Before Cycle PS arrived, Kennington already had a cool independent bike shop – Balfe’s Bikes on Kennington Road. We thought they’d started to compete with Cycle PS on the bar front by selling lager for the rather expensive sum of £4.30 per bottle, but it turns out SE Lager is a type of bike and they’re selling it for £430.
Kennington Flowers is the flower and plant stall outside St Anselm’s church in the heart of Kennington. It’s a social enterprise from Tomorrow’s People – they provide unemployed young people with paid work and work experience, and the stall provides a nice complement to what was already one of London’s most colourful areas.
The prices are low, and right now you can get a memento of BBC Television Centre – when it closed, the BBC gave Kennington Flowers hundreds of large plant pots to sell. They’re down to the last few, and they start at £5 for the small ones.
They’re open from Tuesday to Saturday so get down there today if you fancy a pot, but make sure you go towards lunchtime because they arrive late and leave early.
We were recently given the book Quiet London by Siobhan Wall, which features “over 140 quiet places to meet, drink, eat, sleep, read or browse”.
Nine of them are in Kennington:
* The Cuming Museum which is currently closed due to fire, but their events programme continues
* Bonnington Square Garden, a magical place which we will write about another time
* Italo Delicatessen on Bonnington Square
* The Tibetan Peace Garden in Geraldine Mary Harmsworth Park, which also deserves its own entry here, being one of London’s nicest and quietest parks
* G Baldwin & Co., a health food shop and apothecary on Walworth Road, which according to Siobhan has “probably the largest selection of essential oils you can find anywhere in England”. Entering the apothecary side of the shop does feel like stepping back in time (it has been open since 1844).
* Danielle Arnaud Gallery – another of Kennington’s art galleries. It is based in one of the lovely Georgian houses on Kennington Road and we can testify as to how quiet it is – when we went we were the only visitors.
* The Ragged Canteen at Beaconsfield
Quiet London by Siobhan Wall
[Update July 2017: The Garden Museum and Cafe have been redeveloped since this post]
The Garden Museum (formerly the Museum of Garden History) is in the deconsecrated St Mary’s church next to Lambeth Palace in North West Kennington. Even if you’re not interested in gardening, it’s worth a visit for the good quality vegetarian cafe and the lovely garden (there’s a charge to enter the museum but not the shop, cafe or garden).
The knot garden with the walls of Lambeth Palace in the background:
William Bligh lived in Kennington, on Lambeth Road in a house that is now a B&B, and was buried at St Mary’s. Appropriately enough for a site that was to become a garden museum, his grave features the breadfruit plant which he discovered and brought back to England. Presumably whoever designed his grave was hoping he would be remembered for this, rather than for being the ship’s captain who inspired the Mutiny on the Bounty.
The well-stocked shop featuring gifts for gardeners and books:
The interior of the museum:
The Kennington branch of Cycle PS has now closed, but they do have branches in Camberwell and Battersea, and Kennington still has Balfe’s Bikes and ReCycling.
Cycle PS is a stylish new cycle shop and cafe bar at the top of Kennington Park Road, which is London’s second biggest street for cycling. On Friday nights Cycle PS stay open late – ideal for a drink before heading to the Lobster Pot.
Exterior:
Interior:
For more on Sally White, see our earlier post.
LASSCO is an architectural reclaim company based in Brunswick House, a cavernous Georgian mansion on the gyratory in West Kennington. If architectural reclaim doesn’t sound much fun, it really is – imagine a museum where everything’s desirable and everything’s on sale. A whole room of taps. Antique baths for only £4000. If money was no object, this is where you’d go to furnish your house.
Brunswick House is also the best restaurant in the area, with food that’s more than matched by the atmosphere as you eat amongst the antiques and curiosities – look for the price tags on your chairs and tables. The restaurant is run by one of the Boxer family, who are also behind the nearby Italian deli and cafe Italo (which is just off Bonnington Square, the best advert there could be for squatting, but more on that another time), and Frank’s Café and Campari Bar atop a multi-story car park-cum-sculpture gallery, which is leading the regeneration of Peckham. For more on the Boxer family, see here.
Adrian Amos from LASSCO was featured in this week’s ES Magazine in one of the rooms at Brunswick House:
This is the main restaurant room:
Here’s a collection of signs from the exterior wall of the house:
For more photos of beautiful LASSCO objects, click here.
Relatively new on Walworth Road are two exciting arrivals within the same premises. Aobaba is a top notch and very reasonably priced Vietnamese street food restaurant. The veggie options are particularly good, the Vietnamese beers are cheap, and there’s a multitude of choice about how to flavour your bubble tea.
Lots of choice of garnishes:
Nice food, beautifully presented:
Even if you’re not a big buyer of oriental foods, the Longdan Express Oriental Supermarket is worth a visit for quality Western brands that aren’t otherwise easy to find in the area, like Teapigs tea.
Kennington Bookshop is now closed but the site became Vanilla Black Coffee & Books.
The Kennington Bookshop is an excellent independent book store in the heart of Kennington. It’s great for last minute gift shopping (they also sell cards and wrapping paper), and they have a second hand section in the basement. Local author Will Self has been spotted in there, so it may be the bookshop referred to in this article.
Also if you want a less common, more Kennington twist on the ultimate smug middle class London accessory, the Daunt Books bag, get a Kennington Bookshop bag instead:
Very exciting to see a high end coffee shop and deli opening up in the heart of Kennington. Welcome Sally White which is on Kennington Road at the junction with Windmill Row. They serve proper coffee, nice cakes, and they commission poetry about asparagus (bet Ottolenghi have never done that).
