Walworth Through Time A Second Selection

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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.

Edward Yates (1838–1907), a local builder, developed the Georgian residential streets on the western side of the Old Kent Road. Also built on the eastern side, laying out Marcia Road. Yates was leased and built on land owned by the Rolls estate and the Ecclesiastical Commissioners in Walworth. Walworth moved from a Georgian suburb to Victorian inner city, with long rows of terraces built speculatively for rental, to house lower middle class and working class residents. By the time of his death, an estate of just over 2,500 houses, a church and school had been built, to match the rise in the population of Walworth. 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. St Peters Church built for Church Commissioners as a result of Walworth’s expanding population. Architect: by Sir John Soane (1753-1837). More info

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. A Congregational chapel, the Sutherland Chapel, was built between St. Peter's Church and the Walworth Road. In 1904 the building was closed and was later taken over by the Electric Theatre Company. 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.

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.

Walworth, Southwark A historically crowded and socially disadvantaged district situated east of Newington 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.

Surrey Zoological Gardens opened by Edward Cross (1774-1854) on Lorrimore common (old Walworth Manor) Shown in the CGI below, the old town hall is presently under­going restora­tion and is due to reopen by the end of 2023 as a “dynamic cultural community and workspace hub.” 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. Henry Coming (1817-1902) left funds in his will to create a public museum to house his family’s collection.Their first book – Walworth Through Time – came out in 2010, so four books later prove that his hunch was right. New St Paul’s Church opened on Lorrimore Square . Modernist Grade II-listed building of reinforced concrete designed by Woodroffe Buchanan & Coulter 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.