Fences and Flats

Near to where I went to school, both primary and secondary schools, and in fact across a lot of London stand blocks of flats built from the beginning of the 20th century, up until the Second World War. They come in many variations around the same idea, some in London Stock with Red Brick edging, some unusually in a Brown Brick. Most have white highlights on the balconies etc. They have stairs, which are sheltered but open, are often built around a courtyard, commonly have four floors above the ground level, (restricted by having no lifts of course) and, (this being the mysterious bit to me when I was a kid), have grass areas surrounding them with odd bulges and an odd design in fencing.

How odd is the design? Well the pavement boundaries are a low wall often topped with a glazed or polished brick, out of which sprang black metal uprights in pairs every 6-7 feet, fixed to these were horizontal poles which ran along and supported meshwork filling the gaps and making the fence.

So far nothing sounds odd, but there was a final element which defied my brain to suss it out for years. Inbetween the uprights, the horizontal poles zigged back from the straight for no reason making little "v"s all the way down the fence - a design element I thought, but why doesn't the mesh follow the zig-zag then, and why are the zig-zags so close to the ends?


In some of the green areas these fences surrounded, the ground bulged up into (often) squared off bulges and once I remember I saw an entranceway into one (Though I can't remember where! Any offers/photos?)

I was quite young and mother pointed out this was a bomb shelter so that made sense as these building were as I said pre-war.

Still I never saw any link to the designer fencing....

.... for there is a link and it's also a good example of reuse of old items, which is more efficient that recycling and shows great ingenuity.


For the "fence panels" were originally stretchers, and as soon as you imagine them cut away from the uprights and rotated around their long axis you can see the zig-zags on the long rods are legs for keeping the stretcher off the ground.

It seems so clear to me now, as all things are when looked at with the right perspective; but I'm guessing there are still people who don't realise, particularly as the further we go on in time and more of these are replaced as they are damaged.

Right along from where I took these pictures other sections of the fencing have been changed out for boring arrowed railings and even these examples are not original as the original mesh was attached with metal straps which I presume allowed flexibility and movement; desirable in a stretcher, but not in a fence; the panels in the pictures above are welded, however these panels on the left are from Kennings Way and are original.


There are few like this about now - soon these too will probably be gone, but if they are being repaired to keep the zig-zag frames at least, there might still be kids in the future who will look at them and wonder.... and if they are cleverer than me, will puzzle it out.

Laurie Smith

Kennington - common and the church.

There is a famous photo of the Grand Surrey Canal with a vessel in the foreground and St George’s church in the background. I mentioned it in my previous post on the Grand Surrey Canal. Now St George’s is one of a group of churches know collectively as the Waterloo churches. After Waterloo, an Act of Parliament was passed in 1818 to raise a million pounds as a national thank-offering for peace and as a memorial to the soldiers who had fallen. Seven of these churches were built in south London and all but one of them is in our branch area.

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

Connections ...

This was written, as were the rest of these early posts, for a Union Branch Magazine I edited. This was written by John Clark - my first guest contributor.

When walking round the Branch area the past is often very evident, famous buildings abound, but not all the history is quite so obvious, and there can be some odd, but interesting, obscure historical links. Neither should all the information you find be, necessarily, interpreted in terms of today’s values, or even language.

The Lion that now stands at the approach to Westminster Bridge has previously featured in an article in Crosstalk; originally it graced the Red Lion Brewery situated on Belvedere Road not far from Waterloo station. In Victorian times Lambeth was not a fashionable area.

The great landowners south of the Thames, the Duchy of Cornwall and the Archbishop of Canterbury left Lambeth to industrialisation, questionable entertainment and slums. The area often featured in stories from the likes of Dickens. But real people lived real lives there, one such was George Merrit. George lived at 24 Cornwall Cottages on Cornwall Road with his pregnant wife Eliza and their six children.

