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 […]
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 […]
Get 55% off 2 classic local history books and help a good cause
Order Naomi Lourie Klein’s These Were Our Sons: Stories from Stockwell War Memorial and Ross Davies’s Vauxhall: A Little History for £6 each, plus £2.99 postage, with £1 going to the Friends of Tate South Lambeth Library. Better still, save even more if you order both books at the same time. Use this below to […]
Talk: On the Wings of Love? Fugitive marriages in the Georgian era
“Base, foul, fiend-like,” said her enemies. “Docile, modest and artless,” said her friends. Who was Maria Glenn and why was opinion so divided about her – and the story she told? Naomi Clifford’s new book The Disappearance of Maria Glenn (Pen & Sword) relates the mystery surrounding the abduction of a teenager from her home in Taunton in […]
Stockwell
The name Stokewell (first recorded in 1197) means the well by the stump or wood and comes from the Old English stocc + wella. There was a Stockwell Wood till the 17th century. The manor of Stockwell was formed in the late 13th century, when King Edward I acquired the manor of South Lambeth and […]
Jean Charles de Menezes
Jean Charles de Menezes, a Brazilian, was shot by undercover police on an underground train at Stockwell station on 22 July 2005, after he was misidentified as one of the fugitive terrorists involved in the previous day’s failed bombing attempts in London (they were subsequently caught and jailed). De Menezes’s death sparked debate and controversy […]
Marmite factory
Love it or hate it… The now rather unprepossessing Westminster Business Square on the corner of Kennington Lane and Durham Street used to be a Marmite factory. The Marmite Food Extract Company was formed in 1902 and was based at Burton upon Trent where it had ready access to its main ingredient – a by-product […]
Larkhall (Lark Hall)
1745 – Larkhall is in the middle area of John Rocque’s map. The map matches extremely well with the location of Larkhall Park on modern maps, if you take the road between the ‘Lark’ and the ‘Hall’ as modern Priory Grove. John Rocque’s Exact Survey of the Cities of London and Westminster, the Borough of Southwark, […]
Lambeth Palace
Lambeth Palace is the Archbishop of Canterbury’s official residence. The Convent of St Andrew of Rochester sold part of the Manor to Archbishop Haldwin of Canterbury in 1190. Archbishop Hubert Walter bought the rest of the Manor in 1197 and built a house by the river roughly opposite the Palace of Westminster. This house was […]
