The Streets of Old Southwark: Bermondsey - Docks and Slums

A visitor to London, exploring the Borough of Southwark, and having visited Peckham, may board a Number 78 Bus from Peckham High Street to Tower Bridge. The route takes us through further residential suburbs, and over the site of Bermondsey Abbey, founded in 1082. The Abbey of Saint Saviour was a Benedictine establishment, and was dependent on the French Abbey of Cluny, one of the wealthiest and most politically influential monastic institutions in Medieval Europe. Today, only a few architectural fragments of the abbey are visible in the basement of the Lokma Restaurant, in Bermondsey Square.

Bermondsey Abbey, reconstruction drawing by Sir Walter Besant, 1894 (image is in the Public Domain).

"A Fete at Bermondsey," possibly a marriage feast, c 1579, by Marcus Gheeraerts the Elder (image is in the Public Domain).

Alighting at Tower Bridge, we find ourselves back on the river-front, and at the southern end of one of London's most iconic landmarks, looking across the Thames towards the Tower of London. The bridge itself was built, to the then fashionable neo-Gothic design, between 1886 and 1894, as part of an ongoing effort to ease the passage of people and goods between the City of London, to the north of the river, and the Borough of Southwark, to the south. At the time of its construction, however, the "Pool of London" (the stretch of river between Tower Bridge and London Bridge) remained one of the most important elements of London as a port, hence the imperative to design a bridge that could be raised, to allow the passage of ships, and lowered, to accommodate road traffic.

Tower Bridge under construction, 1892 (image is in the Public Domain).

Tower Bridge, looking back from Shad Thames. Photo: Colin (licensed under CCA).

Strolling eastward along the river, we come to Butler's Wharf and Shad Thames, where a series of warehouses, completed in 1873, have now been converted into high-class restaurants and boutiques, with luxury apartments above. Beyond them is Saint Saviour's Dock, once owned by the monks of Bermondsey, who had a tidal mill at the point where the (now largely invisible) River Neckinger flowed into the Thames. The river's name, however, post-dates the monks (we have no idea what they would have called it): it recalls the "Devil's neck-cloth," or hangman's noose, for it was here that Eighteenth Century pirates were hanged, and their bodies exposed as a warning to others.

Shad Thames warehouses. Photo: David Iliff (license CC-BY-SA-3.0).

Saint Saviour's Dock. Photo: C.G.A. Grey (licensed under CCA).

On the other side of the wharf lay Jacob's Island, one of the most notorious of London's Nineteenth Century slums, the home of Charles Dickens's villain, Bill Sykes, and the place where he meets his untimely death.

Dickens spares us none of the details in his description:

" ... crazy wooden galleries common to the backs of half a dozen houses,with holes from which to look upon the slime beneath; windows, broken and patched, with poles thrust out, on which to dry the linen that is never there; rooms so small, so filthy, so confined, that the air would seem to be too tainted even for the dirt and squalor which they shelter; wooden chambers thrusting themselves out above the mud and threatening to fall into it - as some have done; dirt-besmeared walls and decaying foundations, every repulsive lineament of poverty, every loathsome indication of filth, rot and garbage: all these ornament the banks of Jacob's Island."

Jacob's Island, 1813 (image is in the Public Domain).

Folly Ditch, Jacob's Island, c 1840 (image is in the Public Domain).

Some decades later, however, in 1878, Edward Walford tells us of the transformation of the area:

"The foul ditch no longer pollutes the air. It has long been filled up ... there is now a good solid road ... Part of London Street, the whole of Little London Street, part of Mill Street, beside houses in Jacob Street and Hickman's Folly, have been demolished. In most of these places warehouses have taken the place of dwelling-houses. The revolting fact of many of the inhabitants of the district having no other water to drink than that which they procured from the filthy ditches is also a thing of the past. Most of the houses are now supplied with good water, and the streets are very well paved. Indeed, so great is the change for the better in the external appearance of the district generally, that a person who had not seen it since the improvements would now scarcely recognise it."

