Nunhead

 Post to the north Telegraph Hill

Aspinall Road

Embankment where the old railway line departed. Housing and Nature reserve too.  Cutting made in 1860, this is now a wide embankment of bramble thickets and sycamore woodland that turns into bright golds and oranges in the autumn. After closure it supported an interesting swathe of chalk loving wildflowers, but was lost to a housing development in 1989. A small sycamore wood abuts the road bridge.

Barset Road

25 home of Woodroffe friend of Lenin

Buchan Road

2-storey houses, good gardens behind on south side. (Booth)

Crystal Palace line

Went off at Cow Lane junction.

Drakefell Road,

Bombed 22.6.44 29 people injured.

Takes one up the higher ground of Telegraph Hill and off the north side part of the new Park lies, finely situated, with splendid views over London. The houses, 2-storey and 2-storey with basements, small, but generally with well-to-do occupants, middle class. (Booth)

Evelina Road

5 Charles Peace

16 Golden Anchor

2-storey and 5-storey houses, mainly the former. Shops at north east corner. More of a business street, especially at the west end. Just south of the railway on the north side are three or four houses. At the house next to the railway, with its passage and boundary running along the bottom of the embankment, the notorious criminal, Peace, lived for some years. Dolby said that he frequently arranged to come home after nightfall from one of his house-breaking expeditions and that his plan was to throw his booty out of the carriage window as the train passed his house. He thus arrived at the stations without luggage and, without exciting suspicion, went home and picked up the booty.  (Booth)

Gibbon Road.

66 Railway Tavern

A few poor but majority fairly comfortable. 2-storey houses with gardens. (Booth)

Grimwade Crescent

2-storey houses. "More of the labouring class", not a good name, brawls etc.  (Booth)

Hall Road (not on AZ)

Gates property ceases. Houses 2-storey, less well built, much worse tenanted. Two families in each. Rents 11/- per flat. Some shops (Booth)

Howbury Road

2-storey houses, much like Barset Road. Better from south end to Machell Road. Here tiled forecourts and a brighter appearance. (Booth)

Ivydale Road

202 Waverley

300 Mckenzie Court. Named for Able Seaman Albert McKenzie who won a Victoria Cross.

200-302 children’s home for London Borough of Southwark 1970, Southwark Architect's Department. The concrete blocks and tough iron railings, fashionable architect's materials of c. 1970 immediately mark it as a council building even though it is unnamed

202 Waverley Arms

St.Silas 1902-13 by J. E. K. & J. P. Cutts. Ragstone, Decorated.

Waverley Park estate. Classic speculative development. Edward Yates.

Ivedale School. A good, bold example of the three-decker type of Board School near Nunhead Cemetery, 1891, generously decorated. Battlemented centre with tall turreted roof.

Poorish opposite the stations. Two bow windows to the house and Jones said only one family in each. Further south the road turns west along the south side of the Nunhead Cemetery. The amenity of the road is spoilt by the shooting trial ground of the Army &. Navy Stores in the open space at the back of the south side. Road improves as it goes westwards. (Booth)

Kimberley Road

South east end has rather larger houses than in the northern bits, bow windows, fronts, 2-storey and 2-storey. (Booth)

Limes Walk

Worth exploring. One of the Small developments for Southwark, 1966, an original solution to a long narrow site. It begins as a broad paved walk entered by a passage beneath a bridge. An old people's home, terrace houses, with gardens at the back over garages. Then comes a subtle change of access, and a narrow alley continues beneath slate-hung bridges edifice of Messrs Daniels, monumental masons.

Linden Grove

Where Charles Dickens set up home with Ellen Ternan.

