Long-time London resident and avid museum and theatre-goer. I started this blog in 2014, and got serious about it in 2020 when I realised how much I missed arts and culture during lockdowns. I go to a lot more events than anyone would think is sensible, and love sharing my thoughts in the forms of reviews, the occasional thought piece, and travel recommendations when I leave my London HQ.
I am still full of New Year’s Resolutions (capital letters for extra impact), and therefore have decided to combine two resolutions by going for long walks every now and then, and exploring new parts of London. And blogging, so I guess that’s a three-in-one. And you, dear readers, get to read the results. The first of these walks was from my home in Brockley, through Peckham to Dulwich, and then back via Forest Hill. South East London suburbs at their finest. So we find ourselves here in Peckham Rye Park. Built in 1868 from farmland just south of historic Peckham Rye Common, it shows various Victorian influences and fashions, from an American Garden to an Old English garden. The lido closed in 1987, and there was at one point a pagoda which burned down, but the stream and lake are very nice features. Overall it is a fairly textbook Victorian London park in its mixture of formal and open spaces, water features, and exotic and local plants. So far so standard.
One thing I did like in Peckham Rye Park was the Community Wildlife Garden. It seems like an active space with beekeeping, spaces for bugs and birds to come, a pond to encourage other local fauna, etc. It came from a push in the 90s to bring the park back to its former glory, and in particular to make proper use of the ‘old depot’ site which had originally contained greenhouses. The space today focuses on community and inclusion, which is a nice counterpoint to the rest of the park which, while used by local residents, operates to a historic blueprint with little visible change over the years to encourage participation and a sense of community.
Between Peckham Rye Park and Dulwich Park is Barry Road, named presumably for Charles Barry Jr who designed the concept for Dulwich Park as well as designing Dulwich College. At the Peckham end of the road there is a section of paneling featuring something like a community art display, but also including this manifesto on the activism of elective exclusion and its effect on democracy. Interesting reading.
Next to the political manifesto in favour of voluntary exclusion is this imagined bit of history on the shutters of a barber shop. Juxtaposition on my London walks is always an interesting thing to look for.
Continuing in my exploration of Victorian suburbia I came across the Passmore Edwards Dulwich Public Library, named for John Passmore Edwards, a Victorian philanthropist responsible for a number of hospitals, schools, libraries, drinking fountains and other public works. Philanthropy was such an important part of Victorian paternalist capitalism and the improvement of conditions in large British cities in this period that its markers are still visible across inner London and the suburbs. What I liked about this building is that it is still a public library and hasn’t been converted into a restaurant or exclusive flats as have so many similar edifices. John Passmore Edwards would be proud.
Walking along the aforementioned endless Victoria terraces, I was struck by two thoughts. Firstly, what a rupture it must have been to see villages and hamlets sucked into greater London with rows upon rows of indistinguishable homes being erected. When you actually stop and look at the housing stock outside of central London, WWII bomb damage aside, such a vast amount of it was built over only a couple of decades that it must have been a period of incredible change. The other thought I had was more prosaic, about the preservation of history. Here we have a lovely tiled entrance, while the houses on the same street run the gamut from modern tiling to practical concrete through various states of disrepair. With many suburbs locked in as ‘conservation areas’ now and therefore only able to renovate in-keeping with the original look and feel of the houses, what does this mean for London’s ability to respond to contemporary changes and concerns? Based on the housing crisis maybe not too well, although there are many other factors feeding into this. What interests me is the way that what must sometimes initially be an accidental preservation (no money to redo the entrance tiling) becomes a valued asset worthy of formal preservation if it lasts long enough.
Into Dulwich Park now, through Court Lane Gate, named because it once led to the court where the Lord of the Manor tried people or settled disputes. Apparently Dulwich College holds court records going back to the 14th Century. These days, you’re more likely to be run over by a kid on a kid on a scooter than dragged off to face punishment. Altogether very wholesome.
The lake was created when the park was built in 1887 from grazing land originally rented out to local farmers and residents. As with Peckham Rye Park, Dulwich Park is basically a bog standard Victorian affair, with a mix of formal and informal planting, a water feature, etc. Interestingly though, this one has been Grade II listed, meaning it presumably now has to stay pretty much as it is.
