St George’s we have seen is in Camberwell. St Matthew with St Jude is the one in the middle of the one way system in Brixton. St John the Evangelist stands at the end of Waterloo Road opposite the IMAX at the bottom of Waterloo Bridge. St Luke’s (the only one not in our branch area) is at the bottom of Knight’s Hill opposite West Norwood cemetery. St Peter’s is just off Walworth Road and St James is just off Jamaica Road in Rotherhithe. Now I’m sure that they all have their own stories to tell, but it is the seventh one, St Mark’s, which stands opposite the Oval tube station in Kennington that I am writing about here. This is the one which I saw most often when, for ten years, I got on and off a bus at the Oval on my journey to and from work at Vauxhall Exchange from the late 70s to late 80s.
St Marks Church stands at the junction of two old Roman Roads, (today’s Brixton and Clapham Roads), and was along with nearby Kennington Park, part of the old Kennington common.The Common was a favourite place for chariot racing and cricket, and for six months of the year cattle and sheep grazed the common. But it had a more sinister use too; until 1799 this was also the site of a public gallows where, in 1746, twenty-one members of the Jacobite Rebellion, captured at Culloden Moor, were executed.
Another use of the common was as a gathering place for preachers; in 1739 John Wesley preached on the common to an estimated 50,000 people. Fifty years later, an early black preacher, the radical Robert Wedderburn, (born to a West African slave woman in Jamaica), spoke here too. So it is no surprise that when looking for sites for the Waterloo churches, Kennington common was chosen. (A young pawnbroker’s assistant on Kennington Park Road, William Booth, continued this tradition of preaching on Kennington Common in the 1840’s. He and his wife Catherine went on to found the Salvation Army.)
St. Mark’s took two years to build and was opened by the Archbishop of Canterbury on June 30th 1824, the cost of £15,274 was paid as part of the million pounds raised for the purpose.
The great Reform Act of 1831 brought direct representation to Parliament for the first time with
Lambeth becoming a parliamentary constituency on 7 June 1832.Now voting in elections took place on Kennington Common, though only property owning men could vote. The country was seething with political agitation. The Chartists (‘Peace and Order is our Motto’) described themselves as ‘pining in misery, want and starvation’. They held a mass demonstration on the Common on 10 April 1848. Asking for fair wages and other human rights, the heavily policed event passed off peacefully. However, the Establishment, including the then vicar of St Marks, was frightened. The common was enclosed and cricket moved to the Oval.
The new park was run by the ‘Royals’, (the Prince of Wales having given £200 of the £1000 needed for fencing), until it was passed into the hands of what became the London County Council in 1887.
Another person with a connection to the area is Field Marshall Sir Bernard Montgomery of Alamein, his father, historian H.H. Montgomery, was vicar here when Bernard was born in 1887.
The church was restored in 1931 at which time the glass dome was installed. Bombed in September 1940, it was scheduled for demolition. However, Wallace Bird, a man of vision and faith, became vicar in 1947. The building was partially re-opened in 1949 and fully opened on 12th March 1960.
Laurie Smith
