Area Description
The paradoxes of
Camberwell are many and various.
Camberwell Green is a name which might evoke traditional village life but it's located next to an extremely busy junction;
Camberwell Grove is a fine example of mellow Georgian splendour, yet close by are the hospitals with the busiest A&E departments in Britain. The brutalist tower blocks north of the Green contrast with ever-so-decent inter-war suburbia around
Ruskin Park; the shy little cottages of
Love Walk seem a world away from the stern
Dog Kennel Hill Estate.
The area, in short, is an interesting mix of old and new, up-and-coming and should-be-torn-down, expansive parks and equally expansive council estates. Gentrification is definitely in the air and there are some really lovely properties to be had on attractive leafy streets. By the same token, there are also corners which even the most imaginative of estate agents would have difficulty in talking up.
Housing
The jewel in Camberwell's residential crown is undoubtedly
Camberwell Grove, a rigidly straight road which starts on the road to Peckham and then runs south and uphill to Dog Kennel Hill. With Georgian properties at the north and early 19th century ones at the south, it has a wide range of tall, classy housing.
East of the Grove there are pockets of council flats in amongst perfectly decent late-Victorian terraces. The old piano factory here has been converted to flats - including a ground floor loft.
The summit of Dog Kennel Hill has a particularly large council estate, and to the west is the Champion Hill Estate, but next to this many of the 1840s villas of Champion Hill survive. Some have been split into flats and others provide accommodation for the medical folk of the nearby hospitals. South of the estate lies a large late-Forties council building programme; many of the houses have fine gardens and are now in private hands.
Over Denmark Hill to the west is Ruskin Park, and the houses around it try to look as suburban as they can. Apart from the main road every place around it is inter-war property. Between Maudsley Hospital and the Green is a jumble of styles, cottages on Love Walk (some built as late as 1982), vast terraces on De Crespigny Park and artisans' terraces on Grove Lane.
West of the Green to Myatts Fields is dominated by the 1890s Minet Estate, always popular with its 5-bed villas. An 1899 college has become 50 mezzanine apartments and the cottages diminish in size as we approach Coldharbour Lane and Brixton. The chaotic mix of busy Camberwell New Road, on the way to Kennington, runs through handsome Georgian housing, tower blocks and shopping parades.
North of the Green is probably the area's most unappealing neighbourhood. Two fine 19th century half-squares survive at Addington and Rust, but these are marooned in a sea of late 20th century public housing experiments, among them the Wyndham Estate to the west which dates from 1964.
There are, however, notable exceptions. St. Giles Hospital off the Peckham Road is now all flats; Hopewell Street has late-Eighties' apartments and maisonettes set around a courtyard; and the workhouse tower of Ada Road is an Eighties' conversion into flats. Generally, the closer you get to Peckham Road the better chances of pre-war survival there are.
Facilities
Standing in the maelstrom of Camberwell Green junction you could be forgiven for thinking that SE5 is just too busy to provide anything out of the ordinary for its residents. The Green itself underwent major renovation in the mid-Nineties, but it doesn't really show - the junction is too overpowering. But piecemeal gentrification is appearing, as an upmarket raffish air wends its way down Coldharbour Lane from Brixton.
Although shops are to be found along most stretches of the main roads that lead off the main junction, it is to the south - with a covered mall and Safeway's - and to the east that most retailers are to be found. Many of the shops on the southward main drag are still pound shops and charity affairs, but to the east things are smartening up along Church Street, just before the Camberwell Art School.
Snazzy bars are the order of the day here now, with Tadim's Turkish bar and art student favourites Seymour's joining longer-established emporia such as the Greek and Italian restaurants and the Cypriot bakery. Redstar, Babushka and Funky Monkey are also newcomers. All in a row, it would seem, Brixton, Camberwell and Peckham are sharpening their act and moving on up.
Open ground here is as varied as the place itself. Most of the parks are small, with Lucas and Sceaux Gardens, Camberwell Green and Brunswick Park providing the normal fare of tennis courts, football pitches and playgrounds. Camberwell Leisure Centre can be found on the east side of the Green close to the huge Law Court of 1971.
Myatt's Fields is a strange survival, a field of strawberries and rhubarb until its conversion to a public park in 1889. Ruskin Park is perhaps the gem of the area, set on a gentle slope that allows a full view of London's centre from the top and an impressive array of playgrounds and tennis facilities at the bottom. It was opened in 1907 and covers 35 acres.