As the caption states, these shelters are still in existence, minus the thatching. When I sat down in one before finding this panel I found them slightly odd: too shallow to offer any real protection from the elements, and facing slightly boring views. I guess Victorians used parks differently than we did, maybe the ladies needed to sit down more to avoid hysteric episodes.
Here it is, a bit small and folorn in today’s park, although still in use by those wanting to rest their legs and look out at a not very interesting field.
Have you been wondering where the Great Trees of London are and what they look like? Me neither. I wonder what the London Tree Forum is like as an organisation. I guess it’s good someone is making sure they don’t get chopped down to save the cost of looking after them, right?
And here is the Great Tree itself. A fine specimen. Something I did not detour past on this walk is the eponymous oak of Honor Oak, another nearby London suburb. Eponymous, that is, apart from the fact that it is the third such Honor Oak, planted in 1905 to replace two before it which have been linked to a legend of Queen Elizabeth I resting under an oak on the way to somewhere. Yeah, like she was known for sleeping under trees. Anyway, this is quite an impressive tree.
We now find ourselves, dear readers, at Dulwich Picture Gallery. It is an interesting place: opened in 1817 with a collection rejected by a king, a stipulation that it be housed in a purpose built gallery, open to the ‘publick’, and eventually housing the bodies of the assemblers of said rejected royal collection. I suggest you read up about it sometime. For me the only downside is that art from 1600-1800, which this collection represents, is not my favourite. And at £8 for entrance to the permanent collection I find it out of reach of some segments of the ‘publick’ (though not the residents of Dulwich…).
For their 200th anniversary, the folks of the Dulwich Picture Gallery put together what I thought was an interesting set of insights into the interactions between the gallery and its audience, drawn from archival materials over two centuries. As this one demonstrates, they are not all positive, but they fulfill a couple of purposes: making the collection relatable, and providing a window on the sometimes fluid nature of art historianship. This ‘Leonardo’ in the quote is now by the hand of another painter. What was once a Holbein is now a work by the British School. We only get glimpses of what impact these changing attributions had on how the author of the quote saw a certain work vs. how the modern viewer sees it, but these panels were my favourite part of the visit.
Here is the tantalising, ivory hard-ware toy herself.
Another thing the gallery did for their anniversary was to produce three small sequential exhibitions reflecting on the collecting environment in which the Dulwich Picture Gallery emerged, and the emergence of publicly accessible art collections. The first was archival, on the reception of the DPG itself, and the second and third were comprised of loans from stately homes: one from Penrhyn Castle, Wales, and this work by Bassano from Burghley House, Stamford. A really top notch painting, it is not in a publicly accessible area of Burghley and is therefore still very much part of a private collection. As with the quotes from visitors through history, I found this reminder of the revolutionary nature of the gallery’s public mission enlightening.
On my way home I went via Forest Hill and the Horniman Museum (well, the outside in any case). On the way I spotted this dedication on a nearby church. Presumably the gift of the same Horniman as the museum or a close relative, it is an earlier act of philanthropy, at 1886 compared with the museum’s opening date of 1901. Perhaps there’s something to be said there for the increasing interest in exotic natural history and anthropological collections in the decades after the Great Exhibition, or perhaps I’m reading too much into it and the church spire was the more pressing need. In any case the Horniman name clearly has a legacy in Forest Hill beyond the museum itself.
And here is the Horniman Museum. I didn’t go in this time, but from previous visits can report that it features such highlights as an overstuffed walrus, a nice garden, and a small aquarium with lots of small children shrieking “Dory!”.
In a city with few real hills, any sort of vantage point is a bit exciting. This is the view east from Forest Hill.
And a final musing on Victorian terraces to round things off. I tend to think of them as a bit drab, always brown or grey, in line with my image of Victorians as a bit dour and always in mourning for something. However, as this run of three in various states of renovation shows, they were actually quite bright and cheerful when first built, and it’s only the years of smog and pollution which have made them otherwise. In any case, the suburbs of South East London are inextricably linked with real and imagined Victorian history, and I hope you have enjoyed my first heritage walk through them!
3 thoughts on “Heritage Walk: Brockley to Dulwich”
3 thoughts on “Heritage Walk: Brockley to Dulwich”