News flash.
The Archbishop’s furniture is at the bottom of the Thames.
Welcome to Lambeth.
London Calling. London Walks connecting. This is London. This is London Walks. Streets ahead. Story time. History time.
It’s 1633. Archbishop Laud is moving into Lambeth Palace. A big move. Important man. Important belongings.
And the ferry sinks.
You can imagine the conversation.
“Your Grace, about the furniture…”
Now that would be a sufficiently good story on its own. But Lambeth obligingly supplies a sequel. Twenty-three years later, Oliver Cromwell’s coach and horses go into the river as well.
Same crossing.
Clearly, being one of the most powerful men in England didn’t guarantee that your transport would reach the other bank.
And there’s our way into Lambeth. Through the unexpected. Through the little trapdoor in the familiar pavement.
Because you know Lambeth. Even if you don’t think you do.
The London Eye. The National Theatre. The Old Vic. The Oval. Brixton Market. Lambeth Palace.
You’ve heard of the performers. You might not have noticed the name on the dressing-room door.
Lambeth.
And what a cast it’s assembled.
An archbishop with waterlogged belongings. A fleeing queen. A little boy in a workhouse who’ll grow up to make the world laugh. Londoners taking their pleasure in gardens where some of the entertainment is best left to the imagination.
Let’s start at the river.
Before the bridges did the heavy lifting, there was the horse ferry. A floating link between Westminster and Lambeth. One of the relatively few crossings where you could take a coach and horses across the Thames.
Horseferry Road, over on the Westminster side, still remembers it.
That’s something London does wonderfully well. Takes away the thing itself. Leaves its name nailed to a wall.
The ferry’s gone. The street sign is still giving directions to it.
And in December 1688, that crossing played its part in a royal escape.
Mary of Modena. James II’s queen. Her infant son, James.
A mother and baby getting out of a country where the ground was shifting beneath the monarchy.
Think of the difference between those two crossings. The archbishop moving into his palace. The queen trying to get away.
Arrival. Flight.
Same stretch of water.
And looming beside it, Lambeth Palace.
Now there’s a place we tend to reduce to a label. Archbishop of Canterbury’s London residence. Tick. Next.
But put a little pressure on that label and the stories come pouring out.
In 1381, during the Peasants’ Revolt, rebels overran the palace. Books, accounts and furniture were burned. Wine casks were broken open.
You can almost hear the change in the noise when somebody finds the wine.
But this wasn’t merely a drunken rampage. The archbishop, Simon Sudbury, was also the king’s chancellor. Religious power and government power under the same mitre.
He took refuge in the Tower of London.
It didn’t save him. The rebels found him there and killed him.
So when you look at that palace, don’t let the mellow brickwork lull you completely. This is a place where the country’s convulsions came right through the front door.
And outside those doors, for centuries, a very different Lambeth.
Fields. Marshy ground. Ditches. Water held back. Water getting in.
Lambeth has been described as an eighteenth-century landscape where the built-up area still clung largely to the river. Further inland, separate settlements. Vauxhall. Stockwell. Brixton.
And Norwood.
The North Wood.
Try putting the trees back. Take away the traffic. Unbuild the streets. Let the forest grow.
It’s a useful little exercise, that. London in reverse.
Because the city we know feels so inevitable. As though it was always going to end up looking like this.
It wasn’t.
And the riverbank wasn’t always a place for concert halls and theatre foyers, either.
Glassmaking. Pottery. Factories.
Eleanor Coade’s artificial stone works were established in 1769 on ground later occupied by County Hall.
I like that change of occupation.
One generation making architectural ornaments. Another generation deciding what to do with London.
And when they were digging the foundations for County Hall, they found the remains of a Roman ship.
There’s London for you.
You start building the future and hit somebody else’s past.
Now, a little further along, Vauxhall.
And we need to turn the lights down.
Then bring them up again. Hundreds of little lights. Music. People arriving for an evening out. Heads turning. Clothes chosen to be noticed.
Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens.
For fashionable London, this was one of the places to go. To see and be seen. To listen. To flirt. To find out who was with whom.
And, in the less well-lit corners, to pursue matters that probably wouldn’t make it into the letter home.
The gardens gave London spectacle, too. Balloon ascents. People lifting off above a city whose inhabitants generally kept both feet very firmly on the ground.
Imagine watching that for the first time.
A human being going up into the sky.
No aeroplanes overhead to make it ordinary. No childhood spent watching departures from Heathrow.
Just this extraordinary thing rising above the trees.
Lambeth could sell you an evening’s escape long before anybody put a capsule on the London Eye.
But pleasure is only half the story.
Come away from the gardens. Away from the music. Find a back street off another back street, near Kennington Lane.
Dugard Way.
The Cinema Museum occupies a building that was once part of Lambeth Workhouse.
And a small boy called Charlie Chaplin spent time in that workhouse.
Before the bowler hat. Before the cane. Before the walk that people would recognise all over the world.
A child in poverty.
That connection makes the building much more than a place to keep old cinema equipment.
