Category Archives: history

Local Heroes of Kennington

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This Saturday (5 October) is London Guiding Day, and we’re here to guide you about a fascinating walking tour around Greater Kennington that will be undertaken throughout the day, brought to you by the good folks at Lambeth Tour Guides  

Local Heroes Kennington is our representation for Guiding Day, and reading from the press release ‘The Kennington tour will introduce you to suffragette art students, the son of a slave who rallied the working classes, a Black Prince and a little tramp, ending at Oval with some trailblazing cricketers’. The press release also encourages people to leave the area in order to ‘discover more tours around London’. We don’t encourage this. 

The tour will include notable and notorious denizens of Kennington including Jemina Durning Smith, Charlie Chaplin, the Black Price, and a whole bunch of ancient people on Instagram who we don’t recognise but who must have been very important. We’ve been notorious in Greater Kennington for over a decade now, so it’s curious that no one knocked on the door of our subterranean bunker to interview us. And we, unlike the lot above, even have the distinct advantage of still being alive. But we’ll get over it.  

There will be six identical tours running on the hour and they meet at Kennington Station and can be booked here.  They are free, but these people are professional tour guides and a tip (a fiver will do) will go a long way to expressing your satisfaction. 

Kennington Cross, 1960

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In this fascinating picture from 1960 we can see a woman pushing a pram through Kennington Cross. You can see the gas holders on the right and the lorry is stopped in front of the present day Tommyfield. What is now Marsh and Parsons estate agents on the left was a fruitier (wouldn’t that be nice) and in the middle, what is now Daniel Cobb was Ferguson which sold TV’s. It is also handily the main attraction at the top of this webpage.

On the right you can see a derelict building with the word ‘Puddefoot’ on the side. Puddefoot, Bowers and Simonett advertised itself as selling ‘ivory, tortoiseshell, and horn merchandise’ and had been in Kennington Cross since the end of the 18th century. This hideous link to the past was probably abandoned after being hit by enemy action and by 1965 it was bulldozed and replaced by the slightly less hideous Edinburgh House.

Mark Hanbury Beaufoy, Social Reformer

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At the end of the 19th century, Vauxhall and the Thames foreshore were repositories of things and people which London needed but didn’t really want. Local man and future Kennington MP Mark Hanbury Beaufoy chose to expend his spare hours making life a bit better for the less fortunate people who lived and worked there. 

In 1864 Beaufoy inherited a vinegar factory at 87 South Lambeth Road (now a handy Holiday Inn Express). Vauxhall at the time was full of poor people looking for work and at its height the factory employed 125 folks, mostly from the area. Beaufoy was a supporter of the nationwide campaign to establish an eight hour work day and implemented this in his factory to set an example to the rest of Britain. 

Beaufoy’s family endowed and built the Ragged School in Newport St, Vauxhall, to provide education to destitute children who couldn’t access mainstream education. We wrote about the place in 2021. It closed after only a few decades, and Beaufoy made the decision to replace it with a vocational training school for underprivileged boys. The Beaufoy Institute then opened in Black Prince Road and this delightful, Doulton tiled building lives on as the London Diamond Way Buddhist Centre. The reason the building hasn’t turned into overpriced flats is that in his will Beaufoy stipulated that the building not be used for commercial purposes. And as if being a vinegar magnate, social reformer, and advocate of gun safety wasn’t enough, Beaufoy was also a Liberal MP for Kennington between 1889 and 1895. 

If you’re a map nerd you might have noticed a preponderance of vinegar factories around Victorian London, and this is not because people had a mad passion for chippies. Instead, before refrigeration it was used as preservative for perishable foods.  If you are a map nerd you might have also noticed the volume of very smelly factories (including one making, lord help us ‘essence of beef’) which dominated Vauxhall for many years. s.

Free Weekend Fun in Vauxhall

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If you’re feeling vocal, the folks at Be In Vauxhall are once again hosting ‘Bearpit Karaoke’ this weekend. The press release describes it as ‘attracting huge crowds each month of both professional and non professional singers’. We walked by it last month and at first didn’t know if was Karaoke or some kind of weird spiritual revival. But it looked fun, and this year Mother Kelly’s and Bokit’la (Oval Market) French Caribbean will be on board with stalls amongst other great foodie offerings.

