When I lived in London, I was very much a west London boy gradually creeping further westwards. Kensington, Baron’s Court, Hammersmith, Shepherd’s Bush. Basically, the District Line. My inner compass means I’m pretty confident navigating my way from here to the middle of town. As soon as I reach St Paul’s though, anywhere further east is an utter mystery to me. As for south London, forget it. I’m like a child trying to force pieces of a jigsaw together. Surely Camberwell is next to Catford. Bermondsey and Beckenham have got to be neighbours. Brixton seems to act like the glue – everything seems to join up to Brixton, or secretly want to. The scarcity of tube stations throws me as well. South London has only 33 tube stations compared to the 250 north of the river. The Monopoly board is even crueller; there’s only one property on the whole board that comes from South London and it’s the cheapest; Old Kent Road.
Two of my children have now, inconveniently, moved into that dead zone for my brain. Aggie is a street away from Telegraph Hill, a spot that gives you the most amazing view down onto the skyscrapers in the city. Its height made it the perfect place for a semaphore station during the Napoleonic wars, picking up messages from Greenwich (the home of the Admiralty) and sending them on to the next station on Shooter’s Hill until eventually the message reached the fleet in Dover or Deal. The message, or ‘telegraph’, took less than 10 minutes to travel a distance that, by horse, might have taken five hours at the very quickest.
Albert is close to the aforementioned Old Kent Road, his flat squeezed between a busy A road and the brutalist majesty of the Aylesbury Estate, a huge concrete construction that houses over 7000 people. But he’s also very close to Burgess Park, one of South London’s biggest. It’s where he does his park run or goes for picnics with flatmates. There are some great cafes, a bridge that sits slightly randomly above nothing but parkland and the remnants of an old kiln. And then he dropped the bombshell that once upon a time all of this (I imagined him sweeping his hand across the horizon) wasn’t fields, but instead houses. Back before the war this triangle of land, 140 acres in all, was a mass of housing, factories and churches. How did it go from that to this?
Partly, we have the Luftwaffe to thank. The Blitz destroyed over a million houses and an incredible one in every six Londoners was made homeless at some point during the war. Miserable for them, but a sudden opportunity to planners who had been bemoaning for decades against the chaos of a capital city that had grown so rapidly over the previous century. Tenement housing nuzzled up to smoke-belching factories, schools wedged into spaces that allowed just the smallest of playgrounds, slums a street away from smart squares, traffic clogging up narrow roads never designed for the size and volume of cars and lorries. In the same way that Beveridge was drawing up his vision of a future welfare state when the war was very far from being won, so planners for what a future London could look like were working hard on a masterplan whilst bombs were still falling. What is incredible looking back is this feeling of optimism and belief despite the terrible destruction around them. The Beveridge Report was a bestseller, particularly popular with the poorest section of society. The plan for London was also very welcomed, introduced to the public through a marvellous film called The Proud City, a rousing twenty minute mini-masterpiece that you can still watch online.
In it, the two principal architects for the plan, Sir Patrick Abercrombie and Mr J.H. Forshaw, explain their process of consultation and their vision for what London could be. Forshaw sits absolutely still at a desk and delivers his news like a doctor explaining a diagnosis. Abercrombie, a tall patrician in tweed, has been clearly told to add a bit of dynamism to the whole affair and wanders around, throwing logs into the fireplace, polishing up his pince-nez and leaning up against the mantle-piece. It was Abercrombie who had the idea for the green spaces. London was famous for its royal parks, but for some areas, like Shoreditch, there were just 0.1 acres for every 1000 people. Abercrombie’s plan was for 4 acres – less than other countries but realistic, he felt, for London. He was passionate about the importance of open spaces but also the idea of roads becoming like the American ‘parkways’ – divided by a strip of grass running down the middle and fringed by trees or green strips.
The Mayor of Camberwell at the end of the war, the formidable Jessie Burgess (the first female mayor in London) was a passionate believer in Abercrombie’s plan. The post-war reality check of a country almost completely bankrupted by the war put the kybosh on most of Abercrombie’s plans (although the Lee Valley redevelopment stretching up from Hackney Marshes all the way to the now M25 was a brilliant success). But Burgess drove the plan through in her own district, buying up the land around the current park and filling in the canal that ran through the middle of it (hence the bridge to nowhere, which had once crossed over it). Slum and bomb-damaged housing was pulled down and factories relocated. The park gradually became what it is now – a hugely appreciated green space for the thousands of people who live in the vicinity, one of South London’s finest ‘green lungs’. The battle to keep it as parkland and not build on it continued up to 1971, but a big housing project was quashed by the GLC (the then Greater London Council) and in 1974 the newly formed Southwark Council renamed the park after Jessie Burgess.
Somewhere Sir Patrick Abercrombie is up in heaven polishing his glasses with pride. At least one small part of his dream came true.
PS
Another random slice of history about the park. Originally, beside the canal, were deep wells built below the depth of the canal. These were ice wells and ice, transported in huge blocks from Norway, was brought first to the Surrey Docks and then by horse drawn barge down to this pocket of London. The ice could be stored here for months and was largely used to supply fishmongers at Billingsgate Fish Market to keep everything fresh. In the 1920’s machines at the market, not dissimilar to the ice cube gadget you get in fancy fridges today, were able to start making ice on site, making the ice wells redundant. Amazingly, the Norwegian ice trade continued all the way through to the 1960s, but that’s a whole other substack.
