The Grand Surrey Canal

As a child I used to enjoy visiting my Grandmother, or Nan as we always called her, and one of the reasons was that if you were lucky you got to see the wood barges being hauled up the canal to the wood yard. She lived in St. Georges Way, North Peckham and to get there we had to cross Willowbrook Bridge over the canal. If you’re familiar with the area you will know the bridge at the bottom of Peckham Hill Street, It’s just one of the many in the area including Commercial Way, Trafalgar Avenue and Old Kent Road to name but a few on the main roads. Now no longer do they straddle the Canal instead they bridge the “Green Tongue”, an extension of Burgess Park.

I didn’t know it then but “the Canal”, as we called it was properly called the Grand Surrey Canal. Later when I came to know that the canal was called the “Surrey Canal” I was surprised as it only went as far as Wells Way and that even when my mother was a child it only went to the Camberwell Road.

So what went wrong, why did the “Surrey Canal” never get to Surrey?

The Grand Surrey Canal Act passed in 1801 authorised the canal from Rotherhithe to Epsom, but even before the canal was built the company started making plans for an enlarged ship dock at its entrance. This soon began to take priority over the canal.

The company, trying to deliver both canal and dock at the same time, ran into financial problems and for a while work stopped on them both. The dock, or basin, opened first, on 13th March 1807. There is a famous picture of the canal in which it all looks idyllic a nice sailing barge moored up with St Georges Waterloo Church in the background, very different from the area as I knew it.

The Croydon Canal, which was being built at the same time, depended on the Grand Surrey for its connection with the Thames. So the directors of the Croydon Canal Company were peeved and applied pressure for the “Surrey Canal” to be completed as least as far as their junction.

This did happen but the relationship between the two companies was never as good as it might have been, with the Grand Surrey company focusing most on its dock operation. The Grand Surrey was opened as far as Camberwell Road in 1809 but was never built any further. A 1,100 yard, (1000m) arm serving Peckham was also opened in 1826, this stopped just short of Peckham High Street to where it was connected by a short piece of road called Canal Head. This has in recent times been redeveloped as “Peckham Square”.

In the 1940s the section from Wells Way to Camberwell Road was closed and in 1970 when the dock was closed the Canal was drained. (In fact it survivedlonger than most of the Croydon Canal, which was filled in much earlier to form the track bed for the South London rail link from London Bridge to Croydon through Sydenham. Where there exists an unusual type of bridge to be crossing over a railway but which can be seen as a typical canal bridge from an earlier period once one knows the history.) Another use for the northern section of the canal is the new “Surrey Canal Road” and “Canal Approach” which uses part of the filled in canal from Ilderton Road to Evelyn Road.

I remember looking over Trafalgar Bridge and Willowbrook Bridges into the junk that had been tossed in over the years when it was drained – the end of an era. Of course the barges had gone, as was the need to cross the bridges when my Nan moved to a new flat when the North Peckham estate was being built. However when I occasionally drive over one of these bridges all those memories come back, a lost part of Peckham.

Laurie Smith

Hungerford Bridge

I first heard of Hungerford Bridge from a teacher at school who was teaching us about the order of bridges up the Thames from Tower Bridge to somewhere like Hammersmith. He told us about Hungerford Bridge and the idea of a railway bridge that you could walk over intrigued me. In later years it also intrigued me that the bridge had a name, Blackfriars, Cannon St and Victoria Rail Bridges do not so why would Charing Cross?

When I later learned that there had been previously been a footbridge on the site it became obvious that the footbridge stuck on the side of the railway was part of the price for putting the rail bridge across the river that the railway company had to pay.

Years passed and I started work for Post Office Telecoms and, working in the area, came to know the bridge quite well. Walking over it and on the embankment nearby I noticed something odd, the Bridge has two large brick piers and several steel supports, why not all the same? It was as though the bridge had been built at different times. In fact it had.

In 1845, the Hungerford Bridge was opened as a footbridge for pedestrians walking from Charing Cross on the north bank of the River Thames to Lambeth on the south bank. Isambard Kingdom Brunel designed the bridge, not unlike his Clifton Bridge in appearance, in 1841. It was commissioned to encourage trade at the new Hungerford Market. Two 80ft-high brick piers, built in the river to an Italianate campanile style, carried the bridge platform 1,352ft across the Thames, suspended from four iron suspension chains.