Bearpit Karaoke takes place this Saturday (8th) from 4 to 8 and then on every second Saturday of the month over the summer. Free tickets can be nabbed here. It’s located at that sketchy bit at the end of the Pleasure Gardens where you indeed might be accustomed to seeing people singing, but for once it won’t be men on their own bursting into song while gripping a bottle of ‘White Lightning’ or Swifties at the altar of the Black Dog.

We’ve been told that this is not, in fact, Catherine Tate

Also gracing Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens this summer is the Be In Vauxhall Summer Screen. If the weather obliges it’s a great way to spend a weeknight and enjoy knees up and singalong with your mates.  Our diverse office pool of subterranean misfits will be watching Barbie, but might opt for the marginally more butch Moulin Rouge. 

9 JUL AT 7PM – ENCANTO | BOOK YOUR SPACE

16 JUL AT 7PM – BARBIE | BOOK YOUR SPACE

23 JUL AT 7PM – MEN IN BLACK | BOOK YOUR SPACE

30 JUL AT 7PM – MOULIN ROUGE | BOOK YOUR SPACE

All of these nights look like great fun but please be aware that they don’t really kick off until about 8:30pm after the sun sets. Tickets are free and according to the website should be booked. Having said that, we’re not really sure why you need to book a place at either of these events as you can take part by sitting on a car bonnet or off a tree limb, so just turn up. It’s not like we expect Runoff readers to oblige by the rules. 

Crossing the Thames (or not)

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For those of you who are in the enviable position of being free in the daytime, or are just unemployed, we’ve unearthed a fascinating sounding walk along the Lambeth side of the Thames called ‘Crossing the Thames’ (don’t worry there is no actual crossing to the scary north side). 

Our patch of north Lambeth was created by bridges and horse drawn ferries across the Thames. This nerdy yet captivating sounding walk tells the told and untold stories of crossings across the river and how they changed our community. Also included will be useless but very trivia such as why the bridges are painted in certain colours. 

If walking around pointing at bridges isn’t exactly your vibe, Lambeth Tour Guides also have a range of other fascinating sounding walks around our patch and further afield. Of particular note is ‘Unseen Vauxhall’ on 13 June which we might just attend. And no points for finding us as you don’t know what we look like. 

This walk was supposed to take place next week, but has been postponed until 7 June owing to rail action. Tickets can be scored for £12 here. Trust us, we tried to get you good people a discount using our line ‘but don’t you know -we’re INFLUENCERS’! However, this rarely works and is often met with outright derision.  

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.   

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……

Chilling in Vauxhall

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From the 2022 archives, the sixth and final of best of history posts!

When you woke this morning you probably weren’t thinking ‘you know what, what I really NEED today is to read about a cold storage facility’. But as we’ve seen in the past two years, life is full of unexpected antics. Some of the more mature residents of Greater Kennington might recall that for 35 years (1964-1999) the monolithic Nine Elms Cold Storage  facility dominated the Vauxhall skyline, located exactly where the round St. George Wharf tower now presides, and it has a history that might just leave you shivering. 

In the 1960’s Vauxhall/Nine Elms was not dominated by million pound flats and swimming pools in the sky, but by railway yards. It was a key transport terminus by rail and river, and our Cold Store was erected to provide a chilly home for meat, butter and fish. However, by the late 1970’s improvements in refrigeration and transport made the building redundant, and it became derelict after just 15 years of life. And this is when our story becomes interesting….

The people of Vauxhall are nothing if not creative, and following the closure of the Cold Store it was used illicitly as a cruising ground, a recording studio, a performance space and even a convenient spot for devil worshiping. On the cruising front, it was the place to pull if you hadn’t been lucky at the nearby Market Tavern (RIP) or Vauxhall Tavern. Guys had to negotiate a 10 foot padlocked steel gate with razor wire, but once that had been conquered one was rewarded with the world’s largest dark room (we assume not the film developing kind). 

