied and creative play in a homemade space. If you want to learn more they would love to hear from you

*If you are too young to know who Scooby Doo is then please ask an elder. 

The Great Stink(pipe) of Kennington

From the 2020 archives, the first of our month of best history posts

Do you wake up at night thinking ‘will the Runoff EVER do a feature on sewage and foul smells’? Well dear reader, if so your time HAS COME as we’re here to reveal the purpose of that black crowned column in Kennington Cross.

The Victorians gave London many architectural gems; the Houses of Parliament and St. Pancras to name a few. In Kennington they endowed us with probably London’s most attractive example of a  Stinkpipe, and that is what we see in Kennington Cross. If you’re wondering what we’re talking about, the Victorians solved many problems but struggled with sewage for years. This was called The Great Stink of London and resulted in some radical methods to solve it. Stinkpipes were one such concept and were installed around London to divert the smell of poo and their more noxious byproducts. The concept was to elevate the odours from sewers and subterranean rivers above sensitive Victorian noses.

January 2025 update – Fans have also made us aware that this Stinkpipe might have also been used to release fumes from the toilets below. We know you relish such detail.

So while the Great Stink might have been deplorable, it realised great advancements later in the industrial age, such the creation of the Embankment and most recently the mighty Thames Super Sewer. And such is the preoccupation with Stinkpipes that someone with apparently a great deal of time on their hands has mapped them all out.

If you share this interest and also have time on your hands you’ll notice more examples of Stinkpipes in the middle of Vauxhall and in a tiny pocket of Kennington Park, below.

The Rosy Hue

In our never ending pursuit of gastronomic excellence in Greater Kennington (read – to find a flimsy excuse to cram food in our face), we recently ventured to independent gastropub ‘The Rosy Hue’. The Hue opened in Elephant Park in 2022 and is part of a small south London based chain. Since then, its positioned itself as a kind of sports pub with a separate gastro restaurant. The upshot being can you can’t really hear the pub in the restaurant. 

For this dinner your scribe was joined by partner in crime Karen from Finance and her friend from Milan, Gabs. Karen was pondering the burger versus fish and chips, and when the waiter indicated that the fish and chips was the more substantial plate, it was music to Karen’s ears as she was keen to break her January resolution.  This certainly proved to be the case with a lightly battered fillet of haddock taking up half or more of her plate and sitting atop crispy golden chips. It also came with a small bowl of crushed minted peas and some homemade tartare sauce. As pub fish and chips go, this was a very creditable offer. The fish was fresh, the batter was light and perfectly crisp, and the chips were good. 

Your scribe opted for the daily special, which was steak and ale pie. The pastry was sturdy and buttery, and topped with some seeds. Inside the pie, the juice was a good combination of sweet brown ale and beef stock. The steak was plentiful and tender, and in the mix were small hints of bacon. It was served with some very creamy mash and well prepared tender stem broccoli. 

As for Karen’s friend, when his burger and chips arrived he commenced eating both with a knife and fork. Karen and your scribe looked at one another with bemused fascination, and I asked him if in Italy its customary to eat a burger with a fork. Without looking up he retorted ‘yes, everyone does’. As we were leaving, Gabs was asked if he’d like to share his fork eating burger experience with our multitudinous readers. He quipped, with Milanese aplomb, ‘not really’.   

But the burning question is…will the Rosy Hue make our top 10 list of best places to eat in Greater Kennington 2025?

Cable Cafe & Bar

As many Greater Kenningtonains spend a few days working from home, we thought we would up our lunchtime review game by checking out Oval staple ‘Cable Café’ at the top of Brixton Rd. By all the brick a brac you might think you’ve stumbled into dear Aunt Flo’s house clearance after she refused to let anybody in for 40 years, but what you’re getting is a mighty fine and eclectic café. 

The daytime trade consists primarily of people popping in for hot drinks and working on their laptops, and the atmosphere is laid back and quiet. We stopped in for lunch, and the specialty is the bang on trend sourdough toasties. Your scribe had it with cheese tuna, and Phil from accounts had his with cheese and jalapeno. The sourdough was crisp and with sharp and abundant cheese (£6.50) . Phil remembered that we were at work and had an Americano as opposed to his usual massive red wine.  We also had our eyes on the homemade pastries, sharing boards, and smoothies.

What Cable does ingenuously is transform itself from a lunchtime sandwich/coffee bar to an evening cocktail and beer joint. The transition happens during the 3-5 happy hour when laptops and chargers give way to candles and, on Wednesday, live free jazz. There is a full bar on hand (cocktails £9) in addition to wines both bottled and draft (at £5, sadly quite cheap). A good alternative to the at times chaotic pubs of Greater Kennington. 

Cable Café is open from 9:00 to 23:00 (midnight weekends) and is even available to hire out for parties. We need to keep independent places like this or they may go the same way as their sister outfit Cable Bakery, which has sadly gone to that big flour mill in the sky. More importantly, we need to keep it going in 2025 to prevent it descending to the hellish netherworld that is the ‘bottomless drag brunch’. Because we’ve been there dear reader, and it’s a very dark place. 

The Book Elephant

Older and more experienced residents of Greater Kennington might recall from the brambles of their hippocampus that for eight years there was a bookshop in Kennington Cross (there was also an Oddbins, but don’t get us started on that trauma). It closed in 2015 and after almost a decade a new bookshop has emerged in the area. It’s called The Book Elephant and is now in soft launch stage in Sayer Street in that oh so trendy new bit of Elephant and Castle. 

At the moment the Book Elephant appears to be a mainstream bookstore with a range of offerings from fiction to children’s books, from reference material to biographies and political books. They also sell paper related things such as cards, notepads and greetings cards. Mostly importantly, they’ve confirmed that you can buy and collect books there if they don’t stock it by ordering on their website.

