Industry
Lambeth's location defined its earliest trades. From the first settlement it had been known for its river fishing, boat builders and for the riverside barge houses. It was also a centre for Thames watermen - the all purpose ferry men. But by the 17th century the Lambeth foreshore, embanked and partially drained, was becoming an extension of London. Its cheaper land and being beyond the restrictive licensing powers of the City and its Guilds encouraged new, malodorous or otherwise anti-social industries. The river was still the principal transport conduit, so all types of material were stored and processed here: timber yards, sugar bakers and flour mills as well as more unusual or prestigious repositories. The Duke of Buckingham's Glass House was one of several Vauxhall glassworks that broke the Venetian monopoly on looking glass manufacture. The critical technology - the discovery that coal-fired furnaces operated at a higher temperature than wood or charcoal - was also developed in Lambeth by Sir Edward Zouch. The site is commemorated in the present Glasshouse Street.
Left: Lambeth from Millbank by Thomas Priest c.1750; Right: Lambeth Watermen (detail) by J Edy 1792
Thomas Field who made the candles lit to celebrate the birth of the Princess Elizabeth in 1533 had his workshop on Lambeth Marsh; and the firm of Fields continued to manufacture candles and soap on the same site in Upper Marsh until 1944. The process of preparing and rendering the fat for tallow candles on an industrial scale was peculiarly foul smelling. Another was vinegar manufacture; distilleries that established themselves in the 18th century included Pratt and Mawbey's on the site of Copt Hall in Vauxhall, Beaufoy's vinegar works at Cupers Garden, displaced by Waterloo Bridge and relocated to South Lambeth Road and Burnett's Distillery on Fore Street, subsequently the Albert Embankment.
Left: J Fields Ltd, candle makers, Night Lights advert c.1910; Right: Beaufoy's Vinegar Factory, Cuper's Gardens, in 1746
Coade's Artificial Stone works was a later manufacturer of luxury goods. Eleanor Coade set up her factory manufacturing an artificial moulded stone for statuary and garden ornaments at the foot of Westminster Bridge in 1769. The stone was frost and smoke resistant and retained its sharpness over time. The business remained in Lambeth until 1837. Coade left a significant built legacy including the gothic screen in St George's chapel at Windsor and the statue of the River God at Ham House. In Lambeth there is the stone lion from the former Lion Brewery now on Westminster Bridge, plus the tombs of Captain Bligh of the Bounty and John Sealy, Eleanor Coade's business partner, both in St Mary's churchyard.
Right: Coade stone River God 1786 (now at Ham House); Left: Coade stone showroom and factory, Lambeth, by C Tompkins 1798 (courtesy Prudence Scrivener).
The windmills that lined the Lambeth foreshore were displaced by steam powered flour mills. The earliest was the short-lived Albion Mills at Blackfriars Bridge, burned down in 1792 by Luddite millers alarmed by the threat it posed. Steam saw mills, displaced the traditional hand sawyers and their saw pits. While in 1819 Applegarth and Cowper opened the first steam powered printing press at their works off Stamford Street; they were taken over by William Clowes and Son who went on to become London's largest commercial printers. The engineering firm of Maudslay, Son and Field was established in Lambeth from 1810 on Westminster Bridge Road and with a riverside dock on Pedlar's Acre, where they built and successfully launched the first Thames-built steam ship, the Lord William Bentinck, in 1832. There were other metal working and engineering trades along the river. The most visually obvious were the two shot towers either side of Waterloo Bridge producing lead shot and musket balls for the army. The circular brick built tower belonging to Walker, Parkers and Co. survived the war and was incorporated into the 1951 Festival of Britain site.
Left: 'Drug' mill, Lambeth; Centre: Clowes type foundry c.1840; Right: Shot Tower at Waterloo c.1905.
Lambeth had long been an important centre for pottery and the earliest, 17th century kilns were set up in the large houses that were being vacated as Lambeth started to change its character. Norfolk House, the London residence of the Dukes of Norfolk across Lambeth Road from St Mary's and Copt Hall in Vauxhall home to Sir Thomas Parry and the Marquess of Worcester, were both producing inexpensive "tinplate" delftware and stoneware goods for the domestic market including chamber pots, plates, bowls and drug jars. It was a 19th century potter who came to define and dominate the Lambeth industry. John Doulton began working at one of the Vauxhall Walk potteries in 1812. He set up in partnership there and through the 1820s the business of Doulton and Watts expanded into Lambeth High Street and eventually the length of the Albert Embankment, taking over other firms like Stiffs and Janeways in the process. Doulton's was the first pottery to link the steam engine and the potter's wheeland the firm developed new markets: acid resistant stoneware for the chemical industry; decorative salt-glaze ware for middle class mantelpieces; faience tile panels for interior decoration (like those in the children's wards of St Thomas's Hospital); terracotta decoration for the exterior of public buildings. But it was the stoneware drainpipe that was to make Doulton's name. The 1848 Public Health Act coincided with Doulton's unveiling of their new stoneware drain pipe which quickly became both the national and international industry standard. One logical extension was to manufacture the fittings that went on the end of the drainpipes; by the 1860s the company also had a reputation for its urinals, baths, water closets and wash basins.
Left: Tin-glazed delftware plate, made in Lambeth c.1760 (courtesy Alistair Cook) ; Right: Doulton & Watts factory, Lambeth High Street c.1840.