One of the abiding stories of the Cold Store is that it was used for satanic worship, or just performance artists trying out new material.  In one recollection a certain ‘archbishop’ took people on tours that ended at a double bed which doubled as an altar. This must have been a wholly frightening/hilarious experience in the pitch black void that enveloped them. However, some found inspiration in the gloom and in 1990 avant garde musicians Chemical Plant (who?) used it as a recording studio and created the super spooky video with the Cold Store making a cameo below.

The question persists as to why the Cold Store evoked mystery and myth. Perhaps the darkness in such a monolithic structure allowed people to explore sides of their lives which were usually hidden. In skyscraper laden Vauxhall it seems almost unfathomable that such a derelict structure existed until almost the millennium. Perhaps the thrill of being in a structure which shouldn’t be there was an enticement. 

The Brandon Estate

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From the archives, the fifth and next to last of our month of best history posts

If you’ve ever been to the back half of Kennington Park, or indeed if you live there, you would have noticed the large towers that constitute the most vertical part of the fascinating 36 acre Brandon Estate in Walworth.  Visionary Architect and Communist Edward Hollamby was the principal designer and most of the work was underway by 1956, with his brief by the LCC to capitalise on the post war enthusiasm generated by the Festival of Britain on the Southbank. 

At the eastern Lorrimore Road end of the Estate, Hollamby tried to preserve the pre war Victorian street pattern and keep the few homes that survived, while filling in the holes with modern three bedroom properties. In Forsyth Gardens he created a new square lined with four story maisonettes with a central garden intended as a ‘revival of Georgian town planning traditions’. 

  • Napier Tower

On the other side of Cook’s Road the Estate took on a more striking and risque modernist form. Napier Tower was at the threshold of the foot friendly shopping precinct and beyond it the signature 18 storey blocks nestled into Kennington Park, and in 1957 they were the tallest the LCC had built. As you walk around the Brandon Estate today you’ll notice that it is a very early example of the ‘mixed use’ development. It provided a range of housing options for different kinds of families at different stages of their lives interspersed with shopping for people who don’t drive. 

If you watched ‘Doctor Who’ from 2005 – 2010, you might recognise the Estate as one of the most iconic locations of those series. The Estate, known as the ‘Powell Estate’ in the show, was home to Rose Tyler (Billie Piper) and her mum. The poor courtyard in front of their flat witnessed a TARDIS crash landing, a cyber ghost invasion, and even the Tenth Doctor’s (David Tennant) regeneration.

The Estate is also home to a beautiful Henry Moore statue which we wrote about in 2020

Necropolis Railway

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

If you’ve ever spotted this rather grand looking building at 121 Westminster Bridge Road you might have wondered what function it once served. For the first half of the 20th century, dear reader, this was the London Necropolis railway station and has been referred to as ‘the strangest and spookiest railway line in British history’.  

In the first half of the 19th  century London’s population surged from one million to almost 2 1/2 million. Churchyards were running out of space to bury the dead and something had to be done, so a plan was hatched by two enterprising men to purchase land near Woking for an enormous cemetery. The idea was that it was far enough away to prevent the bodies from posing a threat to public health, but close enough to let grieving relatives attend funerals without too much hassle. The icing on the cake being that a Waterloo to Woking line had just opened up. 

As you can imagine, people at Waterloo were none too keen on seeing corpses and mourners whizz by as they sat in their 19th century Starbucks, so a separate train station was built behind Waterloo in what is now Leake St. The building was specially designed for mourners and had private waiting rooms, restaurants, and first to third class services. One could depart with their recently departed in the morning, attend a weepy funeral midday, and be back by teatime.  Talk about Victorian multitasking.

The Original

By the end of the 19th century Waterloo station was expanding and  Necropolis station had to be moved. In 1902 the station found it’s present home and out of respect to the dearly departed the builders wanted to make it as attractive as a funeral director’s office, so few expenses were spared. The line was eventually shifting almost 2000 corpses a year until the line was damaged in WW2, and a decision was made to consign it to history, like the many souls it escorted. 

The railway service proved so popular that it even had it’s own rolling stock. However, the reason for this could actually be that if folks knew they had bought a ticket for a train used to carry dead people they could feel like they’d been, well, ‘stiffed’. 

And if you’re still curious, someone has even found enough time to write a book about our little railway to the other side.