Walworth Through Time A Second Selection

Product Information

Great areas of Walworth were rebuilt after the Second World War, notably in the form of the massive Heygate and Aylesbury estates, which were planned in the 1960s and completed in the1970s. In 1914 the Wheatley family moved into Clinton House. Their son, Dennis, was 17 at the time. Dennis went on to write more than 70 books (selling over 50 million copies) before his death in 1977. Most of these were thrillers and occult novels. In the 1960s, two of his most popular titles, ‘The Devil Rides Out’ and ‘Uncharted Seas’ (renamed ‘The Lost Continent’) were filmed by Hammer. Before the Wheatleys moved to Clinton House, it had been the home of Benjamin Pierce Lucas, Managing Director of the Camden Town Palace of Varieties. He appears to have moved to the property around 1898. The house was built in 1884.

The Browning Settlement set up by FH Stead (1857-1928) started at Browning Hall. It was inaugarated with a speech by Herbert Asquith. New St Paul’s Church opened on Lorrimore Square . Modernist Grade II-listed building of reinforced concrete designed by Woodroffe Buchanan & Coulter The Labour Party’s head­quar­ters were in Walworth from 1981 to 1997, when it moved to Millbank. Its Walworth Road building was renamed John Smith House, after the party’s former leader. The building has since been converted into a stylish hostel. Reverend James Butterworth (1897-1977) advocated ‘ a house for friendship for boys and girls outside any church’. He replaced the Walworth Methodist Chapel on Camberwell Road with a new chapel & Clubland. Designed by Sir Edward Maufe (1882-1974), the architect of Guildford Cathedral. Clubland featured a theatre, gymnasium, tennis court & various club rooms. Opened by Queen Mary on 18th May. Robert Kennedy (1925-1968) made his first public speech at Clubland at the age of 13, when his father was the US Ambassador.Darren and Mark have brought together a fascinating collection of old and new photographs that have been individually merged to show the surprisingly rapid changes in London SE17 through the decades. Readers can compare the old Walworth with the fast-emerging new, which is a melting pot of cultures and classes living cheek by jowl. Walworth was long a rural area producing fruit and vegeta­bles in abundance; one local nurs­eryman had a list of 320 varieties of goose­ber­ries. In the mid-17th century there were only a few houses along what is today Walworth Road but growing numbers of tradesmen set up shop here as traffic from London increased. Newington workhouse built at 182 Westmoreland Road (now Beaconsfield Road) (Newington Lodge in 1930)

The houses were built in two stages between the 1860s and 1880s as speculative suburban development to designs by a local builder. The houses were originally occupied as private residences but since the second part of the twentieth century they had been used for medical purposes and as living quarters for nurses at the local Mawdsley Hospital. Most recently they were used as interlinked buildings as a methadone maintenance clinic and medical research facility. As they fell into dereliction they were squatted for a while in the early 2000s. Walworth, Southwark A historically crowded and socially disadvantaged district situated east of Newington Architects wisely concluded that the street facades of the buildings make a positive contribution to the conservation area. The front elevations have good quality Victorian features, though the rear elevations were much less intact and had been altered significantly. The rear parts of the buildings were demolished and replaced toprovide the necessary quality of accommodation to meet modern medical use requirements. The remains of a mammoth have been found under the streets of Walworth and there is evidence of human occu­pa­tion since the Stone Age. Walworth – ‘the enclosed settle­ment of the Britons’ – grew up between what became Kennington Park Road and the Old Kent Road, two of the ancient roads fanning out from London Bridge to the south coast. Canter­bury Cathedral was a large landowner from the late Saxon era onwards. Henry Coming (1817-1902) left funds in his will to create a public museum to house his family’s collection.Shown in the photo­graph above,* St Peter’s church in Liverpool Grove was built to a design by Sir John Soane in 1825 to serve the rapidly growing community; over the course of the 19th century, Walworth’s popu­la­tion increased eightfold, reaching 122,200 in1901.