Looking like he was in Mumford & Sons
Category Archives: culture
“Did you think I’d forgotten you? Perhaps you hoped I had.” House of Cards is back.
The second series of the TV drama that took Kevin Spacey away from Kennington is out now on Netflix.
We’ve watched some of it already – it’s just as good as season one, but the bit where Francis murders the president is way OTT.
Kennington residents can get a free trial of Netflix here.
Lambeth Walk
Lambeth Walk was immortalised in a music hall song from 1937. When the song was written, 159 shops lined the street and catered for every need, including eleven butchers, two eel and pie shops (one with a tank of live eels outside), a bird dealer and a tripe dresser. To read about the history of the street, go here or to this site which has some great old photos and maps, dating back to a time when it was surrounded by fields.
While the street declined in the second half of the last century, it’s on its way up again, along with the rest of North West Kennington, with lots of cool, creative businesses opening up nearby such as architects, a violin maker, a poetry school, pop up bars, and of course Damien Hirst’s new gallery coming soon.
Here’s the former Pelham Mission Hall, now the Henry Moore Sculpture Studio which is part of Morley (adult education) College:
On the left of the photo, on the first floor, you can see the outdoor pulpit, once used to offer two-for-one perfumes to the market-goers below in exchange for their attendance at church.
(Incidentally, there’s a Henry Moore sculpture on display close to Kennington, in the middle of the Brandon Estate.)
Lambeth Walk’s other great surviving building is the former Lambeth Baths, which since 1971 has been the Lambeth Walk Group Practice award winning GP surgery (who knew that there were awards for GP surgeries?):
Bonnington Cafe
Bonnington Cafe has been a mainstay of Bonnington Square since the squatters moved in in the early 1980s. At that time, many of the houses didn’t have functioning kitchens, so members of the community took turns to cook for each other in the communal cafe, using ingredients either bought from or scavenged from the nearby Covent Garden food market.
The cafe still operates in this way, run as a co-operative, with a different chef cooking every day, but it’s now open the wider public as well, and it’s a truly magical place to spend an evening. Needless to say, the food can be a little hit and miss depending who’s cooking, and there are generally just two choices of starter, main course, and dessert, all vegetarian and some vegan. But the food is cheap, it’s BYOB with no corkage charge, and the atmosphere is invariably great, with candles, occasional live music, a wood fire on cold nights, and above all, a real sense of community (the cafe doubles as a community centre). Just don’t ask for the “special stuff”.
Here’s a video about the Bonnington Square squatters, including plenty about the cafe (thanks to @taxbod for the link):
excellent new single from South Kennington resident Kyla La Grange
It’s called Cut Your Teeth
Meditation at the Jamyang Buddhist Centre
Happy new year.
Are you starting the new year in need of spiritual sustenance? Get yourself down to the Jamyang Buddhist Centre on Renfrew Road in North Kennington, one of two Buddhist centres in Kennington with a third one on the way in the former Beaufoy Institute.
On January 6th from 7.30pm till 9pm is one of Jamyang’s regular Introduction to Meditation sessions. We’ve been to one of these sessions before. What can we tell you about it?
– You’ll have to take your shoes off.
– It’s not a brazen attempt to convert you to Buddhism – Buddha barely got a mention.
– There are opportunities to ask questions. Someone else asked the question we should have asked – how to stay awake during meditation? The instructor did provide some practical suggestions but also said it doesn’t matter if you fall asleep, at which point we nodded off.
– They do a nice quiche and salad in the cafe during the day.
– It’s free but donations are welcome.
– Meditation is scientifically proven to boost concentration, reduce stress, depression, anxiety and addictive behaviours, and can even help with physical problems like heart disease and chronic pain (sorry we can’t lay our hands on the scientific proof right now).
So, all in all, an ideal opportunity to have a look around the Buddhist centre – which has a nice, welcoming vibe whatever your religious beliefs – and to try napping meditation.
Read about the history of the building – and old courthouse – here.
The Courtyard Cafe, featuring a Buddha in a glass cage made from pure Nepalese gold:
Winter Screen
The spirit of the pleasure gardens is seeping back into West Kennington, if not quite reaching the decadent heights of its prime when Duchesses (including Georgiana of Keira Knightley fame), Princes and other notables – including Samuel Johnson, Handel and Dickens – would flounce around what is now Spring Gardens in hot air balloon races, watch cats dropping by parachute, and marvel at the Lilliputian King in the human zoo.