The Illustrated London News observed that pedestrians could ‘walk through the centre of the fruit stalls, over the fish market, and in a few minutes find themselves in Pedlar’s Acre, Lambeth’. Later when the Charing Cross Railway wanted to replace the pedestrian suspension bridge with a rail bridge, the company argued that few people used the Hungerford Bridge due to the smell from the river, especially during the summer.

The Hungerford Bridge was closed in 1861, and replaced in 1864 with the Charing Cross Railway Bridge, a nine-span wrought iron bridge that carried Railway passengers to the new West End terminus at Charing Cross. The two central piers that suspended the Hungerford Bridge were however incorporated into the new bridge and remain to this day. I had been right to suspect the different material used in construction. Obviously the railway required more support than the footbridge, but the canny Victorian railway magnets didn’t want to waste the cost of replacing the perfectly strong piers that Brunel had built only twenty years before.

Brunel, equally crafty however, used the chains of the original bridge which he obtained at a knockdown price to complete a new suspension bridge in Clifton. The chains from the Clifton Suspension Bridge had been sold to the Cornwall Railway Company in 1853 when the Clifton scheme ran into financial difficulties. The Hungerford Bridge chains were acquired as a replacement for the paltry price of £5,000.

Today you can now cross the river on two new bridges either side of the old rail bridge which allows you a better view of the Brunel piers than you could get when walking over them or riding a train into the station and interestingly, and ironically, they are now being cleaned and repaired!

Hungerford Market is long gone buried under Charing Cross Station. Though once upon a time that same schoolteacher had taken me around a collector's market under the arches there. On the Lambeth side, beyond the South Bank complex and Jubilee Gardens, containing the London Eye, is Belvedere Road, the area once known as Pedlar’s Acre.


You see tourists taking pictures of the new bridges and of London Eye from it. People say “Isn’t it great to have the upstream view of the Houses of Parliament now”. Whereas me, I feel it’s a shame we lost the beautiful Brunel bridge for the ugly railway crossing. Even though I often use Charing Cross station I think “Couldn’t they have put it somewhere else?”

Laurie Smith

The South Bank Lion.

On the southern approach to Westminster Bridge stands the South Bank Lion. I often wondered, as I travelled over Westminster Bridge on a No 12 bus... why? Who or what does it commemorate? How old is it? For it looks new, hardly worn at all. Yet it was standing there before I was born, and was already well over a hundred years old then. For this is no ordinary stone lion but a piece of remarkably resilient pottery, fired in a kiln and over a century and a half old.

 In 1769 Eleanor Coade set up her ‘Lithodipyra Manufactury’ on the site of the present Royal Festival Hall, taking over a factory and improving on the artificial stone that was made there using a secret formula. Eleanor Coade’s “Manufactury” created the most weatherproof stone ever made. It was used for statues and decoration on a number of buildings including the Norwegian Embassy, the National Gallery, the Royal Opera House, Buckingham Palace, Westminster Abbey and St Paul’s. Coade Stone memorials and tombs were also used to immortalise people including Captain Bligh. Whose memorial can also been seen nearby in the churchyard of St Mary’s at Lambeth, (also know as the Museum of Garden History), on the south or east side of Lambeth Bridge.  

The 13-ton lion was one of two originally made to stand above Lion Brewery near Hungerford Bridge and coloured red. The lions survived the Second World War, when the Lion Brewery was blitzed. One was moved to Westminster Bridge in 1951 as part of the Festival of Britain, the other went to the Rugby Union Football ground at Twickenham. After the Festival our lion was moved to the entrance of Waterloo Station, but returned to its present home in 1966 when the station entrance was remodelled. 

This is a particularly apt spot being roughly on the site of a gallery opened by Eleanor Coade in 1799 to display over 1,000 examples of Coade stone. Our Lion, whose paw carries a date of 1837 and the initials of its designer William Woodington, was, when moved from the top of the brewery, found to have a time capsule in a recess in it’s back containing two William IV coins.  

The factory closed in 1840 and the formula was lost. The ingredients of Coade Stone have been analysed and, from the name given to the process, people have worked out that the process involved firing the mix twice, for days at a time, at temperatures high, enough to almost liquefy the stone. (“Lithodipyra” is a composite of the Greek words for stone, twice, and fire.) 

The true secret of its perfection and durability, however, lies buried with its creator. Eleanor Coade, whose factory was responsible for so many memorials, asked only that she be buried in a “decent and frugal manner” and lies in her unmarked grave at Bunhill Fields. So the South Bank Lion, made in a way we cannot replicate today, represents, for me, that we should never underestimate those great people of the past. 

 Laurie Smith