As we witnessed with the loss of Kennington Bookshop, making independent bookshops viable is extremely difficult and they need all of our support and resources. Because if we don’t support them we might end up with another *bangs head on keyboard* Gails Bakery. And besides, buying books and buying them locally makes you feel doubly virtuous. 

Betty and Joan’s

As our new intern Allen appears to be up with the kids, we recently sent him on a mission to check out Greater Kennington’s latest LGBTQI+ bar Betty and Joan’s, with the exciting addition of a Queer Comedy club. Claiming to be the UK (and possibly the world’s) only gay comedy club,  B&J is an independent queer owned venue which was originally based in north London but have relocated to Elephant Park because, not to brag, its all happening down here.  

Allen went to Betty and Joan’s on a Saturday night and was impressed by the young and down to earth crowd enjoying dance anthems and drink deals. The cabaret performer was Karise McCock and spinning tunes was DJ Christina Draguilera. On other nights performers include Tiana Biscuit, Rhys’ Pieces and Ophelia Love. We frankly have no idea who any of these people are, but they certainly sound like a lot of fun. On the website there is also a music quiz night and activities/DJ’s nightly.  

The comedy room is a dedicated performance space adjacent to B&J and opens on 7 January. It will be a combination of free (we love free) nights with paid events later in the week. It will likely be a mix of very experienced mainstream comics trying out new material and brand new acts just taking their very first steps onto the comedy scene. So you might get folks you’ve seen on Live at the Apollo or people who are, shall we say, having their ‘moment in the sun’. Keep checking the website as these kinds of things fill up very quickly. 

Allen, if you’re reading this we’re very appreciative that you worked on a Saturday but you’re not getting overtime for an evening spent downing sambuca shots and flirting with men. And we’ll blithely forget the Instagram video taken at 11:38pm of you dancing to ‘Toxic’. Betty and Joan’s is open nightly and is in Elephant Park. It is also open on New Years Eve and tickets can be nabbed on their website. We expect Allen will be there. 

Twixmas Ideas – Churchill in Cartoons

Churchill in Cartoons: Satirising a Statesman marks 150 years since the birth of the great statesman and this show affectionately celebrates his career through one of his favourite mediums, the cartoon. Churchill himself knew of the power of cartoons, and viewed his ‘V’ sign and cigar as props which he invited to be satirised. In an era before TV, cartoons were a powerful tool of communication between politicians and the public.

This exhibit doesn’t embrace the frankly modish interpretation of satirisation (we’re looking at you, Guardian) which attempts to bring down politicians by exploiting their foibles. Rather, we see a Churchill taking charge and leading a frightened public through its darkest hour with a needed sense of humour. We also see Nazi propaganda used to depict Churchill in a very different manner. However. This exhibit runs through the entirely of his career, from 1909 to the 1950’s. 

You may find it a bit counterintuitive spending the festival season in a place dedicated to blowing things up. But the IWM isn’t that at all, and if anything it celebrates the human spirit. The gallery will be closed on Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and Boxing Day, but open every day after that. And if Churchill isn’t the kind of cigar you like to chomp on, then why not visit the great Blavatnik Art, Film and Photography Galleries or the exhibit ‘War and the Mind’, which we brilliantly wrote about

BCO Christmas Estates Tour

Orchestral music is often inaccessible to many people for a variety of reasons, but we’re about to be blessed yet again this weekend in Walworth for a different kind of Christmassy concert that are free and open for everyone! 

Brixton Chamber Orchestra is a diverse group of 25 Brixton based instrumentalists who provide and create music across a range of genres including…wait for it….classical, disco, gospel, grime, rap, swing, pop, drum & bass and others, and often have guest vocalists. They usually ply their trade in community halls and churches in Brixton, which explains why they’re not on our radar. And they’re not in Greater Kennington. But they are now.

Funded by Arts Council England and, surprisingly, by Lambeth Council, BCO is in the midst of a Christmas estates tour of 11 estates in Lambeth. They will be gracing us with their presence on Saturday in the Brandon Estate (those large buildings at the back of Kennington Park). Saturday, 21st December @ 3:30 PM 
Maddock Way, London SE17 3NH 

This looks like it might be outside, so stop by the offie your way to pick up your favourite Christmas tipple.

We attended this event in 2022 and it was great fun. Each show is unique and they’ve been known to feature guests musicians. They also encourage folks to get up and sing along, which should be made easier with that bottle you bought from the offie. And if this is sounding like a kids event, trust us it isn’t. Not that there is anything wrong with kids, a few Runoff staff were once kids themselves. If you can’t make it or don’t live in Greater Kennington there are more dates on their website.

Did we mention it’s free? Did we add that we love free? The clip below is a summer tour from a few years ago but lets you know what they’re about.



Cleaver Sq. Charity Carols 2024

The annual Cleaver Square ‘Carols in the Square’ takes place this Thursday (19th) from 19:30 and the best part is that you don’t even have to live in Cleaver Square to take part! Or even look like you live in Cleaver Square. It is open to everyone and has raised over £10,000 over the years for local charities, so bring a few extra pounds if you can, but they also have a card reader. Also bring your mug to save the hard volunteers a bit of time.

We attended the Carols last year and it was great fun. We were treated to homemade mince pies, mulled wine, and sang along with the lovely Fever Pitch choir, who will be performing at 20:00. Apparently wearing a funny Christmas hats is a tradition so you’ve been warned. In order to fit in with the posh Cleaver Square set, we’ll be digging out our flat cap, red corduroys and beaten up Barbour jacket left over from some Madonna/Guy Ritchie themed fancy dress party we attended in 2007.