Most of Bermondsey remained an industrial area, an integral part of the working river, throughout the first three quarters of the Twentieth Century. As cargoes moved from the holds of ships into containers, however, and the Port of London shifted downstream, the districts of London that look out on the river have become so gentrified that even professional Londoners have long since been priced out of the property market. Millionaires now gaze down into clean flowing water, where once the underworld characters evoked by Dickens stared into the abyss, breathing its noxious fumes.

Butler's Wharf and Courage Brewery, 1971. Photo: Dr Neil Clayton (licensed under CCA). 

Mark Patton is a published author of historical fiction and non-fiction, whose books may be purchased from Amazon.

The Streets of Old Southwark: Peckham - The Growth of a Victorian Suburb

A visitor to London, exploring the Borough of Southwark, and having visited the remnants of the Great North Wood, extending between Sydenham and Dulwich, can board a Number 33 bus from Crescent Wood Road, heading north towards Tower Bridge. The journey takes us through a largely residential area of London, passing the Horniman Museum on the left.

The Horniman Museum. Photo: I.M. Chengappa (licensed under CCA).

Founded at the end of the Nineteenth Century by Frederick Horniman, the heir to a fortune built on the import of tea, the museum has stunning natural history and ethnographic collections, including one of the UK's most extensive collections of musical instruments from around the World. After a journey of around half an hour, we alight at Peckham Rye Station.

Until the mid-Nineteenth Century, Peckham was "a small, quiet, retired village, surrounded by fields," traces of which can still be glimpsed on Peckham Rye Common, and in Peckham Rye Park. As a child in the mid-Eighteenth Century, William Blake would often walk here from his home in Soho, and began to experience the visions that would inform his later writing and art: on one occasion, he saw the Prophet Ezekiel under a bush; and, on another, an angel in a tree.

Peckham Rye Common. Photo: Kate Tierney (licensed under CCA).

Angels, by William Blake (image is in the Public Domain).

The River Peck, in Peckham Rye Park, one of many small rivers that run beneath London's streets, largely unnoticed by modern Londoners. Photo: Rob Kam (licensed under GNU).

Stagecoaches from the south coast and Kent passed through Peckham on their way to London, escorted by armed guards, as a precaution against highwaymen. Drovers from Kent also stopped here with their livestock, and, typically, sold them here to local graziers, who would fatten them up before selling them on to City butchers (only freemen of the City were permitted to drive livestock over London Bridge).

Mural on a Peckham public house, commemorating the lives of Kentish drovers. Photo: Oxyman (licensed under CCA).

Peckham was transformed in the mid-Nineteenth Century, first by the establishment by the entrepreneur, Thomas Tilling, of a horse-drawn omnibus service connecting it to London in 1851; and, in the decades that followed, by the coming of the railways (the London, Chatham, & Dover Railway in 1865, and the London, Brighton, & South Coast Railway in 1866). The railways opened the area up to property developers, and to the growing legions of clerical workers who made their homes in the suburbs, rather than in the increasingly crowded streets of The City and Westminster.

A Tilling Omnibus. Photo: KellyASands (licensed under CCA).

Whilst the senior clerks of City banks, insurance and legal firms made their homes on the main thoroughfares once used by stagecoaches and drovers, the side-streets and alleys within a stone's throw of them housed the poorer families on whose services their wealthier neighbours depended: blacksmiths, carpenters, joiners, decorators, railway and postal workers, bus conductors, brewers, and bakers.

Charles Booth's "Poverty Map" of Lambeth & Southwark, including Peckham: streets coded in yellow and red indicate the most prosperous households; those in purple and black the poorest ones. Image: London School of Economics Booth/E/1/11 (image is in the Public Domain). 

