Category Archives: Vauxhall

Millicent Fawcett and Vauxhall Park

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The research division here at Observer have been working overtime to establish and claim feminist writer, politician, trailblazer and suffragette Millicent Fawcett as one of our own, and we think they’ve cracked it. Her many achievements are outlined here and if you’re the attentive sort you’ll be aware that she was the first female honoured with a statue in Parliament square a few years ago.

For a number of years Millicent and her equally esteemed husband Henry Fawcett lived in a house in what is now Vauxhall Park. The house included grounds and the couple realised that in an increasingly cramped Vauxhall this was a privilege which they wanted to share with others. Although the genesis of the idea came from Henry, when he died prematurely in 1884 it came down to Millicent and several other people to fashion the reality. 

The Fawcett’s home and gardens extended from South Lambeth Road back quite a bit. Although spacious, the gardens weren’t quite large enough to create a promenading style park, so Millicent and another pioneering champion of the underdog, Octavia Hill, set about purchasing buildings to create a solid, square park. The park was opened by Prince Charles in 1890. And before you throw your laptops out the window, as he was the Duchy of Cornwall the ground beneath the park was (and is) technically his. 

Vauxhall Park doesn’t look so inviting in March, but you get the point

So, you may be asking yourselves ‘now why isn’t there a memorial to the Fawcetts in Vauxhall Park’? Well this is a great local mystery. There was a very fine stature created by the Vauxhall based Doulton factory of Henry (but not our heroine, go figure) and it lived in the park for 70 years. In a moment of characteristic insanity, Lambeth Council took a sledgehammer to the statue in 1960.  Henry Fawcett’s legacy now lives on in the form of Henry Fawcett Primary School in Bowling Green Street in Oval. Apparently the bust of Henry in the school is all that remains of the vanquished statue, but this has never been proven.  And when you compare a regal bronze statue in Parliament Square to a chipped bust in a primary school corridor, I think we know who ended up with the better deal.

Fawcett’s legacy lives in the form of the Fawcett Society, which is in Black Prince Road. Their mission is to fight sexism and gender inequality through research and campaigns.  

Can You Help With Our Project?

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Some of you might think that the current Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens is the open space that was created when the original Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens was closed in 1859, but you’re mistaken. It was actually a vibrant, working class neighbourhood for over 100 years consisting of Glyn Street, Auckland Street and Italian Walk. It was destroyed developed by Lambeth into its current incarnation only in the mid 1970’s.  And believe it or not, the Vauxhall Tavern used to have shops and homes attached to it. The photo with the woman in it was taking in the early 1970’s in Goding Street in the sad dying days.

As we’re sure you are aware, we here at the Runoff are nothing if not highly academic. If you lived in this community or have any information about it we’d love to hear from you and feel free to email us at kenningtonrunoff@gmail.com . So you can be a staff member, or just act like one. Our online research has not exactly been, lets say ‘fruitful’, but we plan to go to Minet history reference library when we can muster the courage to leave Greater Kennington. 

Here is a lovely photo of a family who resided in Auckland Street in 1905. If you’re reading this from your heavenly perch then we welcome your feedback. We’ll get out our ouija board. 

The Ten Best Places to Eat in Greater Kennington #6

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+ One Sunday Roast

Brunswick House Restaurant

If money were no object then Brunwisck House would nab the top spot, but as money DOES matter they’ve bagged the still respectable six slot. Please note that restaurants on this scale have menus that change almost daily. So what you read below (from 2024) might not still be available.

If you’ve ever noticed a large Georgian mansion which appears to be on the precipice of getting inhaled by skyscrapers in the Vauxhall gyratory, it is called Brunswick House (and we’ve written about it here) and for several years they have run a critically acclaimed restaurant, in addition to its main hustle of selling (very) high end architectural salvage.

The dining room sits effortlessly in a large space in Brunswick House selling mostly chandeliers, light fittings and other gorgeous things. For an upmarket restaurant, the clientele was surprisingly young in a kind of ‘please come to my book launch next week’ kind of way. And no sooner do we sit down than we are joined at the next table by no other than TV presenter Miquita Oliver and a gaggle of her gorgeous, hair flicking friends! They were a nice complement to our botanical and creative cocktails, the favourite being their house eucalyptus martini. 

The menu at Brunswick House often requires a diction course or at least a dictionary. But fear not, the drilled to perfection serving staff can help you differentiate between a chicharron and a tardivo. And there is the very modern dilemma of trying to decipher a sharing plate from a mains. Highlights among the snack or starter sizes were the salt cod croquettes, the roasted leeks and the devilled eggs. The croquettes oozed with creamy salty fishiness, while the roasted leeks were winning for an innovative combination with a tangy sauce derived from red peppers and pecans. The devilled eggs had a seventies retro quality but the trout roe filling gave it a more on trend feel.

For the mains, your scribe had the roast cod with sea greens and spring vegetable chowder. The meaty and flaky cod was set off well with what appeared to be a tureen of well matched veg with an aniseed hit.  A big hit on the main size dishes was the fresh maccheroni (note proper Italian spelling). This packed a big flavour hit with the curious sounding combination of roast chicken butter, wild garlic and bottarga (translation: grey mullet roe). Curious it was but definitely lovely – rich and satisfying. 

Fancy Macaroi
Cod

And then, after a night spent with Maquita and her chums set amongst glittering chandiliers  and food we couldn’t pronounce, our night was over and we were deposited into a bus fumed traffic gyratory in Vauxhall. But the wonderful food made it worthwhile. This kind of food is by no means cheap, but one of the few glories of sharing portions is that you can just pop in for a snack of two £5 plates and they’re fine with that. 

J- Seven

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For purposes relating to our  wholly scientific and profoundly subjective top 10 list of the best places to eat in Greater Kennington (+ a Sunday roast) The Kennington Observer (formally known as the Runoff)  just paid a TKO visit to hot new Chinese restaurant J –Seven in Vauxhall. Our top ten list kicks off in a couple of weeks. But will it make the cut? 

J-Seven occupies one of the arches in Albert Embankment, and the arches typify the evolution of our storied manor. Previous inhabitants have included coal, railway sidings, gyms, motorbike shops and nightclubs. J-Seven has now pitched up in one of the arches offering upmarket(ish) Mandarin cuisine with the totally intoxicating element of lounge singers in the evening. Sadly we attended in the daytime with no singer evident. But the helpful manager Bear explained that there are singers most nights. 

J-Seven presents itself in that wonderfully Chinese restaurant manner of seeing customers as a slight inconvenience, and they prove this by plopping an Ipad in front of you to order. As Ipads came about only twelve years ago, we are very much up with the kids and your scribe ordered the slow braised brisket with rich sauce. This was proper slow braised beef with juicy fat on the sides, served with Chinese rice and a firey spicy cabbage which was delicious when mixed with the stewed meat juice. 

Very few of us at the Observer have real life partners as we’re overworked. However, you are luckier than us we again J-Social for a date owing to its banging cocktail bar in the front, the precise menu, low romantic lighting, and the food is properly Chinese. And when under the arches think about all those amazing women and men who might have worked there shovelling coal, building a railroad, dancing or just buying a motorbike. Our evolution continues.  

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.