Lambeth was becoming one of the industrial centes of London. At the Fore Street there were bone crushing factories "the smell complained of as a great nuisance; the bone bugs creep through the wall into the next house"; at the floor cloth manufactory on Kennington Lane "the boiling of oil is complained of as detrimental to health; on Stangate it was the smell of the Seysell Asphalte company, on Carlisle Lane that of the soap maker and bone boiler, while the residents of Kennington Common complained of the twin delights of Farmer's Vitriol works making sulphuric acid and a cat-gut manufactory. More overpowering than all of these was the smoke and the choking acid pollution from the potteries, even the Archbishop of Canterbury noticed that it was killing the trees in his gardens. The potteries dominated the riverside from Westminster Bridge down to Vauxhall until the major redevelopment of the riverside frontage for the new Albert Embankment in the 1860s swept away the remnants of the old Water Lambeth village, created flood protection with a new river wall and obliged existing firms to rebuild and relocate their premises.
Left: Pollution from the Doulton factory c.1905 (courtesy Jocelyn Lukins); Right: Early Vauxhall Car made in Vauxhall, 1903 (courtesy Vauxhall Heritage Centre, Luton).
Lambeth ceased to be attractive to industry once the river was no longer the main transport route. Inadequate road links, London land values and the increasing scale of manufacture drove many successful businesses out. Maudslay's success as boat builders took them down stream to deeper water at Woolwich. The Vauxhall Iron Works on Wandsworth Road developed an early internal combustion engine motor car, but had to move out to a green field site on the edge of Luton to exploit their product and become one of the major British car manufacturers. By the twentieth century Doulton's were the largest single employer - but they too planned to relocate to their works at Burslem in Staffordshire. The war delayed this, but four centuries of pottery manufacture ceased in Lambeth in1956.
Kennington
Kennington lay beyond the river remaining rural and substantially unchanged for a longer period; but its transition from market gardens to extended London suburb was rapid when it finally arrived. Kennington manor was acquired by the Crown in 1337; a royal association which persists today with the Prince of Wales's continued ownership of residual parts of the manor as the Duchy of Cornwall Estate. Edward III gifted the manor to his eldest son, the Black Prince, who had a palace built on Kennington Lane. It was a place of power and influence: two of Edward III's parliaments met there; Richard II frequently stayed while his uncle John of Gaunt used it as a refuge from the London mob; Henry VII used it on the eve of his coronation as it was close to his Archbishop's palace. It was his son, Henry VIII, who demolished Kennington and reused the materials for his new palace at Whitehall. The manor remained the property of the Princes of Wales; the young Prince Charles lived in the new Manor House on Kennington Lane before becoming king in 1625. Today the only reminders of that royal influence are the Prince of Wales's feathers motifs on the model dwellings and mansion blocks built by the Duchy of Cornwall Estate in 1916.
Left : Effigy of the Black Prince; Right: Duchy of Cornwall housing, Kennington.
For most Londoners Kennington meant the wild expanse of common that the coach traveller was obliged to traverse on the journey south from London Bridge. By 1700 it was losing its original function of grazing land for and it was notorious for its gallows; public executions were held there from the1640s. Crowds would flock to see a witch burnt or rioters and highwaymen hung at the "triple trees". When Jacobite rebels involved in the '45 rebellion were executed there in 1746 the crowd got the full theatre of a state execution for treason. The prisoners were dragged to the gallows on hurdles, hung, drawn, quartered, beheaded, disembowelled and had their entrails burnt on a brazier for good measure. The final execution there was that of John Badger in 1799, hung for forgery. Evangelical preachers used the same space for prayer meetings - often at the same time as a public hanging to be sure of a good audience. Clerics like George Whitfield and Charles Wesley drew audiences of thousands. Kennington required a local place of worship and the recently vacated "gallows common" became the site for the parish church of. St. Mark's was consecrated in 1824, but not before workmen had unearthed one of the gibbet irons used for displaying the bodies of executed prisoners to eighteenth century "rubber-neckers" travelling along the coach road.
Left: St Mark's Church and the Tollgate at Kennington Common c.1865; Right: Kennington gibbet iron
The common still remained a sufficiently large space for any number of different users. It was used for political meetings and also had a reputation as an unofficial "speakers corner" where the disaffected could meet. The most famous instance was the Chartist meeting of April 1848. In 1853 transformation of Kennington Common was transformed into a park, the first in Lambeth. Unlike later parks the motive was not the preservation of open space but rather the desire to ensure that such meetings should never recur.
Left: Kennington Common and The Horns Tavern in 1820; Left: Kennington Park c.1905
Cricket had been played regularly on the Common but was now banned. Prince Albert himself is supposed to have brought pressure on the Duchy of Cornwall Estate to find an alternative venue; and the Oval, an area of market gardens, became a replacement cricket ground.Kennington changed dramatically after the construction of Westminster Bridge. A link road was built to connect it to the coach routes from the south. It was here that the link road (Kennington Road) met the old coach road (Kennington Park Road) at the Horns tavern. The Horns was bombed in the War and its prominent corner site is now occupied by offices.
The Oval Cricket Ground, 1935.
In 1850 the construction of the new Lambeth Vestry Hall on Kennington Road marked the extent to which the area had changed. Local government was growing. The previously limited parish functions - the care of the poor, the maintenance of the highways and the management of parochial charities - were dwarfed by new responsibilities for street lighting, rubbish collection, sewers and drainage, public health and building control. The former vestry rooms by St. Mary's church were inadequate. A new and appropriately grand building needed to be located at the hub of Lambeth. Fifty years later the further growth of Lambeth would mean a still larger and more imposing Town Hall would be built in Brixton. But no. 367 Kennington Road, now used as offices, with its classical revival architecture and imposing pillared entrance still recalls that moment of municipal glory.