On the 10th October, 1899, the social researcher, Ernest Aves (a colleague of Charles Booth), accompanied PC Dolby on his beat, starting on Peckham High Street. Whilst he recorded "large garden fronts" on the wider streets, he found the narrower alleys, such as Stanton Street, "dull and depressing:" the policeman explained that the street had an "indifferent reputation," with "two or three wife-beaters living in it." There were even some streets where "the police do not patrol," and "Dolby had never been up;" streets in which burglars were known to live, and in which murders had taken place; yet there were other streets nearby, occupied mainly by "conductors and drivers," with lively beer-houses and taverns.

The worst accommodation in late-Nineteenth and early-Twentieth Century Peckham was very bad indeed, and, in the 1930s, residents of Nigel Street staged a rent strike in protest at the unsanitary conditions in which their landlord expected them to live. Oswald Mosley's blackshirts tried to hijack the protest, pointing out that the landlord in question was Jewish; but the residents chased them away, insisting that their objections were to his practices as a landlord, not his ethnicity or religion.

The Peckham rent strike, 1935 (image is in the Public Domain).

Returning to Peckham Rye Station, our visitor can board a southbound Number 78 bus, for the next stage of the journey.

Mark Patton is a published author of historical fiction and non-fiction, whose books can be purchased from Amazon.

The Streets of Old Southwark: Remnants of the Great North Wood

A visitor to London, exploring the Borough of Southwark, and having visited Dulwich Village, can walk south along College Road, crossing the South Circular Road, and passing the present buildings of Dulwich School, designed by Sir Charles Barry (who, with Augustus Pugin, also designed the Palace of Westminster), and built in 1840, when the needs of the school had long-since outgrown the buildings endowed to it by Edward Alleyn.

Dulwich College. Photo: Noel Foster (licensed under CCA).

A little further up the hill, a toll-booth, dating back to 1789, reminds us that we are, in fact, on private land. Beyond this is a path that leads into surprisingly dense woodland. Dulwich Wood and Sydenham Hill Wood are, in a sense, remnants of the "Great North Wood," which once extended over much of what is now south London. This wood (which also gives its name to the suburb of Norwood) was granted to the monks of Bermondsey Abbey by Henry I in 1127. Five centuries later, parts of it were owned by Alleyn.

The College Road Tollgate. Photo: Spsmiler (image is in the Public Domain).

The Table of Tolls. Photo: Spsmiler (image is in the Public Domain).

The view east from Dulwich Wood towards Battersea Power Station. Photo: Robkam (image is in the Public Domain).  

Natural as it appears, it is not true "wild-wood," almost none of which exists anywhere in the British Isles. Woodland has been actively managed across these islands since the Neolithic period, five to six thousand years ago: and the monks would have managed it in much the same way as Alleyn managed it; by dividing it up into "coppices," leased out to one or more tenants, often members of the same family, since coppices were harvested in rotation.

Coppicing involves trees being regularly cut down to near ground level, and allowed to grow up again from new shoots. Birch can be coppiced for faggots on a three to four year cycle; oak for poles or firewood on a fifty year cycle. Different species, and various lengths of cycle, produced wood for different purposes: cart-making; wattle fencing; thatching spars; charcoal for industrial burning.

Recently coppiced alder. Photo: Cat James, Naturenet (licensed under GNU).

The same coppice after one year's growth (the predominant species in the Great North Wood is likely to have been oak, which follows a longer cycle). Photo: Cat James, Naturenet (licensed under GNU).

The coppicing process. Image: Javier Martin (licensed under GNU).

Some trees would have been allowed to grow for longer, but would then be pollarded (the upper branches cut off, and allowed to regrow), both to provide the larger timbers needed for the construction and ship-building industries; and, in the case of oak, to provide acorns, on which the tenants would have grazed their pigs.

Oak pollard. Photo: Rodolph (licensed under GNU).

