Category Archives: Vauxhall

Unseen Vauxhall

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Lets be honest, we’ve all probably walked through Vauxhall and seen things that we wish we’d never seen, but we’ve just unearthed two fun walking tours that explore hidden elements of history that transpired there which we wished we had seen, but missed by a hundred years or so. 

Unseen Vauxhall – the Vanished and the Unseen is a two part, stand alone set of talks around Vauxhall and the Thames foreshore. The press release is tantalizingly short of detail, but states it will not be centred on the fabled Spring Gardens, which has been celebrated in books, Bridgerton and, most importantly, by us. These walks usually cover areas such as local discoveries, scandals, famous residents, notable architecture and political protests. 

Unseen Vauxhall is taking place on Tuesday, 3 September from 15:30 to 17:15. It is such a large topic that there is also an Unseen Vauxhall part 2 on Friday, 13 September from 13:30 – 15:30, so you’ll need to bunk off early from work. Tickets are on sale now for £12 but won’t be for long as the sale ends on 1 September. 

These two events are part of the larger Lambeth Heritage Festival taking place throughout September, many of which are free. We would happily send you over to the Lambeth but the links on their website *coughs and stares out window* aren’t working. We did unearth this .pdf, as we love you almost as much as you love us.

SKVP (Shree Krishna Vada Pav)

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Here at the Runoff we pride ourselves on promoting small business, and while new arrival SKVP in Vauxhall may be the most recent outlet of a small chain, we’ve paid them a visit because a) we all need to be eating more vegetarian food and b) it is located in what we call a jinxed property and we feel sorry for them. Plus, anywhere that has a Bollywood movie corner with a VHS machine (kids, ask your parents what this is)  can’t be all bad. 

Considering the petite nature of SKVP, the length of the menu is mind bending. Gwen the intern pondered and then went for the Weekday Deal of vada pav and pav bhaji The pav was a delicious spicy fried potato fritter inside a soft toasted dinner roll, served alongside a bhaji: a traditional Mumbai street food of mashed spiced vegetables again with what looked like school dinner rolls. Research tells us this is actually authentic, but next time Gwen wants to seek out an option with what we understand better to be Indian breads, such as paratha or roti. Please do this in your own time, Gwen. 

Your scribe opted for the mutter paneer with rice an and added soft drink. The mutter paneer was a good example of this rich, spicy pea and Indian cheese favourite and the rice was fluffy, as it should be. And it gave your scribe a flimsy excuse to eat cheese in the middle of the daytime. You might want to research the menu ahead of time so as not to panic when confronted with so much choice. 

We hope SKVP succeeds in spite of its funny name and jinxed location along from the Nandos in Vauxhall. You might recall that location was a Dirty Burger and a sub sandwich place, among other things. And on most Sunday mornings where you can find people crawling out of nightclub ‘Fire’. We call them ‘Fire Damage’. 

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.

Dominion at Newport Street

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Choosing the right career can be tricky when your dad is the artist, collector, and  Newport Street Gallery owner Damien Hirst . But the beneficent Hirst has given his son Connor a helping hand by allowing him to rummage through daddy’s loft space and garage to pull out a bunch of paintings and curate his very own show. The product of Connor’s efforts is now on show for as all to see at Newport Street, located handily in our very shire. 

The curated work of the younger Hirst is called ‘Dominion’, and groups together highlights of Hirst’s mind boggling collection of 20th century paintings. Included are works by Warhol, Emin, Bacon, Banksy, Baselitz, and Koons, to name a few. The theme, like most of Hirst’s work overall, is about the cycle of life, death and redemption. Amid the images of car accidents and electric chairs, you also see the virgin Mary and clowns. Also included is the 1995 work ‘Myra’ by Marcus Harvey. Hugely controversial when it was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1997, it symbolised the YBA (Young British Artists) of the period, of which Mr. Hurst was one

Dominion evokes memories of Hirst’s excellent 2020 show retrospective ‘End of a Century’ which we reviewed at the time. In an almost peerless display of life imitating art, the exhibit closed suddenly after only a few days due to the death and pain happening in the outside world. In that show he displayed the cycle of life by means embalmed sharks and dead flies. While Dominion is more subtle, it touches on similar themes, nevertheless. 

