Editing Kennington (section)

==History==
===Toponymy===
{{see also|Street names of Kennington and Lambeth}}
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".<ref>{{cite book|author=Mills, Anthony David|year=2001|title=Dictionary of London Place Names|publisher=[[Oxford University Press]]|isbn=0-19-280106-6}}</ref> Another explanation is that it means "place of the King", or "town of the King".<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.lambeth.gov.uk/Services/AboutLambeth/LambethByLocalArea/NorthLambethHistory.htm |title=North Lambeth&nbsp;— history &#124; Lambeth Council |publisher=Lambeth.gov.uk |access-date=29 March 2012 |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20120316220346/http://www.lambeth.gov.uk/Services/AboutLambeth/LambethByLocalArea/NorthLambethHistory.htm |archive-date=16 March 2012  }}</ref>

===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 (unit)|hide]] and 3 [[virgate]]s; 3 [[plough]]s, {{convert|4|acre|m2}} of [[meadow]]. It rendered £3 annually.<ref>[http://www.gwp.enta.net/surrnames.htm Surrey Domesday Book] {{webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20071030192829/http://www.gwp.enta.net/surrnames.htm |date=30 October 2007 }}</ref> The manor of Kennington was divided from the manor of [[Vauxhall]] by the [[River Effra]], a tributary of the [[River Thames]].{{citation needed|date=January 2021}} 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.{{citation needed|date=January 2021}}  Both rivers have now been diverted into underground culverts.{{citation needed|date=January 2021}}
[[File:Chartist meeting on Kennington Common by William Edward Kilburn 1848 - restoration1.jpg|thumb|Chartist meeting on Kennington Common in 1848]]

[[Edward III of England|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|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 of England|Henry IV]] and [[Henry VI of England|Henry VI]]. [[Henry VII of England|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]].<ref name="british-history1">{{cite web |url=http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=45285 |title=Stockwell and Kennington &#124; Old and New London: Volume 6 (pp. 327–341) |publisher=British-history.ac.uk |date=22 June 2003 |access-date=29 March 2012 |url-status=live |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20120329083721/http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=45285 |archive-date=29 March 2012  }}</ref>{{failed verification|date=January 2021}}

The historical manor of Kennington continues to be owned by the current monarch's elder son (the [[Prince of Wales]], Duke of Cornwall: see [[Duchy of Cornwall|Dukes of Cornwall]]). The Duchy of Cornwall maintains a substantial property portfolio within the area.<ref name="british-history1"/>

===18th century===
[[File:St Mark's Church, Kennington 20 Feb 2022.jpg|thumb|left|Plaque at [[St Mark's Church, Kennington]] in 2022]]
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 of 1745|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.

[[File:Kennington Road - geograph.org.uk - 175708.jpg|thumb|Kennington Road was constructed in 1751, and houses were soon built along it.]]

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.<ref>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.</ref> [[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,<ref>{{cite web |url=http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=49755 |title=Kennington – Common land &#124; Survey of London: volume 26 (pp. 31–36) |publisher=British-history.ac.uk |access-date=15 August 2013 |url-status=live |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20130912211320/http://british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=49755 |archive-date=12 September 2013  }}</ref> 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.

[[File:Walcot Square Lambeth - geograph.org.uk - 1635424.jpg|thumb|Walcot Square was, like most of Kennington's 19th-century development, built in the gaps between main roads.]]
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 [[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]]'').<ref>Willey, Russ; ''Chambers London Gazetteer''; Chambers Harrap (2006); p.&nbsp;267</ref>

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.

[[File:St john divine kennington nave.jpg|thumb|The nave of St John the Divine, Kennington]]

The [[Durning Library]], at [[Kennington Cross]], was designed in 1889 by S. Sidney R. J. Smith, architect of the Tate Gallery (as it then was; now [[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 [[ArtsLav|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.<ref>{{cite book | title=My Autobiography | publisher=Penguin | author=Chaplin, Charles | author-link = Charles Chaplin|year=2003 | pages=28–31 | isbn=978-0141011479}}</ref> When his mother fell on hard times he was taken with his brother [[Sydney Chaplin|Sydney]] to another Kennington landmark the old Lambeth Workhouse now the home of the [[Cinema Museum (London)|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 (philanthropist)|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".<ref>{{cite web |url=http://booth.lse.ac.uk/cgi-bin/do.pl?sub=view_booth_and_barth&m.l=1&m.d.l=0&m.p.x=8297&m.p.y=8810&m.p.w=500&m.p.h=309&m.p.l=0&m.t.w=128&m.t.h=80&b.v.x=399&b.v.y=88&b.p.x=14028&b.p.y=12554&b.p.w=500&b.p.h=309&b.p.l=1&b.p.p.l=2 |title=Booth Poverty Map & Modern map (Charles Booth Online Archive) |publisher=Booth.lse.ac.uk |access-date=29 March 2012 |url-status=live |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110427161751/http://booth.lse.ac.uk/cgi-bin/do.pl?sub=view_booth_and_barth |archive-date=27 April 2011  }}</ref> The map shows that there existed in the district a great disparity of wealth and comfort between near-neighbours.