One Saturday morning in February 1872, shortly after two o’clock in the morning, he was on his way to work as a stoker at the Red Lion Brewery when, as he approached Belvedere Road, a number of gun shots rang out. On arrival at St Thomas’ Hospital it was found that two large-calibre bullets had severed George’s carotid artery and severed his spine, he did not survive in spite of the quick response of the police. On hearing the shots the beat officer, PC Henry Tarrent blew his whistle to summon help, two other constables heard the summons and rushed to assist Tarrent – the sort of response that one could hope for, but not expect, even in today’s age of radio.

This was an unusual crime even in the violent Victorian society, for guns had not become fashionable amongst criminals. Not until after the First World War when millions of soldiers returned to civilian life trained in their use did the prevalence of guns in crime begin to increase.

George’s murderer it turned out was mentally unstable. At his trial he was found “Not Guilty” due to his insanity, detained at Her Majesty’s Pleasure and committed to an asylum.

The most famous asylum in London if not the country was St Mary’s of Bethlem founded in 1247. In 1815, after a number of moves Bethlam Hospital relocated from London Wall to the building that now houses the Imperial War Museum in what is now known as Geraldine Mary Hamsworth Gardens, though formally known as Bedlam Park. The Concise Oxford English Dictionary defines bedlam as a scene of uproar and confusion. It is often said Bedlam is a corruption of the name Bethlam, personally I think it has more to do with the building being built by James Bedlam between 1812 and 1821. (Sydney Smirke added the dome later in 1846.) By 1863 the building was no longer suitable and the criminally insane patients were transferred to Broadmoor. This is where the murderer of George Merrit was incarcerated. Bethlem now forms part of a NHS trust based near Croydon with a unit on Denmark Hill. Broadmoor is now considered to be a hospital rather than an asylum.

Other local examples of asylums in a traditional sense of the word from a time before the welfare state are: an asylum for the blind, which was situated just along from the Imperial War Museum in Lambeth Road. Today a brick wall surrounds much of the site, behind which is a large excavated pit, containing the sidings for the Bakerloo Line.

Towards the New Cross end of Old Kent Road is Asylum Road named for a large complex, a building built in the classical style.
This building used to house the Licensed Victualler’s Asylum. I have often wondered what the criteria were for admittance.

The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) defines asylum as sanctuary; protection – any of various kinds of institution offering shelter a place of refuge to distressed or destitute individuals. But language is not fixed and changes over time. When Shakespeare wrote for the theatres on the Southbank dictionaries had not been invented and he even spelt his name in various ways during his life. The tabloid press today often distorts the meaning of language, often not in a pleasant, useful way but to make political mischief. They have coupled the word asylum with the idea of people seeking economic advantage, and to perpetrate benefit fraud, rather than those seeking refuge from persecution.

What was to become the OED was first published in 1928. It took more than seventy years to complete and consisted of twelve large volumes. (The second edition was published in twenty volumes!)

The compilation of the OED was thorough and meticulous; volunteers were sought, sent reading lists and books. The volunteers were asked to read through the selected works compiling on slips of paper quotations that defined key words, words both new and obsolete, from living authors and from those long since dead.

One volunteer that contributed more than any other, both in terms of quantity and quality, to the dictionary over many years was Dr W C Minor of Crowthorne, Berkshire. The strange thing was that he never attended any meeting or dinner of the organisers of the dictionary, and depending upon which account you believe, Dr Minor’s circumstances were not known to them for some years.

It was not until the Editor of the dictionary arranged to call on Dr Minor after twenty years of correspondence that Dr Minor’s circumstances became more widely known. Crowthorne is the village where Broadmoor Asylum is located and Dr Minor was a long term resident there, a resident because of his murder of George Merrit.

Dr Minor was a surgeon who had served as such on the Northern side in the American Civil War. One account suggests that it was his experiences in that war that triggered his mental illness though another account suggests that his illness arose from the effects of a very promiscuous life style. Today he would probably described as schizophrenic and one of the few who are violent.

The OED, the American Civil War, a forgotten murder in our Branch’s area, a Minor connection? Absolutely, but an interesting one.

John Clarke

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