VicLondon-Peckham

Peckham, Southwark

District Traits

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Notable Locations

Parks: Nunhead Cemetery (Off Map) Public Works: Licensed Victuallers' Asylum (x) Waterways: Grand Surrey Canal (x)

Class: x

South of this area, the former town of Peckham has been consolidated into London’s sprawl. Like Battersea and Putney, this is a middle-class area, inhabited by skilled labour and of ce workers that can afford to buy a home on the outskirts and take the train or omnibus into town. The area is dominated, once again, by canyons of townhouses, all joined together, or surrounded by small gardens with hedge works to separate the homes. The place is especially busy in the early morning (usually around dawn) and the evening (usually around eight o’clock) when the men are trekking into or out of the city and their workplaces.

Unlike Bermondsey, which is almost exclusively poor, with a high crime rate and a low police presence away from the rail station and high streets, Peckham has low policing and generally low crime. Although the neighbourhood is mostly respectable and quiet, there are pockets throughout Peckham and Peckham New Town where the building owners are either absentee landlords, or simply do not care. In these areas of Peckham, tenements and single family homes are turned into poor-packed slums, with the attendant high crime and violence.

Notable Locations

Grand Surrey Canal (x)

A waterway built primarily to provide an easy route for timber and coal barges to reach the Southwark, the canal is frequently clogged with goods barges up and down its length, dropping off crates of goods.

Licensed Victuallers' Asylum (x)

An almshouse established by the Licensed Victuallers' of London (an organization of landlords and public house owners), this site provides food and clothing to the very poor, particularly mothers and children. Its first patron was Prince Augustus Frederick, Duke of Sussex, joined more recently by Prince Albert.

Newington Workhouse (x)

Built in 1850, this workhouse provides "indoor relief" (a place to sleep at night) for the working poor. Its administration was taken over by the St. Saviour Poor Law Union in 1868, who turned it into an infirmary for the care of poor (though it does maintain a small selection of beds for the non-ill).

Nunhead Cemetery (Off Map)

Consecrated in 1840, Nunhead is one of the seven great Victorian cemeteries established in a ring around the outskirts of London. It contains magnificent monuments erected in memory of eminent citizens, which contrast sharply with the small, simple headstones marking common, or public, burials. Its formal avenue of towering limes and the Gothic gloom of the original Victorian planting gives way to paths which recall the country lanes of a bygone pastoral era.