If you’re a fan of 20th century art and want to give young Mr. Hirst a bit of career boost then it is sliver of time that you won’t regret. Dominion is on now until 1 September, 2024 and is totally free. Newport Street Gallery is open Wednesday to Sunday, 10am to 5pm.

Metropolis London

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If you dare venture into other neighbourhoods, you might have detected that big venues full of small eateries are now well established. An example is Market Place in Vauxhall which we reviewed in 2022. With  Railtrack’s mission of gentrifying the gays out of the Vauxhall arches now nearing it’s completion, we felt compelled to visit enormous Metropolis London in Albert Embankment.  While Metropolis itself is far from independent it’s food stalls definitely are, and here is what we found.

We took new intern and overall zippy gal Beth for a working lunch. As Beth is on a health kick, she headed over to the Curry Club  and chose the dahl with spinach and paratha. At £6.99 this has to be one of the bargains of the Metropolis food options (which aren’t exactly cheap). As you can see, it was a small but adequate serving of a luscious dahl with good spice and coconut coming through and it is served with two whole parathas, providing plenty of that flaky, stretchy Indian flatbread to soak everything up. She pronounced it to be very good indeed and a terrific lunch option.

Your scribe headed for the curiously named Uzbeki place ‘Shpaz’, which Beth observed is the sound that a tiny dog makes when it pops out of a posh lady’s handbag and sneezes. For £10 we had the Lag Nam chicken noodles. Served in a rich broth, this healthy option featured hand pulled noodles, carrots, celery, peppers and what tasted like barberries and dried coriander. Very light and satisfying.   Other cuisines at Metropolis include Italian, Thai, burgers, pizza, Japanese and Greek. And of course poke bowls, as it is now illegal to have a food village without one. 

We are aware that these look like dishes that could be served in a prison canteen but….
photographing food is very difficult!

Metropolis occupies two huge arches and there are plenty of tables both outside and in. Outside features a cute coffee/pasty hut which also serves pints. The second arch is dominated by a massive bar and a stage to appeal to an evening crowd. While it is very sad that thanks to Railtrack independent LGBTQI+ assets such as Above the Stag theatre have gone to that giant curtain call in the sky, at least there are some independent shops of a fashion opening up in their place. 

The Squeegies of Vauxhall

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Long before Vauxhall had a Starbucks and flats behind the bins at Fire nightclub that would set you back  £11,000,000, young people called ‘Squeegies’ popped up in Vauxhall Cross determined to make a bit of change by cleaning windscreens. The budding filmmaker Paul Bernays decided to make a documentry out of their lives, turning it into a film that was included in the long running BBC series ’40 Minutes’. You might remember an iconic episode in this series called ‘Angel’, about the tube station.  

Squeegies Follows the windscreen washing lives Del, Leah and Tony and a cast of others (including children) as they battle traffic in Vauxhall, relationships, alcohol and, in Leah’s case, pregnancy. Del is the sage of the group and actually has a family of his own and memories of almost being a popstar. There is something quietly life affirming about their quest for better things in a world stacked against them. 

Squeegies was shot in 1992,  So in the background can be seen the MI6 building nearing completion, Vauxhall cold store, and a roundabout without a giant bus shelter. 40 minutes and fascinating stuff. 

Vauxhall’s Invisible Bridge

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We love nothing more than a barmy idea that never comes to fruition, and one almost came into fruition in that very bastion of barminess, Vauxhall. In  1963, London County Council were accepting applications for a never to be realised bridge to replace the current Vauxhall Bridge. As the objective was to ease congestion and overcrowding, the Glass Age Development Committee submitted a plan for a 300 metre, seven storey glass edifice called ‘The Crystal Span’.

The vision for the recumbent skyscraper was to create a wide berth for cars on the ground level, and above it, create an extension of the Tate Gallery, a shopping centre, roof gardens, an open air theatre and residential development. So as you can see, paying over the odds for a tiny Vauxhall flat above traffic fumes and noise is by no means a recent phenomenon. Structurally, the bridge would have been made of a pair of double-decked concrete boxes for the road sections, that in turn supported the buildings above. A glass curtain surrounding the bridge and enclosing the pedestrian spaces would have hung from the sides of the bridge structure.

