Led by Ted Litchfield students from St Thomas the Apostle focused on Peckham in the eighteenth century and based their project around the fairs that were a popular source of entertainment in the period. They looked at the background to these fairs and then at fairground design in the past and present before making maquettes for their installation which re-imagines an eighteenth century fair for the present day.
Southwark Fair
In the eighteenth century Peckham developed from a rural village with a farming community of just 600 people into a much more commercialised area. Peckham’s never been slow to exploit its advantages: in the days before refrigeration, food had to be grown close to its final market and Peckham was ideally situated to exploit the large London market on its doorstep.
It became a thriving market gardening area known for its orchards and gardens, and yes, melons did grow in Peckham, along with figs and grapes – if you need any proof, just look at surviving street names like Melon Road. Peckham was also geared up as an important stopping point for cattle drovers taking their livestock to the London market. There were holding facilities for the cattle where they could be safely secured overnight while the needs of the drovers were attended to in the local taverns like the two called the “Kentish Drovers” on the Old Kent Road and in the High Street.
The High Street was also the focal point for Peckham Fair, a three-week long event at its peak, famous for its wild beast and other attractions and a great draw for people from all over the area until its abolition in 1827. There were booths exhibiting four-footed animals of all kinds from bears and monkeys to dancing dogs and learned pigs, and there were human curiosities and performers too like the celebrated Mr Lane who made ‘the grown babies’ in the audience stare ‘like worried cats’ with his ‘snip-snap, rip-rap, crickcrack, and thunder tricks’ like ‘driv[ing] about forty twelve-penny nails into any gentleman's breech, plac[ing] him in a loadstone chair, and draw[ing] them out without the least pain!’ William Hogarth’s engraving (dated 1733) of nearby Southwark Fair, one of England’s most popular fairs held every September from the fifteenth century until 1763 when it was forced to close because of prostitution, drunkenness, and hooliganism, gives a good idea of what the fair must have been like with its heady mix of theatrical performances, freak shows, acrobatic acts, and prizefighting. Novelty was a byword of Southwark Fair, with the famous English stage gladiator James Figg promoting female fighters in the ring along with men, for instance.
Peter Collision
Peckham had its share of celebrated visitors and residents in the eighteenth century: poet, painter, printmaker and visionary William Blake famously had a vision of angels in a tree on Peckham Rye; poet and writer Oliver Goldsmith worked as a junior schoolmaster in Peckham; and naturalist and scientist Peter Collinson, who was fascinated by the potential of electricity and passed his passion on to his friend Benjamin Franklin, lived here. Collinson’s real love was gardening, however, and through his business contacts, particularly with North America, he obtained samples of seeds and plants from around the world. After building up his own personal plant collections, first at Peckham and later at Mill Hill, he began to import North American botanical seeds for English collectors to grow.
Peckham is linked with another supposed North American import in the eighteenth century. It’s credited with the early development of the barbecue in a pamphlet written in 1707 by a so-called ‘Grub Street hack’ Ned Ward entitled The Barbacue Feast: or, the Three Pigs of Peckham. Peckham in the eighteenth century was still on the wild side, a stagecoach ride away (with an armed guard to give protection from highwaymen) from the discreet thoroughfares of London, yet no stranger to the raw ingredients of the barbecue. It would seem as if the barbecue may not be an import after all, but that it’s perhaps an invented tradition, which has got more to do with a home-grown taste for the wild and a reaction to stuffy ‘civilisation’ than Native American Indian custom.
Is there life on Mars? Were there barbecues in Peckham? So it would seem!
