Category Archives: history

The Era of the Adventure Playgrounds

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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

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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 Last Days of Liz Truss at White Bear Theatre

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When we first saw the title of this new play at the White Bear Theatre, we thought it rather odd as the end of Liz Truss seemed to overlap with the beginning. Nevertheless, we just visited the Bear’s latest offering and we’re here to tell you all about it. If you’ve never been to the White Bear Theatre, it’s been a Greater Kennington staple since the 80’s and focuses on new and cutting edge writing. 

The Last Days of Liz Truss is an origin story told from her own perspective, and beings with a jaunty twirl around her childhood in Scotland and Leeds and her battle to be called ‘Elizabeth’ as opposed to her given name of Mary. A similarity to Thatcher is invoked/contrasted in this period and underlined when Liz/Mary breaks into song with 80’s tunes such as ‘Material Girl’. We then speed through her early parliamentary career as a junior minister as she builds alliances with the likes of Kwasi and Therese Coffey (‘TC’). 

In the second half we encounter the Truss who we all remember, trying to rationalise cutting taxes as the establishment deep state (cunningly deployed by remote voices) urge her against this. Then come the pesky little realities which work mendaciously to tear her apart. For example, the Queen dying and pension plans. It’s not exactly a spoiler alert to tell you what happens to Liz/Mary after just 49 days. However, Liz readily deploys the use of a lettuce held aloft to symbolise her own downfall, in a manner not unlike Hamlet’s skull. Overall it’s a captivating and very well acted monologue with defined moments of dark humour.  

The Last Days of Liz Truss is on now and runs until 14 December at the White Bear Theatre Pub and tickets can be grabbed here.  While the theatre is situated within the White Bear Pub, it is independently owned and not part of the Youngs mega chain.  But the Bear has some lovely Christmas lights.

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……