Spring Gardens was also the setting for a series of summer film screenings earlier this year, such a success that they are being reprised this week in the arches of Vauxhall station with a festive Christmas theme. Complementing the Winter Screen series is a Christmas market dishing up mulled wine or cider to raise your body temperature before you sit down, and blankets to keep you from going numb while you watch the film. We are hoping that local author Will Self will honour the spirit of Dickens and Thackeray and the original pleasure gardens and settle in to watch Elf with a mega bucket of popcorn.
Full programme:
December 2013
- Thursday 12th – Miracle on 34th street (7pm)
- Friday 13th – Elf (7pm)
- Saturday 14th – A Muppets Christmas Carol (2pm) Scrooged (7pm)
- Sunday 15th – Home Alone 1 (2pm) Home Alone 2 (7pm)
MK II:
MK I:
Ticket proceeds are going to ‘Thames Reach’, a charity who operate a local homeless shelter.
Location:
Arch 50
South Lambeth Place opposite Starbucks
London SW8 1SP
Cable Bar & Café
The South Kennington end of Brixton Road in is becoming a haven for food and drink lovers. There’s the Oval Farmers’ Market on Saturdays, plus some very good delis and restaurants which we’ll write about soon. Best of all for hot drinks and extended visits is Cable Bar & Café, from the people behind the Scootercaffe on Lower Marsh in Waterloo – a cafe so cool it wouldn’t be out of place on Redchurch Street or in The Marais in Paris.
Cable, which used to be a greasy spoon, has a similar aesthetic to the Scootercaffe, which used to sell scooters, with vintage furniture, exposed brickwork, a poster for North by Northwest, a playlist featuring Edith Piaf, Françoise Hardy and the Velvet Underground, and live music on Tuesdays (jazz, bop, bluegrass – that kind of thing). Bands playing the nearby Brixton Academy gravitate here after soundcheck, so if you see someone who looks like they’re in Gogol Bordello or Lamb of God, they probably are.
Their coffee is top notch and food-wise they offer a selection of sausage rolls, scotch eggs and cakes. The Evening Standard have been breathlessly promoting West Kennington for some time now, which stretched to this South Kennington spot not long after it opened.
They also have a piano:
Cable Bar & Café
8 Brixton Rd, London SW9 6BU
020 8617 9629
Pullens Yards
In the early 20th century, East Kennington’s magnificent Pullens Estate, AKA the Pullens Buildings, comprised almost 700 properties and stretched all the way to Manor Place. In the seventies the surviving buildings were threatened with demolition. Residents and squatters fought back (Kennington owes a lot to the preservation efforts of squatters) and thank goodness they did – these are some of London’s last surviving Victorian tenement buildings, and their workshops host a thriving community of creative people, as well as providing film sets for the likes of The King’s Speech (in the scene where the king goes to visit the speech therapist for the first time).
Twice a year they host an open day and their Christmas event is coming up next weekend. It’s the ideal opportunity to look around these unique spaces and pick up unusual Christmas presents. How about some Alex Monroe jewellery for a fraction of the Liberty’s price, or some pottery moulded from vegetables, or a handmade loot, or some architect-designed furniture, or a print of all the regions of the shipping forecast? It’s all here, in the most amazing and rather Christmas-y setting.
Pullens Yard, with workshops along both sides:
An installation of umbrellas from a previous open day, an idea that later made it to Carnaby Street:
Naomi Campbell used to live in Iliffe St, below, and, wait for it, the young Charlie Chaplin lived in one of the Pullens Buildings for a while:
The loot making workshop, who supply all Kanye West’s loot needs:
Make Space Studios
Make Space Studios is a complex of arts and craft studios run by the people behind Studio 180. If you want to see handbags made out of recycled material, screen printing of posters for leading alternative bands, and savagely accurate parodies of twee middle class consumerist products, get along to their Christmas open evening today tomorrow, Thursday, from 4pm to 9pm (sorry we got the date wrong initially). There will be mince pies, mulled wine and special magic punch*.
Make Space runs alongside the railway lines going in to Waterloo Station, while the entrance is on Newnham Terrace in North Kennington, opposite Lambeth North Tube. They also have an art gallery, The Simulator Gallery.
Follow the pink bannister below to enter and on no account allow yourself to be diverted into CP Hart, the world’s largest and therefore most terrifying bathroom showroom.
* we can’t be sure but it seems like that kind of place