This mix of activities: coppicing; pollarding; and the grazing of pigs; ensured that plenty of light reached the woodland floor, creating an environment in which bluebells, anemones, and primroses could thrive. In Sydenham Hill and Dulwich Woods today, these native species jostle alongside introduced survivors from Victorian Gardens, such as rhododendrons and buddleia; and, whilst the foxes and badgers may be descended from those that roamed these hills in prehistoric times, the native red squirrels have long since been displaced by their American grey cousins. The woodland remains a sanctuary, however, for species that we rarely see in the more built up areas of the metropolis.

The Green Woodpecker. Photo: Hans-Jorg Hellwig (licensed under CCA).

The Nuthatch. Photo: Peter Mulligan (licensed under CCA).

In the later Seventeenth Century, particularly after London's Great Fire, with a reduced demand for timber, the active management of woodland declined. Gypsies colonised the woods, and told the fortunes of Londoners who rode out to meet them, including, in 1688, the wife and daughters of Samuel Pepys.

Margaret Finch, the "Queen of the Norwood Gypsies," who died in 1740, at the age of 108 (image is in the Public Domain). It may have been her mother or aunt who told the fortunes of Pepys's family. Her daughter, "Old Bridget," is buried in the Dulwich Village Cemetery. 

The coming of the railways, in the mid-Nineteenth Century, dissected many of the remaining woodlands of Greater London, but, where these railways have subsequently been decommissioned, as is the case here, nature, in both its native and invasive guises, has been quick to reassert itself.

A train leaving Lordship Lane Station, by Camille Pissarro, 1871, Courthauld Institute of Art (image is in the Public Domain).

The line of the railway track today (closed in 1954). Photo: Robkam (licensed under CCA).

The footbridge today. Photo: Roger W. Howarth (licensed under CCA). 

From the woodland, we can re-emerge onto Crescent Wood Road, close to the top of the Sydenham Ridge, and, from there, take the southbound Number 363 bus for the next stage in our journey.

Mark Patton is a published author of historical fiction and non-fiction, whose books can be purchased from Amazon.

The Streets of Old Southwark: The Manor of Dulwich

A visitor to London, exploring the Borough of Southwark and arriving at Dulwich Village, finds himself or herself in an environment that really does feel like a village, rather than a corner of one of the World's great metropolises. It existed as a village as early as 967 AD, when King Edgar granted it to one of his thanes, Earl Aelfheah. The name, "Dulwich," comes from the Anglo-Saxon "Dilwihs," meaning "Dill-Meadow." The herb, dill, goes particularly well with fish, so the families that worked Aelfheah's land probably harvested it, and took it into London to sell around the fish-wharves of Billingsgate. In 1333, before the Black Death struck England, the population of Dulwich numbered one hundred.

In 1605, the Manor of Dulwich was purchased by Edward Alleyn. Regular followers of this blog have already encountered him as a theatrical impresario and Marlovian actor, but, having made his fortune and set up his family in rural Dulwich, he was ready to give something back to the community, with one eye doubtless on his immortal soul, and the other on his enduring reputation.

In 1619, Alleyn founded a school, "God's Gift" (now Dulwich College), for the education of twelve orphaned London-boys, admitted from the age of six. The establishment had a chapel (in which Alleyn is buried), a school-house, and twelve alms-houses. The first fifteen masters of the school were all members of Alleyn's family, the last such being George Allen (the family changed the spelling of their name during the Eighteenth Century), who retired in 1857.

Christ's Chapel of God's Gift, Dulwich. Photo: DeFacto (licensed under CCA).

Alleyn's tombstone within the chapel. Photo: Stephencdickson (licensed under CCA).

"Old-Time Tuition at Dulwich College," by Walter Charles Horsley (1855-1904), Dulwich Picture Gallery 607 (image is in the Public Domain).

Among the alumni of Dulwich College was the Antarctic explorer, Ernest Shackleton, and the college owns the small boat, the James Caird, in which, against the odds, he led five companions to safety in 1916, in a journey of 800 nautical miles from Elephant Island to South Georgia.