London County Council Flats pompous pre- and post-war

Urinal made in Glasgow

Nunhead Tavern, tea garden

Brock's firework factory in 1840s Houses

43 Belvedere

Nunhead Cemetery. The fifty-one acres of the cemetery of All Saints, Nunhead, were consecrated in 1840. it  was laid out by the London Cemetery Company to designs by James Bunning, architect. The Cemetery was consecrated by the Bishop of Winchester and in 1844 the Anglican Chapel was built to the design of Thomas Little. A formal drive lined with mature lime trees approaches the now ruined chapel from the gates. A second chapel for Dissenters was built in the North-west corner of the Cemetery, but was demolished. lodges on either side of the main entrance  - one now restored - are an important element in Bunning’s design. The paths are circuitous and winding, apart from the main axial drive and a subsidiary path at right angles. The monuments in Nunhead are not as distinguished as those in many other London cemeteries, reflecting the less socially elite classes buried there. Like most private cemetery companies, by the Second World War its management had declined  and Vandalism and apathy lead to its acquisition for £1 by LB Southwark in 1976 and it is a designated grade II historic landscape. Woolwich beds of acid sand and gravels underlie it and it is an outlier of high land Rising to two hundred feet above sea level with panoramic views of London. a third of the area is open land still available for new burial plots. Once hill top pasture It is now the closest woodland area to central London dominated by secondary broadleaved woodland set aside as a park and nature reserve. The nature reserve has ash and sycamore beneath which is  layer of bramble and ivy.. At the opposite side a more open environment reveals red and white clover, bird's foot trefoil and chamomile. On the crown of the hill is damp grassland with wood rush. Specimen trees are scattered throughout like Turkey oaks and a gingko. The dense undergrowth contain s remnants of the Victorian shrubbery, with laurel, holly, box and yew with wild shrubs like elder, hawthorn and bramble.  Ivy as a symbol of remembrance, grows abundantly. In summer the pathways take on a 'country lane' aspect with clover, ox-eye daisies, cow parsley and buttercups and sprays of buddleia attracting bees and butterflies.  The more open parts of the Cemetery contain comfrey, yarrow, trefoil  vetches, campion, lady's smock, sorrel and alongside nettles and rosebay willow-herb. It supports a wide range of birds including thrushes, , wood pigeon, robin, blackbird, jay, starling, hedge sparrow, blue, great and coal tits, green woodpeckers, chiffchaff, various finches, cuckoo and tawny owls. Eerie atmosphere.  the most prominent memorial is the obelisk erected in 1851 by public subscription raised by Joseph Hume M.P., to commemorate the five so-called Scottish martyrs transported to Australia in 1795 for advocating the cause of Parliamentary reform. Other memorials include Vincent Figgins, City of London type-founder; Sir George Livesey, Chairman of South Metropolitan Gas Company and Thomas Tilling, who pioneered horse drawn bus routes in South London. Josiah Stone buried there in 1867 and Prestige. In the North-east corner is a vast catacomb dating from 1867; now sealed. Memorials from both World Wars are maintained by the War Graves Commission, and record those killed in Nunhead during air raids. The Stearne mausoleum is unique in London. Nunhead Cemetery is the final resting place of a quarter of a million persons.

Gates and lodges. Formal large noble cast-iron entrance and classical piers of Portland stone Just inside are two charming lodges of exquisite neo-classical design. Bunning designed both gates and lodges.

Chapels: Thomas Little won a competition to build the chapels in 1844. His designs, which survive, were in the Decorated style of Gothic; the materials were Kentish rag with freestone dressings. The Dissenters' chapel has been demolished, and the Anglican chapel is in ruins.

catacomb shaft has been filled in, and the rectangular catacomb sealed up.

Scottish Martyrs Memorial high granite obelisk impressive. erected in 1851 to commemorate the Scots martyrs to the cause of Parliamentary Reform. money collected by committee under the Chairmanship of Joseph Hume

Large detached houses on east side, mixture on west. Distinctly less good on west, some apartments. along Linden Grove. Opposite the Cemetery, poor gravediggers, somewhat improved. West end is in the Camberwell 'W Police Division., it improves west of Gibbon Road. East of Gibbon Road Has always had a bad name for drink and roughness but is not as bad as the streets behind in Daniels Road (Booth)

Machell Road.

2-storey houses, six rooms, forecourts. (Booth)

Norbert Road?

Partly built embankment connected Crystal Palace & Greenwich.

Nunhead

Reservoir which holds 20,000,000 gallons of water taken from the Thames above Teddington. Reservoir land bought by Southwark and Vauxhall Water Co. in 1854. 14 acres. Simple distributive works. Four reservoirs which have now been reduced to two which can deliver forty three million gallons a day.  Originally two bull engines 1890,

60 Rev Porter, died there, Brotherhood of the Holy Cross

Railway

Line from Nunhead built by London, Chatham and Dover Railway in an open cutting south of Telegraph Hill.

Rye Hill Estate

L.C.C. 1939-64.

Torridge Gardens pleasantest parts the low-density terraces hidden behind the dull blocks.

19th villas and houses

3 George Livesey

Rye Hill Park.

2-storey and 3-storey houses built on the side of a steep slope for good class servant-keeping families. Owing to a scare that the waterworks reservoir at the top might burst the tenants left. Working class have taken their place and many are to let. Good tenants remain only in the houses near the Rye. (Booth)

Stuart Road

40 Stuart Arms

Tappisford Road

Design Reserve Council work for Habinteg. The model suburban scale of the area continued in the work from 1978

2-storey houses. Done up. Somewhat better than Banstead Road - more or the mechanic class". On the east side is Stanley Hall, the headquarters of the Nunhead Christian Band, said to represent a past local split in the Salvation Army. Two houses in the space at the south end.  The road perhaps from Barset Road represents a still further improvement. 2-storey houses still, forecourts. At the end, running south of the Buchan Road line is Salisbury Terrace. Poorer. (Booth)

Waveney Road/Rye Hill Park:

London County Council flats. Fine blocks

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