The Old Kent Road is best known as the first and cheapest property square on the original Monopoly board, with a rent of just £2, rising to a maximum of £250 with a hotel – and, as such, is supposed to represent all that is downmarket about London and especially South London since it’s the only Monopoly property south of the river. It also has a back story of poverty, urban blight, heavy industry, docks, railways and canals. (e.g. nearby Burgess Park is actually based on the now filled in Surrey Canal – to be covered in my Parks & Recreation blog here.) The area between the Bricklayers Arms roundabout at the northern end and the Ilderton Rd at the southern end is what is technically defined as the Old Kent Rd.
Right at the southern end you will find the Brimmington Park street art walls and this is essentially Peckham. Locals often jokingly refer to Peckham as “Gaza” e.g. see the recent short play by Olympic Gold medallist sprinter and local girl Imani-Lara Lansiquot called “Armour of Gaza”. This is partly a reference to troubled times in the area and partly to the many ethnicities living here.
All of which makes for a creative and interesting part of town. Dropped Tea theatre, a local arts collective and the Livesey Exchange, a local community centre are examples of the work currently going on to support an area which contains 3 of the most economically deprived wards in the country. The range of cafes, bars and restaurants backs this up, from the “Afrikiko” bar at the Ilderton Rd junction to the mini-Latin quarter around “Costa Azul” in the north and the proper “gorblimey” English pub “Lord Nelson” in the middle.
There is also a fascinating range of evangelical “shopfront” churches with names evocative of African Christian heritage such as The Redeemed Assemblies Restoration Sanctuary (services also in French), Divine Prophetic Interdenominational Church of God, Christ is the Ladder Ministries (the Land of Prayer for Solutions), sitting alongside the Old Kent Road Mosque and Islamic Cultural Centre which itself occupies a former pub. Not so much multicultural as omnicultural
But if you are interested in “experiencing” this part of London which preserves some of the sense of a truly mixed community in an “authentic” environment….. you’d better be quick. Property prices in the area have more than doubled since 2006, are approaching an average of £600,000 and the developers are coming. By 2029 over 40 major developments on this two-mile urban stretch will transform the area. The Old Kent Rd website claims it will generate 20,000 new homes, 10,000 jobs, 3 new tube stations (on the Bakerloo line extension to Lewisham), at least one new secondary school and a new Further Education College between the Bricklayers Arms roundabout and the junction with Ilderton Road.
This will drag the residential values of the “brown square” closer to the more expensive “blue squares” of Pentonville Road and Angel, Islington although the developers claim that 7,000 of the new homes will be “affordable”. Developers are obliged to provide a certain percentage of housing which is at prices below market value in theory providing opportunities for local people to benefit from the regeneration/gentrification. We can debate the pros and cons but a recent example at Commercial St (in the similarly deprived East End) illustrated the developers’ understanding of how to deliver such mixed socio-economic communities: they provided a sidedoor entrance down an alley for the local peoples’ “affordable” homes, while the newcomers entered via a concierge-staffed marbled hallway.
However, as well as representing a fascinating modern “moment” in London’s urban development, you could easily spend an equally fascinating day taking in the historic significance of the Old Kent Rd.
After all we can connect the Romans with Ronald Reagan, Rio Ferdinand (Man Utd & England footballer) with the Muppets and Geoffrey Chaucer (“Canterbury Tales”) with Henry Cooper (20th century English boxing champion) and David Bowie.
The Old Kent Rd, as the name suggests, was the only proper highway from London to Kent from Roman times. This is the old Roman Rd of Watling St which runs from Dover to Chester (Dubris to Deva) through London.
On the side of the former North Peckham Civic Centre there is a mural depicting those Romans and many other historic events along the road, such as the triumphant return of Henry V from Agincourt in 1415 and Charles II returning from exile in 1660. This building which is now owned by another of the many local evangelical organisations: the Everlasting Arms Ministries Church stands on the corner of Peckham Park Rd and Ronald Reagan’s grandfather lived on that very road.
As the main route from Kent to London, the Old Kent Rd is also the route once taken by farmers driving their livestock up to Smithfield market to sell it. It was therefore known as the Kentish Drovers way and there is a pub formerly called the Kentish Drover on the corner of Commercial Way (now the New Saigon restaurant) with another painted fading mural showing those Kentish Drovers who used fields nearby to rest and fatten up animals before market in the area of the side street called Drovers Place nearby.
Just across the road from the New Saigon is Camelot Primary School where Rio Ferdinand spent his formative years and the Old Kent Rd even has its own song “Wotcher (Knocked ‘Em in the Old Kent Road)”. A 19th century Cockney comic song performed by Music Hall comedians (think Vaudeville) like Albert Chevalier and Stanley Holloway, but also Shirley Temple (in The Little Princess – worth it for the hilarious “Mockney” English accents) and even at one time by the Muppet Fozzie Bear as a Cockney Pearly King (YouTube link here Fozzie Pearly King).
There is another primary school just off the Old Kent Rd called Pilgrims’ Way school which is a clue about the other major significance of the road. It was the route to Canterbury in Kent for pilgrims heading to the shrine of Thomas Becket. He was the Archbishop of Canterbury in 1170, murdered by 4 French knights in the cathedral itself (“Murder in the Cathedral” a play by TS Eliot), who became a saint with a famous shrine in the cathedral.
It was to that shrine that the characters in Geoffrey Chaucer’s masterwork “The Canterbury Tales” were travelling when they made their first stop at a watering place for the horses on the Old Kent Rd (see quotation below) – as also appears on the mural.
The watering place was where the Earl’s Sluice (one of London’s lost rivers) crosses the Old Kent Rd and was known as St. Thomas à Watering and right at that spot there is a bar to this day (which used to be called the Thomas à Becket). Upstairs Henry Cooper the great English boxer who once floored Muhammad Ali with his trademark left hook did all his training in his early years and apparently David Bowie wrote and rehearsed Ziggy Stardust in another upstairs room.
So there we have it – one Monopoly square and we get the Romans, Reagan, Ferdinand, Fozzie, Chaucer, Henry Cooper, David Bowie and a truly multicultural London mélange on the fragile cusp of disappearing.
Let’s go take a look in real life on a walking tour !
email: londontownwithmrbrown@outlook.com
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The Canterbury Tales – General Prologue – quoted from Harvard University
822 Amorwe, whan that day bigan to sprynge,
In the morning, when day began to spring,
823 Up roos oure Hoost, and was oure aller cok,
Our Host arose, and was the rooster of us all (awakened us).
824 And gadrede us togidre alle in a flok,
And gathered us together all in a flock,
825 And forth we riden a litel moore than paas
And forth we rode at little more than a walk
826 Unto the Wateryng of Seint Thomas;
Unto the Watering of Saint Thomas;
827 And there oure Hoost bigan his hors areste
And there our Host stopped his horse
828 And seyde, “Lordynges, herkneth, if yow leste.
And said, “Gentlemen, listen, if you please.
829 Ye woot youre foreward, and I it yow recorde.
You know your agreement, and I remind you of it.
830 If even-song and morwe-song accorde,
If what you said last night agrees with what you say this morning,
831 Lat se now who shal telle the firste tale.
Let’s see now who shall tell the first tale.