The "James Caird" being pulled ashore on South Georgia, 10th May 1916. The illustration, from Shackleton's book, "South," is almost certainly by the expedition artist, George Marston (image is in the Public Domain).

Dulwich College has relocated a short distance away (more on this in a future post), but beside the original foundation is the Dulwich Picture Gallery, probably the first purpose-designed public art-gallery in Europe, with important works by Rembrandt, Gainsborough, Hogarth, Reynolds, Rubens, Claude, Canaletto, Raphael and Veronese.

Sir Francis Bourgeois (1753-1811) and Noel Desenfans (1744-1807) were London art-dealers, who collected many of the paintings for Stanislaus Augustus, the King of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, which was dissolved before he could take delivery of them. They tried, unsuccessfully, to persuade the British Government to accept them as the core of a national collection, and, ultimately, they were bequeathed to Dulwich College.

Sir Francis Bourgeois and Noel Desenfans, by Paul Sandby, Dulwich Picture Gallery 645 (image is in the Public Domain).

The gallery itself was designed by the architect, Sir John Soane, and opened to the public in 1817. Even before this, it was open to students of the Royal Academy of Arts: and Constable, Turner, and Van Gogh were among the many students who would visit, and find inspiration there.

Dulwich Picture Gallery, main entrance. Photo: Poliphilo (licensed under CCA).

Dulwich Picture Gallery interior. Photo: Bridgeman (licensed under GNU). Natural lighting from above is a key element of Soanes's design.

Unusually, Soane's design includes a mausoleum for the gallery's founders, Sir Francis Bourgeois, Noel Desenfans, and Noel's wife, Margaret. The mausoleum and west wing of the gallery were badly damaged by a German V1 bomb in July 1944. Human remains from the caskets were scattered across the lawn, and the bones of the three individuals, who had been so close in life, are now mingled in the three restored caskets.

The Mausoleum at Dulwich Picture Gallery. Photo: Poliphilo (licensed under CCA).

Margaret Desenfans, by Moussa Ayoub, after Sir Joshua Reynolds, Dulwich Picture Gallery 627 (image is in the Public Domain).  

From Dulwich Village, we can proceed on foot to an even more rural corner of one of London's most urban boroughs.

Signpost in Dulwich Village. Photo: Velela (licensed under GNU).

Mark Patton is a published author of historical fiction and non-fiction, whose books can be purchased from Amazon.

The Streets of Old Southwark: Elephant & Castle - Religious Revival on the City Edge

A visitor to London, exploring the Borough of Southwark, and alighting at Elephant and Castle, finds himself or herself at the centre of one of London's busiest road junctions. It takes its name, almost certainly, from a coaching inn long since demolished, but owes its existence, as a junction, to improvements made to the roads leading in and out of London in the Eighteenth Century. From Roman times down to the Seventeenth Century, London had only one bridge across the Thames, London Bridge, which, with time, had become increasingly congested.

Westminster Bridge opened in 1752, and Blackfriars Bridge in 1769, opening up the City, and the newly developed West End, to increased traffic from the south. Prior to this, the area around Elephant and Castle was open countryside, "Saint George's Fields," used for military training and pony races. Here it was, in 1780, that the anti-Catholic Gordon Rioters had assembled, before marching on London. 

Between 1801 and 1841, the population of London increased by an average of 22,500 people per year, or 1875 per month. Most of these people were migrants from the market towns and rural parishes of the British Isles, and many, like the character of Kate in Charles Dickens's Nicholas Nickleby, sought work in the retail industries of the West End, as milliners and shop assistants, bar-tenders, and seamstresses. With rents in the City and the West End soaring, many made their homes on the south side of the river.

A construction boom was underway in Southwark, and was boosted by the coming of the railways in the middle decades of the Nineteenth Century. Much of the labour for the construction industry was provided by Irish immigrants, driven from their homeland by famine, and the overwhelming majority of these immigrants were Roman Catholics. London had few Catholic churches or priests, the legal restrictions on Catholic worship having been removed just a few decades earlier.

