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
