AKA North Kennington: The Maccabees’ Documentary.
Anyway, this looks great:
Elephant Days
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The Top Ten Best Lunch Spots in Kennington – no. 8 – Sirena’s
Sirena’s sadly closed down for good.
Positives: Imagine eating creamy ravioli while watching Back To The Future – that’s what it’s like visiting Sirena’s. There’s a dessert trolley and a great atmosphere. It will cheer you up and fill you up.
Negatives: You have to be in the right mood to eat your lunch in 1989. In the basement of an office building. With a dessert trolley. And they’re only open on weekdays.
Address: Southbank House, Black Prince Road, SE1 7SJ
Website (also from 1989)
Come back next Sunday to see what’s at no. 7.
Supper Club Frenzy
It’s a supper club bonanza in Kennington this week, with two separate pop-up dinner events taking place mere streets away from each other in North West Kennington.
On Thursday August 27th, The Ragged Canteen are hosting their inaugural dinner event, at an extremely reasonable price of three courses for £15 (tickets here). Expect robust, imaginative vegetarian fare, and some ‘small surprises’. We’re not in on the secret of what the unexpected element of the evening might be – as long as it’s not an appearance from local resident Peter Stringfellow, who we saw being turned away rather incongruously from the Tea House Theatre on Sunday (it was a rainy afternoon and there wasn’t space for his Bugaboo alongside all the others). If you book, you’ll be sure of a table at The Ragged Canteen.
Beaconsfield, home of The Ragged Canteen
On August 28th and 29th, Roots and Shoots are bringing back their Magpie Kitchen, with a menu that’s an interesting cocktail of Middle Eastern, Indian and Mediterranean influences. The Roots and Shoots garden should be looking particularly verdant after Kennington’s recent deluges, too.
Roots and Shoots
Brunswick House have also been hosting their own supper clubs in recent months, but they are rather more elite affairs. For restaurant staff, they run the Sinning on Sundays dinners, with entrance strictly restricted to trade only, and at the other end of the spectrum was this summer’s Brunswick House Ball (dress code: Black Tie with a Napoleonic Twist), for those who like their supper clubs with a hefty side order of Georgian grandeur.
Brunswick House restaurant
It’s competition time! Win a super limited edition vinyl album by The Maccabees
The Maccabees’ no. 1 album Marks To Prove It is a tribute to North Kennington (or, as The Maccabees rather quaintly still call it, Elephant & Castle). The album was recorded at the band’s own Elephant Studios, the videos are set in North Kennington, and the cover features a photo of the Michael Faraday Memorial.
We’ve managed to lay our hands on an extremely limited edition vinyl copy of the album. Not only is the vinyl blue like the Elephant & Castle shopping centre but, in a tribute to the wind turbines at the top of the Strata building, the sticker has been placed so as to make the A side completely unplayable!
To win this unique item which has North Kennington written all over it, just tell us why the Strata’s turbines don’t turn anymore. Leave a comment below or email kenningtonrunoff@gmali.com or tweet us.
The Top Ten Best Lunch Spots in Kennington – no. 9 – Tea House Theatre
Positives: They transformed a former pub into a tea house with a lot of personality. A convivial setting, on what is now called Vauxhall Walk Square, on the edge of Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens. At lunch, they do a good Welsh rarebit, a kedgeree, and just about every type of tea you could think of. Sometimes there’s live music, and it’s an events space at night, for everything from poetry to ballroom dancing to, yes, theatre. It’s Kennington’s most baby-friendly venue – they will roll out the red changing mat for you and your little one.
Negatives: About those babies – if you don’t want to eat lunch surrounded by NCT groups, you’re in the wrong place. Being militant about tea, they don’t serve coffee. There’s a big choice of cakes but they are all intensely creamy and rich.
Update in 2019: Did we mention they hate milennials and love Nigel Farage and Brexit?
Address: 139 Vauxhall Walk, London SE11 5HL
Come back next Sunday to see what’s at no. 8.
The Top Ten Best Lunch Spots in Kennington – no. 10 – Imperial War Museum café
Positives: The food, by Peyton & Byrne, is unusually good for a museum cafeteria. Update in 2019: the food is no longer by Peyton & Byrne and is no longer above average.
You can sit outside in Geraldine Mary Harmsworth park when the weather is fine.
Negatives: Hordes of tourists, especially during school holidays. Often a lengthy queue at lunchtime.