A short walk along Saint George's Road from Elephant and Castle brings our visitor to Saint George's Catholic Cathedral. Designed by the Catholic architect, Augustus Pugin, it can hardly be accounted his masterpiece. Other commissions, not least that for the Palace of Westminster, gave him much greater latitude to explore his passion for neo-Gothic ornamentation. The budget for Saint George's was limited, and a large church was needed in something of a hurry. It was dedicated by Bishop Wiseman in 1848, and Pugin and his third wife, Jane, were the first couple to be married at the high altar. Four years later, it was raised to the status of a cathedral.

Saint George's Cathedral, Southwark. Photo: C. Ford (licensed under CCA).

Saint George's Cathedral, Southwark. Photo: Fuyaboo (licensed under CCA).

Saint George's Cathedral in 1942, following a bombing raid. Photo: Imperial War Museum, Non-Commercial License D7216.

From Saint George's or visitor can cross the road to the building that, today, houses the Imperial War Museum, but which, from 1815 to 1930 was the Royal Bethlem Hospital, relocated from Moorgate. In an age before mental illness was well understood, it offered little more than asylum. Pugin spent time here as a patient, and would have died as such, had Jane not had the courage and initiative to secure his release.

The Royal Bethlem Hopital, 1828 (image is in the Public Domain).

The short walk back to Elephant and Castle along the south side of the road brings us to another symbol of religious revival: the neo-Classical facade (which Pugin would have hated) of the London Metropolitan Tabernacle, opened in 1861. More so than the Catholic Church, the Church of England had struggled to make itself relevant to the deracinated and newly urbanised population of a fast-expanding metropolis. The field was open to charismatic preachers, with a clear and simple message, and few were more charismatic than the Baptist, Charles Haddon Spurgeon, for whom this church was built.

The London Metropolitan Tabernacle. Photo: C. Ford (licensed under CCA).

The London Metropolitan Tabernacle in 1864 (image is in the Public Domain).  

No recordings of Spurgeon's voice exist, but he must have been an unusually powerful orator, since he had preached (without any amplification) to congregations of more than ten thousand people in a variety of venues, including the Crystal Palace. The Tabernacle itself held five thousand people, with standing room for a further thousand, one of the world's first "mega-churches." Stenographers were on hand to transcribe his sermons, which were rapidly circulated around London.

Charles Haddon Spurgeon, by Alexander Melville, National Portrait Gallery 2641 (image is in the Public Domain).

The "Sword and Trowel," in which Spurgeon's sermons were published (image is in the Public Domain).

His message, as set out in his first sermon at the Tabernacle, could not have been more simple. "I would propose that the subject of the ministry of this house, as long as this platform shall stand, and as long as this house shall be frequented by worshipers, shall be the person of Jesus Christ ... who is, himself, all theology, the incarnation of every precious truth, the all-glorious personal embodiment of the way, the truth, and the life." Spurgeon was also a writer of hymns, one of which can be heard here.

He had little time for the "New Theology" of the Anglican Church, which sought a rapprochement with the scientific discoveries of the age, including Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by means of natural selection: even if "preached for a thousand years by all the most earnest men of the school," Spurgeon insisted, "it would never renew a soul, nor overcome pride in a single human heart." In a city in which the realities of life and death were frequently brutal, however, his simple message of faith, salvation, and the promise of eternal life, was surely of comfort to many.

From Elephant and Castle, our visitor may take the Number 35 or 45 bus to Loughborough Junction (actually in the neighbouring Borough of Lambeth), and there change to the P4 bus, alighting at our next destination within Southwark: Dulwich Village.

The Elephant and Castle in 1888, British LibraryHMNTS 10350 d.19, from A. Boot and Son, The District Railway Guide to London (image is in the Public Domain).

Mark Patton is a published author of historical fiction and non-fiction, whose books can be purchased from Amazon.