But the oddest open ground is surely Burgess Park. One of the largest parks in the capital it stands close to the centre of London and yet is unknown to the great majority. Given its origins, this is perhaps not surprising; created in a single night - 29/12/40 - when a concerted German assault on the City fell short by virtue of high winds - it has struggled to be seen as anything other than flat, dull territory. Being surrounded by some highly-deprived neighbourhoods has not helped, and the many schemes that have been launched upon it are still struggling to give the park an enjoyable identity. The insertion of a lake in 1982 has been one of the few success stories.
Camberwell today is perhaps most famous for Kings College and Maudsley Hospitals. Administering to the body and soul respectively, these institutions are justly world-famous and many medical pioneers flock to work here to improve their careers. Southward and over Dog Kennel Hill is Dulwich Hamlet FC, serious football contenders between the wars (winning the F.A. Amateur Cup four times). Next door is an especially large Sainsbury's (now open 24-hours) and the newly-established Hamlets Health Centre.
Transport
Without a doubt the land of the
bus. With the Green being such an important junction it seems that no traffic-light change can happen without a big red vehicle passing through every single one. Camberwell/Walworth Road (
A215) runs north to the Elephant and the centre of the capital.
Camberwell New Road (A202), a creation of 1818 to service Vauxhall Bridge, heads west to the Oval, Kennington and over the river. The A202 continues east as Peckham Road to New Cross and Greenwich. South, and climbing the hills that formed the southern horizon of London for centuries, the A215 splits into three - Coldharbour Lane (A2217) for Brixton, Denmark Hill for the Norwoods and Grove Lane/Dog Kennel Hill (A2216) for Dulwich.
The alternative to car and bus is the train, and residents here are blessed with some versatile railway lines. The daddy of all SE5's stations is Denmark Hill, now surmounted by a splendid pub following the disastrous 1980 fire that gutted the building. It is on the South London Loop that allows travel to Victoria to the north-west and London Bridge to the north-east.
Loughborough Junction, between Brixton and Camberwell, is now coming into its own by virtue of being on the Thameslink from Bedford to Brighton, taking in Blackfriars and Kings Cross. East Dulwich station comes in from Mitcham to Peckham Rye and London Bridge, and by the year 2007 it will be connected to the East London Line - SE5 on the tube map.
Steve Roberts
History
For centuries Camberwell was happy to be a village providing cures for cripples (hence the name) and flowers and fruits to the capital. The village and the church had been named in Domesday, "Cabrewelle" with its parish church dedicated to St. Giles, appropriately the patron saint of cripples.
Later, the relative isolation combined with a close proximity to London went down well with the artistic fraternity: writers who have lived here have included Robert Browning, John Ruskin, Oliver Goldsmith, George Gissing and Thomas Hood, with the obligatory flying visit from Charles Dickens.
As if to copper-fasten this arty air, the South London Gallery and the Camberwell School of Arts & Crafts were opened just east of the Green in 1891 and 1896 respectively. In 1842 Felix Mendelssohn even popped over to the Green and composed "Spring Song" on the spot, presumably before the six-lane junction came into being.
But if the natives were hoping for a quiet life then they chose the wrong spot. Camberwell's siting at the foot of the first hills south of the capital, and at junction for two roads heading east and to the City, destined it to be as busy a confluence as could be found anywhere in the Great Wen. Residential expansion duly followed. In 1801 the village was home to seven thousand souls; by 1901 it was a quarter of a million.
Camberwell Green was the old village centre and the site of a centuries-old fair. As the Victorian age descended like a shroud over the land, these fairs - drink-sodden riots by our standards - were one by one suppressed. Camberwell was no different. The church's attempt to do so was initially beaten off in 1824, but by 1855 Camberwell had seen the last of its Bacchanalian revelry.
In 1835 the horse-drawn trams arrived and in 1866 the railways came through here (the commotion it brought drove out John Ruskin), and in 1913-15 the twin medical monoliths of King's College and Maudsley were established south of the Green.
The many attempts at post-war rebuilding between the Green and the Elephant betray how grievously northern Camberwell suffered in the Second World War.
Steve Roberts.
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