You go looking for the history of films and find yourself standing in the history of hunger.
And then you think about Chaplin’s little tramp. His precarious dignity. His attempts to look respectable when the world keeps kicking him in the backside.
The comedy becomes sharper when you know something of what lay behind it.
Lambeth helped give the world a great comic artist.
It didn’t give him an easy beginning.
Now let’s go underground.
Clapham.
During the Second World War, deep shelters were built beneath London. After the war, some found new uses.
In 1948, the Clapham South shelter provided temporary accommodation for some of the people who had arrived on the Empire Windrush.
Think about that arrival.
Across an ocean. Into a new country. And your first accommodation is down below its streets.
A wartime refuge becoming a first foothold.
The nearby labour exchange was in Brixton. People went there looking for work. That connection helped Brixton become an early centre of Caribbean life in London.
It isn’t the whole explanation. Human communities don’t grow from a single cause.
But it’s a telling piece of the story.
Beds in one place. Jobs sought in another. Journeys between the two. People meeting. Connections forming.
And gradually, a neighbourhood changing.
That’s how a great deal of history happens. Through practical necessities. Where can I sleep? Where can I work? Who do I know?
Walk through Brixton Market with that in mind.
The food. The voices. The shops. The layers of arrival and enterprise.
And then remember that David Bowie was born in Brixton.
Lambeth again.
It keeps producing people who make the rest of the world sit up.
Now, back towards Waterloo. We’re going to the theatre.
The Old Vic.
Here’s a little corrective worth putting in your pocket.
Victoria. Yes.
But which Victoria?
The theatre became the Royal Victoria in 1833 in honour of the Duchess of Kent, the future Queen Victoria’s mother.
Mother and daughter shared the name. Posterity has a habit of giving the daughter the whole spotlight.
And women belong at the centre of the Old Vic’s story.
Emma Cons, who gave it a new direction in 1880. Her niece, Lilian Baylis, who took up the work and helped make it one of the great engines of British theatrical life.
You can put royal names above the door.
Somebody still has to make the place work.
And then, in 1951, Lambeth put on a show for the country.
The Festival of Britain.
After the war. After the destruction. With rationing still part of daily life.
The South Bank became a place to look forward.
The Dome of Discovery. The Skylon. The Royal Festival Hall.
Just those names give you something of the mood.
Discovery. Flight. Music.
A battered country lifting its head.
And the South Bank’s cultural life grew from there. The theatres. The galleries. The audiences flowing across the bridges.
But one of my favourite details in your borough book concerns something the planners didn’t intend.
The skateboarders.
The undercroft at the Queen Elizabeth Hall wasn’t designed as a skatepark.
The skateboarders saw its possibilities.
Banks. Ledges. Concrete. Shelter.
And made a place for themselves.
You gotta like that.
The architects hand over a building. Then the city gets its hands on it.
People find uses nobody put in the drawings.
And down in Leake Street, beneath Waterloo station, there’s another version of the same story.
A tunnel becomes a place people go to see.
Spray paint across the walls. Across the ceiling. Pictures appearing, disappearing, being painted over.
A gallery that won’t sit still.
Which is a fairly good description of London.
And that brings us to our word of the day.
“Hythe.” Spelt H-y-t-h-e.
You’ll also see it spelt “hithe”. H-i-t-h-e.
An old word for a landing place. A small harbour. Somewhere to bring a boat ashore and unload.
It comes from Old English. And although it’s largely slipped out of everyday conversation, it survives in place names.
Including, in a worn-down form, Lambeth.
The usual explanation of Lambeth is a landing place for lambs. But there’s an alternative interpretation involving a muddy harbour.
Either way, we’re back at the water’s edge.
And I rather like what that does to the word.
Lambeth stops being an administrative label.
You can hear it.
Water against a boat. Feet on timber. Animals being brought ashore. Somebody calling out.
A working place beside a working river.
And all the later Lambeths gathering around it.
The palace. The pleasure gardens. The factories. The workhouse. The theatres. The market. The concert hall.
People arriving with luggage. With hopes. With very little at all.
Some coming to govern. Some coming to entertain. Some simply looking for a start.
That’s the Lambeth I wanted to put in front of you today.
A place you might think you know, opening another door.
And if you’re moving into a palace, one final piece of advice.
Use the bridge.
Final point. Why are we here today. Well, for starters, it’s part of our series on the 32 London boroughs. But this latest run: Enfield, Barnet, Lambeth is more or less tracking the north-south trajectory of Charlie’s London Camino, his walk, in 14 stages, all the way across London, all 42 miles from the northern border of this town, where London meets Hertfordshire, to way down south, the southern border, the Surrey Downs. And I’ve got a bit of news for you on that front. Charlie’s just finished hammering out the 2027 schedule of the London Camino. It’ll go live on walks.com sometime in the next few days. Keep an eagle eye out for it.
London Calling. London Walks connecting.
This is London. This is London Walks.
Streets ahead.
Story time. History time. The latest news from London Walks time.
See you tomorrow.