Kennington is a district in South London, England. It is mainly within the London Borough of Lambeth, running along the boundary with the London Borough of Southwark, a boundary which can be discerned from the early medieval period between the Lambeth and St George's parishes of those boroughs respectively. It is located south of Charing Cross in Inner London and is identified as a local centre in the London Plan. It was a royal manor in the parish of St Mary, Lambeth in the county of Surrey and was the administrative centre of the parish from 1853. Proximity to central London was key to the development of the area as a residential suburb and it was incorporated into the metropolitan area of London in 1855.
Kennington is the location of three significant London landmarks: the Oval cricket ground, the Imperial War Museum, and Kennington Park. Its population at the 2011 United Kingdom census was 15,106.
History Toponymy
Kennington appears in the Domesday Book of 1086 as Chenintune. It is recorded as Kenintone in 1229 and Kenyngton in 1263. Mills (2001) believes the name to be Old English meaning "farmstead or estate associated with a man called Cēna". Another explanation is that it means "place of the King", or "town of the King".
Early history The presence of a tumulus, and other locally significant geographical features, suggest that the area was regarded in ancient times as a sacred place of assembly. According to the Domesday Book it was held by Teodric (Theodoric) the Goldsmith. It contained: 1 hide and 3 virgates; 3 ploughs, of meadow. It rendered £3 annually.Surrey Domesday Book The manor of Kennington was divided from the manor of Vauxhall by the River Effra, a tributary of the River Thames. A smaller river, the River Neckinger, ran along the edge of the northern part of Kennington, approximately where Brook Drive is today (i.e. the brook) still forming the borough boundary. Both rivers have now been diverted into underground culverts.
Edward III gave the manor of Kennington to his oldest son Edward the Black Prince in 1337, and the prince then built a large royal palace in the triangle formed by Kennington Lane, Sancroft Street and Cardigan Street, near to Kennington Cross. In 1377, according to John Stow, John of Gaunt, 1st Duke of Lancaster came to Kennington to escape the fury of the people of London. Geoffrey Chaucer was employed at Kennington as Clerk of Works in 1389. He was paid 2 shillings. Kennington was the occasional residence of Henry IV and Henry VI. Henry VII was at Kennington before his coronation. Catherine of Aragon stayed at Kennington Palace in 1501. In 1531, at the order of King Henry VIII, most of Kennington Palace was dismantled, and the materials were used in the construction of the Palace of Whitehall.
The historical manor of Kennington continues to be owned by the current monarch's elder son (the Prince of Wales, Duke of Cornwall: see Dukes of Cornwall). The Duchy of Cornwall maintains a substantial property portfolio within the area.
18th century
The eighteenth century saw considerable development in Kennington. At the start of the century, the area was essentially a village on the southern roads into London, with a common on which public executions took place. On three dates in 1746, Francis Towneley and sixteen men who had taken part in the Jacobite rising were hanged, drawn and quartered at Kennington Common.
The area was significant enough, however, to be recognised in the Peerage of Great Britain and in 1726, the title Earl of Kennington was assumed by Prince William, Duke of Cumberland.
The development of Kennington came about through access to London, which happened when, in 1750, Westminster Bridge was constructed. In 1751, Kennington Road was built from Kennington Common (as it then was; now Kennington Park) to Westminster Bridge Road.
By the 1770s, the development of Kennington into its modern form was well underway. Terraces of houses were built on the east side of Kennington Road and Cleaver Square (then called Prince's Square) was laid out in 1788.It derived its name from the two houses on Kennington Park Road flanking the entrance to the square, built for Joseph Prince by Michael Searles in the 1760s. The name was changed to Cleaver Square in 1937, named after Mary Cleaver who had owned the land in the 18th century. On Cleaver Square, see further below. Michael Searles, architect and developer, built semi-detached houses along Kennington Park Road in the 1790s.
A fraudster from Camberwell, named Badger, was the last person to be hanged at Kennington Common, in 1799.
19th century The modern street pattern of Kennington was formed by the early nineteenth century. The village had become a semi-rural suburb with grand terraced houses.
In the early nineteenth century, Kennington Common was a place of ill-repute. Various attempts were made by the Grand Surrey Canal to purchase the land to build a canal basin, but all of these failed. Because the area had been so rapidly developed and populated in the second half of the eighteenth century, by the nineteenth century, the Common was no longer used for grazing cattle and other agricultural purposes. It became a rubbish dump, a meeting place for radical crowds and an embarrassment to the area. Common rights were extinguished over one corner of the land and in 1824, St. Mark's Church was built on the site of the gallows. One of the four "Waterloo Churches" of south London, the church was opened by the Archbishop of Canterbury. In 1852, at the initiative of the minister of St. Mark's Church, the Common was enclosed and became the first public park in south London.
Pockets of land between the main roads were built upon in the early nineteenth century. Walcot Square and St Mary's Gardens were laid out in the 1830s on land formerly used as a market garden. Imperial Court, on Kennington Lane, was built in 1836 for the Licensed Victuallers' School. The first stone was laid by Prime Minister William Lamb, 2nd Viscount Melbourne, in the name of King William IV.
