Interior of the Museum 1976

Lambeth

The ancient settlements of Water Lambeth and Lambeth Marsh from 1750 to 1900 were transformed from a rural Surrey parish into a major south London suburb. Between 1801 and 1901 its population rose from 28,000 to 302,00; this eleven-fold increase was a catalyst for great change. Its river banks were laid out as wharves and its ferries became road bridges; marshes were drained and green fields given over to streets of houses, and village centres became industrial areas. Its status at the beginning of the 19th century as the new middle-class suburb was almost immediately destroyed by railway building. Its streets of smaller terraced houses were bombed and redeveloped after World War II. At the beginnning of the 21st century, Lambeth continues to reinvent itself.

Girls around a Maypole, Kennington Park 1907

Church and Palace

The river defined and shaped the settlement of Lambeth. In a crook of the a river bend, raised on two low lying islands between the marshes were the twin settlements of Water Lambeth and Lambeth Marsh. Old street names are a reminder of the precariousness of the location: Narrow Wall (Belvedere Road) and Broad Wall (Hatfields) protected the inhabitants of Upper Marsh and Lower Marsh from the river's periodic floods. The church of St Mary-at-Lambeth was founded by 1062 at least. In the Domesday Book it was the property of Edward the Confessor's sister, Countess Goda. The stone tower of the mediaeval church, put up in 1377, is the oldest visible building in Lambeth.

Adjoining is Lambeth Palace, associated with the Archbishops of Canterbury since 1197, so is unusual in retaining its original function for over eight centuries. Archbishop Langton was resident at the beginning of the 13th century and the present archbishop resides there still, it is essentially a private residence. The Church's cultural and political power meant Lambeth Palace was the setting for events of national significance. Here Sir Thomas More refused to take the oath recognising Henry VIII as Supreme Head of the Church of England - a denial that would lead to his execution. For Archbishop Cramner his palace became his prison, prior to being burnt at the stake. Parliamentarian forces commandeered the palace as a military prison during the Civil War and many Royalist prisoners died in the overcrowded prisons. One survivor was the Cavalier Poet Richard Lovelace and his imprisonment at Lambeth provided the inspiration for his most famous lines:

Stone walls do not a prison make, Nor iron bars a cage. Minds innocent and quiet take, That for a hermitage.

Lambeth Gardens

Wenceslaus Hollar published a panorama of London and Westminster in 1670. The imaginary viewpoint is from just above St Mary's tower, but the backgound shows hedges and small field plots of Lambeth Marsh, interspersed with the very occassional house. For all its proximity to London, Lambeth was still part of the rural hinterland; a region of small farms and market gardens that supplied food for the metropolis.

Lambeth's most famous gardening family were contemporaries of Hollar. John Tradescant came to South Lambeth in 1628 to establish his three acres of garden ground and orchards, subsequently managed by his son, John the younger. But they did not just confine themselves to plants. The Tradescant's personal "cabinet of curiosities" which had started as a collection of botanical specimens quickly grew to include animal skins and bones, birds eggs, sea shells and "celebrity" objects like Henry VIII's stirrups and Henry VII's gloves. It also included objects from the distant cultures like the deerskin cloak from a Virginian Indian chief and drums and trumpets from Africa which were equally fascinating to Londoners as "exotic" plants. Their South Lambeth house and its collection known as "Tradescant's Ark" became Britain's first museum for the paying public. After the Tradescant's death, their lands in South Lambeth reverted to farmland. At the end of the eighteenth century the house was occupied by Thomas and Ben White, farming brothers to the more famous Gilbert who visited frequently and described the agricultural routine of this typical Lambeth farm in his diary.

Many other farmers and commercial gardeners flourished in Lambeth. There were market gardeners like John Gold and Simon Harding who cultivated the Walcot Estate in Kennington, nurserymen like John Malcolm and Alfred Chandler who supplied plants for the gardens of the new middle-class villas, and scientific botanists like William Curtis who opened his famous London Botanic garden behind Broadwall in 1779. Within ten years he had 6,000 plants labelled according to Linnaean system. Yet within those years Curtis was forced out to more rural premises on Fulham Road. "I had long observed with regret that I had an enemy to contend with in Lambeth Marsh, which neither time, nor ingenuity, nor industry could vanquish; and that was the smoke of London which, except when the wind blew from the South, constantly enveloped my plants".

The new Westminster Bridge and its attendant link roads opened in 1750 and suddenly the fields of Lambeth were a new development opportunity for builders. By 1826 a Lambeth historian observed that, 'Buildings, or what may more properly be termed the tumbling up of tumbledown houses, are so rapidly increasing that in a year or two there will scarcely be a green space for the resort of the inhabitants'.

William Blake and his wife Catherine came to Lambeth in the autumn of 1790, leaving the built up streets of Westminster for the less developed south side of the river. They moved into a comparatively spacious three-storey house, no.13 Hercules Buildings. Blake's trade as an engraver required light for his drawing and close work, and space to accommodate his rolling press that filled a whole room. The new Lambeth house provided affordable light and space. It also provided him for the first time with a garden, to which he brought a vine and a fig tree. Blake combined his gifts of poet, artist and engraver in The Songs of Experience, the first complete work that Blake printed at Hercules Buildings in 1794. Blake's London is actually Blake's Lambeth, the narrow riverside streets south of the church and Lambeth Palace like Prince's Street and Upper Fore Street where new uses were being found for the old houses of Water Lambeth.