===20th-century history===
[[File:Kennington War Memorial, Kennington Park, London SE11 - geograph.org.uk - 391636.jpg|thumb|Kennington War Memorial]]
Two social forces were at work in Kennington at different times during the twentieth century: decline, and&nbsp;– later&nbsp;– 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, Kennington Road|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.<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/company/05669451/filing-history|title = THE COUNTRYSIDE ALLIANCE FOUNDATION - Filing history (Free information from Companies House)}}</ref>

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".<ref>Mrs Pember Reeves, "Round About a Pound a Week", London, G. Bell and Sons, pp. 39–40</ref>

[[File:Courtenay Square - geograph.org.uk - 1182357.jpg|thumb|Courtenay Square was part of the Duchy of Cornwall's major redevelopment of part of the district in the early twentieth century.]]
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 Adshead|Stanley Davenport Adshead]], [[Stanley Ramsey|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 (area)|Clapham Junction]] of the southern roads".<ref>See [2]</ref>

By 1926, construction of the [[Belgrave Hospital for Children]], designed by [[Henry Percy Adams (architect)|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&nbsp;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]].

[[St Agnes Place]] was a street of mid-Victorian terraces built for the servants of [[Buckingham Palace]].<ref>{{cite news |author=Douglas Rogers |url=https://www.theguardian.com/society/2005/dec/01/g2 |title=Eight years in St Agnes Place &#124; Society |work=The Guardian |date=1 December 2005 |access-date=15 August 2013 |location=London |url-status=live |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20131002204530/http://www.theguardian.com/society/2005/dec/01/g2 |archive-date=2 October 2013  }}</ref> Lambeth Council had decided to demolish the street to extend Kennington Park and the houses were empty by the late 1960s. In 1969, squatters moved into one of the houses and later entered the other empty properties and established a Rastafari temple. The street became London's longest-running squat. From 1977, Lambeth Council sought to evict the squatters and eventually succeeded at the High Court in 2005. The houses and the temple were declared to be unfit for human habitation and were pulled down in 2007. The Kennington Park Extension now covers much of the site.

Lambeth Council designated much of Kennington a [[Conservation Area]] in 1968, the boundary of which was extended in 1979 and in 1997. Lambeth Council's emphasis on conserving and protecting Kennington's architectural heritage and enhancing its attractive open spaces for recreation and leisure is illustrated by restoration of the centre of the listed Cleaver Square in the last decade of the twentieth century. Originally grassed over in the 1790s, the centre of Cleaver Square had by the 1870s become a garden circumscribed by a formal path, but by 1898 it had been cultivated as a nursery with greenhouses. In 1927 the centre of Cleaver Square was acquired by the London County Council to forestall a proposal to build on it, and more trees were then planted and the garden was gravelled over as a recreation ground. During the war years, in particular, the recreation area became somewhat derelict but during the 1950s Cleaver Square's inherent charm was recognised anew and its fortunes once more began to rise. In 1995, Lambeth Council resolved, with the backing of English Heritage, a grant from the [[Heritage Lottery Fund]], and donations from residents of [[Cleaver Square]], to restore the centre of the square to provide once again an attractive and peaceful public space for the people of Kennington.<ref>Cliff Baylis CB, Chairman of the Cleaver Square Residents' Association from 1993 to his death in 1998, was instrumental in ensuring this initiative became a reality.</ref> In the summer months many people from Kennington and further afield play [[pétanque]] in the centre of the square.

===21st-century gentrification===
In recent years, Kennington has experienced [[gentrification]], principally because of its location and good transport links to the [[West End of London|West End]] and the [[City of London]]. In ''London: A Social History'',<ref>London: A Social History (London, 1994; 1996; 2000)</ref> [[Roy Porter]] describes how "Victorian villas in&nbsp;... Kennington, long debased by use as lodging-houses, were transformed into luxury flats for young professionals or snips for first-time buyers&nbsp;– or were repossessed by the class of family for whom they had first been built"; and "Chambers London Gazetteer"<ref>See ref. [2]</ref> observes the "reuniting of formerly subdivided properties" as "decline is being reversed".

It is difficult to identify a single defining reason for this change. The principal factors are location and transport. The good architectural and structural quality of many properties in Kennington&nbsp;– characterised by Georgian and Victorian terraces of yellow [[London stock brick]], typically three storeys or higher, fronting the main roads and squares&nbsp;– has unquestionably contributed to the gentrification of the area. Nevertheless, a significant proportion of housing in the area is council-owned, including some council estates adjacent to Kennington Lane, leading up to Elephant and Castle, and around the Kennington Park area. In the twenty-first century there has been an ongoing programme by Lambeth Council of upgrading its stock of housing and in many cases improving its external appearance. The area's varied social texture demonstrates the population mix.