Vauxhall Gardens was an open-air resort and the English climate being what it is, there had to be an ‘if wet, indoors’ option. This was The Rotunda, which opened in 1748, offering concerts and exhibitions as well as shelter. Pulled down when the gardens closed in 1859, The Rotunda rose again in 2019 as a […]
Screen siren Jane Russell and her South Lambeth adoption sensation
Between the roar of Clapham and South Lambeth Roads lies a maze of residential streets. Mostly lined with Victorian terraces, they are surprisingly peaceful – especially towards the centre where you will find St Stephen’s Terrace. In 1951, that street’s peace was disrupted by the chanting of a mob. The crowd had gathered outside number […]
Millicent Fawcett and Vauxhall Park
Millicent Fawcett’s statue by artist Gillian Wearing was unveiled in Westminster on 24 April 2018 to mark the 100th anniversary of the right of some women to vote. To coincide with Millicent Fawcett’s 172nd birthday on 11 June we publish an article by Elizabeth Crawford on her work to create Vauxhall Park. Elizabeth Crawford Vauxhall […]
Monday 20 May: David Coke guides Vauxhall Gardens history walk
Join David E. Coke for ‘The Heyday of Vauxhall Gardens’
No life for a lady along the Lambeth shore – the adventures and misadventures of Rachel Charlotte Williams Biggs
There’s fascinating information about 18th-century Lambeth to be found in A Georgian Heroine by genealogists/historians Joanne Major and Sarah Murden. Not the least of it is the little-known story of a Vauxhall woman with a long name and a life story well-nigh incredible. Thus far, no portrait known to be of Rachel Charlotte Williams Biggs has been […]
Free Vauxhall Park walk: 21 April 2018
Join Polly Freeman of the Friends of Vauxhall Park on a Vauxhall Society/Vauxhall History guided walk around the Park. Saturday 21 April 2018, starts 2.30pm prompt Meet: Parco Café, Vauxhall Park Lasts about an hour All welcome, no booking required No charge, although on-the-spot contribution of £5 in aid of the Friends of Vauxhall Park […]
Care to help honour Lambeth’s dead of the First World War?
There’s an hour-long get-together at Lambeth Archives on Tuesday 13 March, kick-off 6pm, on what you can do to help restore, research and display some long-unseen Victorian and early 20th century memorials. They came from churches demolished in the 1980s and have languished in the basement of the Carnegie Library ever since. Now there’s Heritage […]
Injury time at Blissets, The Oval, 1960–2015
Curiosity Corner: The first in our occasional series of notes on the odd and the by-the-way in a bustling and historic part of London. An Employee Accident Book dating back half a century has come to light in a corner of a former builder’s yard in Oval.
Kennington, 1795: a highwayman’s dance of death on the gallows
by VauxhallHistory.org online editor Naomi Clifford. On his way to the gallows at Kennington Common, Jeremiah Lewis Abershaw did what many a condemned felon had done before him: during the mile-long journey from Horsemonger Gaol in Newington to the gallows he played to the crowd. Abershaw travelled to his agonising death on Monday 3 August […]
Saturday 10 February: ‘South Lambeth Road Stories’ guided walk with Sean Creighton
Historian, community activist and blogger, and former project worker in the area Sean Creighton leads South Lambeth Road Stories, a free guided Vauxhall Society/Vauxhall History walk which kicks off from the Tate South Lambeth Library at 180 South Lambeth Rd, Vauxhall, London SW8 1QP at 10.30am on Saturday 10 February. There is the story of […]
‘Princess Seraphina’ steps out at Vauxhall Gardens
Vauxhall, or ‘Voho’ in estate-agent’s patter (the ‘Soho’ of the south bank), attracts gay people both as a place to live and for the clubs and bars that surround the site of what was once the Vauxhall Gardens open-air resort (1661–1858). One notable event in the history both of the Gardens and of the capital’s […]
Was Vauxhall’s Prince of Wales as ‘Black’ as the French paint him?
The Duchy of Cornwall owns much of Vauxhall and Kennington, which makes the local landlord HRH Charles, Prince of Wales. One of the royal heir’s other titles is Duke of Cornwall. The first Duke was a Vauxhall resident as well as landlord. This is short-lived warrior Edward of Woodstock (1330–1376), who was invested as Prince […]
Brixton Market 1936: silk knickers 2½ pence a leg, streaky bacon 3½ pence per pound
‘She’s always here soon after 6.30 [a.m.],’ says Bertie of one customer, ‘to buy her own breakfast. And it’s always the same thing she wants, “One-pound-of-streaky-and-five-sausages.”‘ ‘Here’ is Brixton Street Market, in Mary Benedetta’s 1936 book Street Markets of London (London: John Miles Ltd). Benedetta’s book covers over 30 street markets in Lambeth and beyond, […]
The Doulton fairytale tiles that survived Vauxhall’s Blitz
The Doulton fairytale panels in the South Wing corridor of St Thomas’ Hospital get star billing in issue 22 (2017) of the GIST, the Guy’s and St Thomas’s magazine ‘History Corner’ feature. Margaret Thompson and William Rowe’s panels, made a short walk away at the Doulton factory in Vauxhall, once brightened up the two children’s […]
The St Peter’s organ appeal: time to pull out all the stops?
In the 18th century (and until 1859), Vauxhall Gardens was home to an outdoor organ so mighty that it could be heard throughout the 11-acre open-air pleasure resort, and no doubt beyond. The organ could certainly have been heard at St Peter’s Church in Kennington Lane, had St Peter’s been there at the time, which it […]
Walcot Foundation: 350 years of helping ‘the Lambeth poor’
The Walcot Foundation gives away an average of £1.8 million a year ‘for the relief of the Lambeth poor’. The charity has been around for 350 years, established by the 1667 will of a wealthy haberdasher, Edmund Walcott (his surname originally had two ‘t’s), who endowed it with 17 acres of what was then […]
Not even Good Queen Bess could barge up Brixton Hill from Vauxhall for a date with Sir Walter Raleigh – River Effra: London’s Secret Spine by Jon Newman
Jon Newman’s River Effra, South London’s Secret Spine is lavishly-illustrated, deeply-researched and, above all, grippingly-readable – a landmark work, the first detailed and comprehensive account of the Effra.
‘Love Endureth’: Schola Cantorum concert in aid of St Peter’s Organ Restoration Fund – 20 Sept 2016
Tuesday 20 September 2016: Schola Cantorum performs choral music at St Peter’s, Vauxhall, in aid of organ restoration fund. Book tickets here or buy on the door.
Vauxhall’s Doulton & Co – from sewer pipes to art pottery
To mark the launch of vauxhallhistory.org on 6 September 2016, Alex Werner of Museum of London talks about the rise of Doulton, one of England’s greatest pottery manufacturers. All welcome.
Handel at Vauxhall
Conductor and harpsichordist Bridget Cunningham on how she came to record Handel at Vauxhall.
