If you’re heading to the Pullens Yard Open Studios this weekend, you will most likely drop in on East Kennington’s kookiest cafe and gallery, the Electric Elephant, which is on the Walworth Road end of Pullens Yard. The homemade ice cream is particularly eccentric.
This is the place to pick up local history books and pamphlets. Nine Things That Aren’t There must be about local archaic and largely forgotten place names such as Walworth, Elephant & Castle, Lambeth, Vauxhall and Oval:
A fellow local blog, South Kennington Partnership, has suggested that the triangle between Kennington Park Road, Brixton Road and Camberwell New Road be renamed The Kennington Triangle, with its current name The Kennington Oval being reserved for the cricket ground. We agree wholeheartedly.
Some surprising objects have appeared in The Kennington Triangle in recent times.
During the Olympics, this giant shot put landed there:
And during a recent clean-up operation, the disembodied head of Pete Waterman was found:
(photo borrowed from the South Kennington Partnership website)
In the early 20th century, East Kennington’s magnificent Pullens Estate, AKA the Pullens Buildings, comprised almost 700 properties and stretched all the way to Manor Place. In the seventies the surviving buildings were threatened with demolition. Residents and squatters fought back (Kennington owes a lot to the preservation efforts of squatters) and thank goodness they did – these are some of London’s last surviving Victorian tenement buildings, and their workshops host a thriving community of creative people, as well as providing film sets for the likes of The King’s Speech (in the scene where the king goes to visit the speech therapist for the first time).
Twice a year they host an open day and their Christmas event is coming up next weekend. It’s the ideal opportunity to look around these unique spaces and pick up unusual Christmas presents. How about some Alex Monroe jewellery for a fraction of the Liberty’s price, or some pottery moulded from vegetables, or a handmade loot, or some architect-designed furniture, or a print of all the regions of the shipping forecast? It’s all here, in the most amazing and rather Christmas-y setting.
Pullens Yard, with workshops along both sides:
An installation of umbrellas from a previous open day, an idea that later made it to Carnaby Street:
Naomi Campbell used to live in Iliffe St, below, and, wait for it, the young Charlie Chaplin lived in one of the Pullens Buildings for a while:
The loot making workshop, who supply all Kanye West’s loot needs:
The International Maritime Organisation is headquartered in North West Kennington, near Lambeth Bridge. They have an impressive collection of flags on the front of the building, and the ship you can see poking out of the front continues all the way back for some 300 metres, with the rest of the building having been constructed around it.
Make Space Studios is a complex of arts and craft studios run by the people behind Studio 180. If you want to see handbags made out of recycled material, screen printing of posters for leading alternative bands, and savagely accurate parodies of twee middle class consumerist products, get along to their Christmas open evening today tomorrow, Thursday, from 4pm to 9pm (sorry we got the date wrong initially). There will be mince pies, mulled wine and special magic punch*.
Make Space runs alongside the railway lines going in to Waterloo Station, while the entrance is on Newnham Terrace in North Kennington, opposite Lambeth North Tube. They also have an art gallery, The Simulator Gallery.
Follow the pink bannister below to enter and on no account allow yourself to be diverted into CP Hart, the world’s largest and therefore most terrifying bathroom showroom.
* we can’t be sure but it seems like that kind of place
Kevin has heeded our call and says he will always have a home in Kennington.
Above is a ghost sign on Brixton Road in South Kennington – but what is the brand of cigarettes that were so good for the throat? And what’s the penultimate word – “THE WORLD’S PREMIER CO***** CIGARETTE”? Whoever comes first with the answers will be rewarded with a free Durning Library postcard – and we all know the real value of those.
Karen Gillan, who played “Dr Who’s sexiest sidekick ever”, lives in Kennington and was spotted working behind the bar at the Pilgrim pub on Kennington Lane.
In the 2005 Christmas episode, the Tardis crash landed on the Brandon Estate in East Kennington.
Colin Baker, the Sixth Doctor, was born in North West Kennington.
Bob Baker, the creator of Doctor Who’s iconic K9 robotic dog, appeared at the Cinema Museum recently.
The White Bear, on Kennington Park Road, is a pub of two halves. The front half is an Irish sports pub with lots of regulars and rather an edgy atmosphere. The back half is an extraordinarily intimate, award-winning fringe theatre with a capacity of just 50. It was established in 1988 and actors who’ve appeared there include Emily Watson, Tamzin Outhwaite, Kwame Kwei-Armah, Mark Little, Kylie Minogue, Jason Donovan and Natalie Imbruglia.
Plays we’ve seen here:
* One about Byron, the Shelleys, and their frantic sex lives.
* A play featuring objectionable middle class couples arguing and cheating on each other over barbecues – or we saw half of it anyway (the problem with leaving a theatre this small during the interval is your absence will definitely be noticed in the second half – sorry about that guys).
* A good production of Noel Coward’s Still Life, the play on which Brief Encounter was based, which is about an abortive affair.
* Recently we saw Coward, a rather unflattering depiction of Noel Coward and his sex life.
So is the White Bear the theatre equivalent of the Locker Room? No – they had a play by Ayn Rand recently so we’re guessing that was a sex free zone. Check out their programme here and get along.
Here’s a photo of Coward (that’s him, sitting down):
The Ship pub on Kennington Road is celebrating its 250th birthday tomorrow with a pirate-themed evening. 250! Ten generations of Charlie Chaplin’s family have drunk in this pub.
The Ship underwent refurbishment recently and it’s really rather nice inside now, not to mention outside thanks the hanging baskets and picnic tables you can see below. They have an extensive selection of real ales, board games, live music twice a week, decent local-sourced food, and best of all, they have a bar billiards table, which is great fun if you can figure out the rules.
