Working with Heather Martin students from the Harris Academy at Peckham looked at Peckham in the nineteenth century, concentrating on the changing landscape as Peckham went from being rural to urban. Zoetropes, an early form of animation developed in the period, were chosen as a way to represent the shifting landscape. Students created and then dressed paper dolls which were articulated with joints ready for animation and maps were used as the backdrop for the moving figures.
In the nineteenth century Peckham went from being a village surrounded by fields where people worked on farms, in market gardens or in the brickfields, to being a bustling suburb of London with a sevenfold increase in population. The rise of industry, the advent of public transport and the arrival of new business sparked an unparalleled period of housing development in Peckham which saw the last of the market gardens and fields built over for good and green space at a premium by the end of the century.
The early part of the century saw the development of grand houses for the middle classes along Peckham Rye and in New Peckham. This period didn't last very long. Peaceful life began to be disrupted in 1833 when a gas works opened on the Old Kent Road. While it lit some local roads it was many years before most homes had gas. Improved transport and the 'Workman's Fare' meant that travelling to work from Peckham became easier. As the transport system improved more people were able to move out to the suburbs and in the second half of the century Peckham had become the place of the aspiring working classes to live.
New roads began to extend from Peckham to Camberwell over the fields and a branch of the Grand Surrey Canal was built. In 1851 Thomas Tilling introduced a revolutionary new bus service from Peckham to the West End with set stopping points and a fixed timetable. Nicknamed ‘The Times’ buses because they ran on time, Tilling’s buses soon dominated the scene. With the arrival of the railway at Peckham Rye fourteen years later in 1865 and the introduction of horse-drawn trams less than ten years after that, Peckham became accessible to artisans and clerical staff working in the City and the docks. With the railways came the speculative builders and soon the remaining fields and market gardens were built over and lost forever as Peckham became part of the metropolis.
With the abolition of Peckham Fair in 1827 and the gradual filling in of almost all the fields around, Peckham’s residents were in danger of running out of places of outdoor entertainment. To save it from developers and secure it as an open space for ever, the Vestry of Camberwell St Giles bought Peckham Rye in 1868 and maintained it as common land. The common had a large pond and was enormously popular. Within less than thirty years it had become so dangerously overcrowded on Sundays and bank holidays that the Vestry decided to extend it by buying neighbouring Homestall Farm and opening it as Peckham Rye Park. The sale of Homestall Farm in the closing years of the century marked the end of the tradition of farming in Peckham.
Peckham residents developed new forms of entertainment. High on the list was shopping. With the influx of younger residents with money to spend Rye Lane became a major shopping street. Jones & Higgins opened a small shop there in 1867 which was to become the best known department store in south London for many years. Theatres were also popular, the Crown Theatre (which later became the Peckham Hippodrome) one of many that opened in the second half of the century.
As Peckham became more built up, life became more organised. The Anglican Church came to Peckham in 1814 and the area became well known for its schools, boasting the poet Robert Browning as one of its most famous pupils. It was particularly well-known for its girls’ schools, a big change from the women’s prizefighting contests it hosted the previous century. Schools weren’t just open to the rich: Joseph Lancaster of the British and Foreign Schools Society opened a school for poorer children. In 1893 law and order were given a base when the present police station was built in Peckham High Street.
Peckham didn’t quite lose sight of its wild side in the nineteenth century. In the second half of the century it became home to George Bussey and his family, serial inventors who registered patents for everything from stoppers for jars to fencing helmets, golf equipment, and designs for roller skates. They rose to fame as one of the premier cricket bat makers in the country, supplying bats to legendary cricketer W. G. Grace. Bussey was also fascinated with firearms, had a shooting range alongside his factory, patented several designs for weapons and invented a spring-based system called the gyro trap, an alternative to the clay pigeon discs in use today, which meant live animals no longer had to be used in shooting events.
And then there’s the story of Spring Heeled Jack, the legendary figure able to jump extraordinarily high and said to have terrified residents of South London with his diabolical features, clawed hands and eyes that "resembled red balls of fire". An anonymous “resident of Peckham” wrote to the Lord Mayor of London, Sir John Cowan, in 1838 claiming that Spring Heeled Jack’s exploits were all a hoax, the result of a bet made by “some individuals (of, as the writer believes, the highest ranks of life) … with a mischievous and foolhardy companion, that he durst not take upon himself the task of visiting many of the villages near London in three different disguises — a ghost, a bear, and a devil; and moreover, that he will not enter a gentleman's gardens for the purpose of alarming the inmates of the house. The wager has, however, been accepted, and the unmanly villain has succeeded in depriving seven ladies of their senses’’.
Is there life on Mars? Did Spring Heeled Jack really roam Peckham? What do you think?