The Oval cricket ground was leased to Surrey County Cricket Club from the Duchy of Cornwall in 1845, and the adjacent gasometers (themselves an international sporting landmark) were constructed in 1853.
Dense building and the carving-up of large houses for multiple occupation caused Kennington to be "very seriously over-populated in 1859, when diphtheria appeared" (recorded by Karl Marx in Das Kapital).Willey, Russ; Chambers London Gazetteer; Chambers Harrap (2006); p. 267.
The church of St John the Divine, Kennington, which was to be described by the poet John Betjeman as "the most magnificent church in South London", was designed by George Edmund Street (architect of the Royal Courts of Justice on Strand, London), and was built between 1871 and 1874.
The Durning Library, at Kennington Cross, was designed in 1889 by Sidney R. J. Smith, architect of the Tate Gallery (as it was known before it became Tate Britain), and is a fine example of the Gothic Revival style. The library was a gift to the people of Kennington from Jemina Durning Smith.
A men's public convenience, which had been built opposite in 1898, is now preserved as an arts venue and is likely to have been used by a young Charlie Chaplin who writes in his autobiography of a night when he was locked out of the family room and listened all night to the music in the newly opened White Hart pub, now The Tommyfield. When his mother fell on hard times he was taken with his brother Sydney to another Kennington landmark the old Lambeth Workhouse now the home of the Cinema Museum.
Kennington station was opened as "Kennington (New Street)" in 1890 by the City of London and Southwark Subway, but is in fact on the boundary of Newington, Surrey and Kennington and as such is now in the London Borough of Southwark.
The poverty map of London, created by Charles Booth in 1898–99, identifies a mixture of classifications for the streets of the district; Kennington Park Road, for example, corresponds with the description "Middle class. Well-to-do". Most streets are classified as "Mixed. Some comfortable, others poor". There are also several scattered streets which are considered to be "Poor. 18s. to 21s. a week for a moderate family". The map shows that there existed in the district a great disparity of wealth and comfort between near-neighbours.
20th-century history
Two social forces were at work in Kennington at different times during the twentieth century: decline, and – later – gentrification. Decline began in the early part of the twentieth century. Middle-class households ceased to employ servants and no longer sought the large houses of Kennington, preferring the suburbs of outer London. Houses in Kennington were suited to multiple occupation and were divided into flats and bedsits, providing cheap lodgings for lower-paid workers.
Kennington ceased to be the administrative centre for the Metropolitan Borough of Lambeth (as it then was) in 1908. The Old Town Hall, built on Kennington Road as a vestry hall for the local parish, was not large enough for the council to properly carry out its functions and a new town hall was built in Brixton. The Old Town Hall was the registered office of the Countryside Alliance until September 2015.
In 1913, Maud Pember Reeves selected Kennington for Round About a Pound a Week, which was a survey of social conditions in the district. She found "respectable but very poor people [who] live over a morass of such intolerable poverty that they unite instinctively to save those known to them from falling into it".Mrs Pember Reeves, "Round About a Pound a Week", London, G. Bell and Sons, pp. 39–40.
In an initiative to improve the district, from 1915, the Duchy of Cornwall set about an ambitious project to redevelop land. Courtenay Square, Courtenay Street, Cardigan Street, Denny Street and Denny Crescent were laid out to a design by architects Stanley Davenport Adshead, Stanley Churchill Ramsay and JD Coleridge, in a Neo-Georgian style.
In 1922, Lambeth Hospital on Brook Drive was created from a former workhouse. Under the control of the London County Council, Lambeth Hospital, which had a capacity of 1,250 patients in 1939, was one of the largest hospitals in London. After the National Health Service was formed, Lambeth Hospital became an acute general hospital. In 1976, the North Wing of St. Thomas' Hospital opened; services transferred there, and Lambeth Hospital was closed. A substantial part of the site has today been redeveloped for apartments, although some buildings are occupied by the Lambeth Community Care Centre.
Kennington station was substantially remodelled in 1925 to accommodate the Charing Cross branch of the Northern line along with the improvements to the City and South London Railway to form the Northern line. Because tram and bus routes converged at Kennington, in the 1920s St. Mark's became known as the "tramwayman's church", and Kennington was referred to as the "Clapham Junction of the southern roads".
By 1926, construction of the Belgrave Hospital for Children, designed by Henry Percy Adams and Charles Holden, was complete. The hospital was subsumed within the King's College Hospital Group and closed in 1985. It was restored and converted to apartments in 1994.
In the 1930s, the Duchy of Cornwall continued to redevelop its estate in the district and employed architect Louis de Soissons to design a number of buildings in a Neo-Georgian style.
On 15 October 1940, the large trench air-raid shelter beneath Kennington Park was struck by a 50 lb bomb. The number of people killed remains unknown; it is believed by local historians that 104 people died. Forty-eight bodies were recovered.
The Brandon Estate was endowed in 1962 by the London County Council with Reclining Figure No. 3: a sculpture by Henry Moore.