The Crystal Span caused a bit of a stir and some support, but in the end, sadly, LCC declined to pick up the estimated £7 million (£132 million in 2024) construction costs, and the scheme was abandoned. In the office we had a little pool going to guess what clever nickname this project could have had if it had bee executed. Of the ones that can be printed, we had the ‘crystal protrusion’, ‘dead Shard’ , ‘Passport to Pimlico’ and ‘carbon monoxide alley’. 

Getting Classy in Vauxhall 2024

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Now that you’ve completed that new year’s resolution of running around Kennington Park six times, it’s time to work on your grey matter. It’s that time in the Greater Kennington cultural calendar (it’s a thing, trust us) for us to enlighten you about the ‘Classical Vauxhall’ series of concerts and events at various places in Vauxhall, Kennington and Oval from 29 Feb to 3 March. The press release boldly describes it as ‘a four day festival of live music and song, featuring a diverse, world class line up featuring acclaimed musicians and captivating performances’. 

The concept behind these five concerts is to put on shows that are varied, lively, and accessible to people who (like us) are not habitues of the Royal Opera House and might otherwise be a bit intimidated by this genre. The event is being co-hosted with the London Philharmonic Orchestra with each night set to a theme, the themes being classical soul,  mythical events, piano vs. violin, and a cappela singing. There are also a few events geared to kiddos. 

Classical Vauxhall are also laying on two walks which sound fantastic. One is called ‘Astronauts, Aeronauts, Animals & Agents’ and another about the music of Vauxhall. There is also a workshop about historic dance. And please note that ‘historic dance’ probably refers to Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens and not the time in 2005 you ripped off your shirt in a ketamine haze at Fire nightclub.

The director of the festival and the brains behind the whole shebang is Fiachra Garvey and he is joined by artists such as Elena Urioste, China Moses, Mary Collins, Tony Tixier and Adjoa Andoh. To be honest we have no idea who any of these people are – But– we have seen some of their work on YouTube and it’s beautiful. Elena and her amazing violin are featured here.  Tickets are £22.15 for the concerts so not exactly cheap, but a great way to support local culture and artists who are also doing outreach at schools. Some folks from KR towers went in 2023 and they described it as both amazing and great fun.  A nice way to get a little culture in your life without venturing much further than your local pub. 

Only 10 days to go until our ‘Ten Best Places to Eat in Greater Kennington (+ 1 Sunday Roast)’ countdown, people! 

Our Own Low Line

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For those of you who have the actual nerve to travel outside greater Kennington, you might in your travels have encountered the Low Line, which is an urban regeneration business initiative created underneath railways arches from Bermondsey to London Bridge. If you’ve seen new arches (and a cinema) opening up in Borough Market and nearby Flat Iron Square then you’ve witnessed this initiative in action. So why are we telling you this little nugget of seemingly useless information?

  • Union Yard Arches, SE1
  • This is Battersea, but similar to how our arches will look

For two years a creative team have been at work to extend the Low Line from London Bridge to Battersea. This cuts right through our fair patch from Lambeth North right through Vauxhall and through to the nightmare urban sprawl that is Nine Elms. We are particularly excited about a plan to connect the area by a new cycling/walking route. Some of these arches are already occupied by great local business. However there are other arches, such as the sad lot in front of Newport St. Gallery, who could use some serious TLC.

  • The vision for the back of Pedlar’a Park
  • The vision for Goding St. Imagine no nitrous oxide canisters!

The Low Line in our neck of the woods is comprised of 299 (!) arches and a deep dive into the report indicates that that the planners are already aware that a range of independent businesses exist but others have had to move (eg Above the Stag Theatre) when Railtrack hiked the rents up. In the report  Lambeth and Wandsworth recognise that what makes our communities work are businesses such as the ones that have existed under these arches for many years. A good example are the Portugese places on Albert Embankment. A hike in rent means they might be no more and we’ll be stuck with the likes of Franco Manco or, god help us, Gail’s Bakery. This should all be kicking off in 2025 hopefully in the right direction. The Runoff are watching you, Lambeth and Wandsworth! 

If you want more information and you have a great deal of time on your hands you’re sick in bed, the detailed report can be found here

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.