Hygiene rating: doesn’t seem to have one yet
Address: Lambeth Road, London SE1 6HZ
Come back next Sunday to see what’s at no. 9.
The Top Ten Best Lunch Spots in Kennington
Following the huge excitement around our Top Ten Best Restaurants in Kennington list, this Sunday will see the start of our Top Ten Best Lunch Spots in Kennington. This is for all those establishments that don’t generally open in the evenings, from Sally White to the Imperial War Museum cafe. Suggestions welcome.
Sirena’s
Kennington: Land of Letterpress
Kennington, epicentre of the London letterpress scene, has played host to many a typographic luminary.
Berthold Wolpe, one of the greatest names in type design, lived at Kennington Park Road until his death in 1989 and his Albertus typeface is used in street nameplates throughout our very own borough of Lambeth. Eagle-eyed Kennington Runoff fans may also have spotted it employed in our social media creative identity.
In the kind of tidy confluence of Kenningtonians that so delights Kennington Runoff, another SE11-based typographer, designer and letterpress practitioner Alan Kitching has created a print in honour of Berthold Wolpe (pictured above), and also one depicting the streets of Kennington (pictured below). Kitching’s studio on Cleaver Street is handily identified in this print, and they host a letterpress workshop there if you fancy joining the long line of Kennington letterpress creatives.
Can’t make the dates for the typography workshop on Cleaver Street? Never fear, there’s a competitor round the corner at Iliffe Yard in the form of Mr Smith.
The Kennington Lane Press is the final stop on our tour of Kennington: land of the letterpress. They sell their hand-printed greetings cards at the North Lambeth Parish Fete as well as online, and will create bespoke thank you cards for all those local businesses looking for the personal touch when reaching out to thank us for our tireless promotion. Bribes always welcome alongside thank you notes.
Kennington Lane Press stall at North Lambeth Parish Fete
Earl of Bedlam, king and queen of Kennington
London 2015’s answer to Tommy Nutter, fashion house the Earl of Bedlam reside down a little mews off Walnut Tree Walk, having previously occupied a shop in South Kennington:
Tailors to some of Kennington’s slickest suited and booted (including Mark Hill of Antiques Roadshow and Counter Brasserie fame), they also dress musical luminaries from across the spectrum – Nile Rodgers, Simon Le Bon, Goldie, Bez and Roger Daltrey have all been spotted in Earl of Bedlam garms. Nile is such a fan that he had the Earl head down to the studio to give Bedlam t-shirts to the band and Mark Ronson when he was making the most recent Duran Duran album.
Earl of Bedlam staff, clients, models, friends & family photographed by Jill Furmanovsky for Jocks & Nerds in Bedlam Mews, with horses from Vauxhall City Farm (Mark in the hat front right, Lady C next to him)
We are still waiting for our Kennington Runoff-inspired three-piece suit crafted from baby llama wool shorn off the latest arrivals at Vauxhall City Farm, but we are indebted to Lady C and Mark at the Earl of Bedlam nevertheless for their endless supply of local tips and information. More ferociously networked than any other Kenningtonites we can name, they are true pillars of the community. Running social media for the Duchy Arms when they relaunched, creating limited edition Bastille Day t-shirts for the Boule-In, designing the uniform for Counter staff, hosting jazz gigs, and propping up the bar at the Royal Oak (otherwise it would fall over) – these are all in a day’s work for the Earl of Bedlam, and still they find time to field stalls at both the Kennington Village and North Lambeth Parish fetes.
Kennington Park and its new Flower Garden
It’s all change in Kennington Park at the moment, and this weekend was a big one thanks to the reopening of the flower garden after a £500k makeover. We bring you photos, with apologies to the woman who we inadvertently followed around:
The flower garden originally opened in 1931 and its layout has remained much the same since, including this water feature:
This new sundial was made from Welsh slate by Sam Flintham, a student of historic stone carving at Kennington’s own City & Guilds:
Get down there quick while the roses are still in season:
Elsewhere in the park, the Kennington Park Centre on Bob Marley’s old hang out, St Agnes Place, is newish and features an arts and community centre, a stay and play club, and an adventure playground. Also newish is the exercise equipment just north of the cafe, which is proving very popular.
Finally, one of the big concerns about Northern Line extension works in the park was that Bee Urban, those harvesters of the world’s tastiest honey, would have to be relocated. Well, they have been, and their new site next to the cafe looks mightily impressive:
Join the Friends of Kennington Park here – they made all this happen.
