The story of one house in Lausanne Road over a century and a half, and of one family who lived there in the 1950s.*
I went looking for the old South London Mission yesterday.
It stood at 39a Lausanne Road and was pretty much just opposite where we lived.
I can’t remember any services being held in the place or if it was used for anything.
But back then I was just too young to take any notice of the building unless of course it offered an adventure.
And there were plenty of other places that offered that mix of edgy opportunities and hours of endless fun.
Of these the crypt on the site of St Mary’s Church was just one of those places. The entrance was boarded up but all too often it was open to anyone who had the courage and a candle to venture down its damp and smelly stairs.
Of course there was nothing to see. No treasure, no dark secrets just that musty smell and the echoing sounds of the kids in front exploring one of the corridors.
It was one of those meeting places where total strangers became friends united by a common sense of purpose and the vain hope that we would turn up something which it never did and if I am honest its attractions were limited.
It had been destroyed by a landmine in 1940 and was rebuilt in 1962, not that I remember that rebuild and now my fondest memory is one from dad who was doomed in one of those awful fogs of the 1950s to have walked around the island looking for the bit of St Mary’s that would have taken him to Belfort Road and home.
I suppose the real reason I didn’t like the place was that simple one of feeling uncomfortable in enclosed spaces which did me no favours when I was taken down Seaham Colliery in the early 1970s.
Hundreds of feet down and three miles out under the North Sea was not my idea of an adventure, but you don’t turn down the invitation of the chief mechanical engineer of the pit who was my prospective father in law.
But that as they say is another story for another place.
A more happy play ground was Telegraph Park which had all that a nine year old could want.
It began with that vast expanse of grass which stretched away from the entrance and which at the top along the Pepys Road side provided a secret rat run where you could creep through bushes and trees undetected from view.
But my favourite must have been the small dusty enclosure which might once have been a pond but long ago had been turned into a play area with that hollowed out tree trunk which became everything from a tank to the conning tower of a submarine.
Sadly magical places fade and by the time we were making our way up to Samuel Pepys the park was just a place to walk through. I doubt I even gave much thought to what was left of the band stand and only remember that expanse of grass with its slope as the place in the big freeze of 1962/3 where we hauled up park benches to slide back down over the frozen ground.
All of which is a long way from the church hall and is beginning to border on nostalgia so I shall go looking again for the South London Mission.
I have written off to the one in Bermondsey and just maybe someone will have a picture.
We shall see.
Pictures; St Mary’s Church, 1906,from Parish Churches** and Telegraph Hill Park, circa 1904, M G Bacchus, Telegraph Hill Society, http://thehill.org.uk/society/Telegraph.htm
*The story of one house in Lausanne Road, http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/The%20story%20of%20one%20house%20in%20Lausanne%20Road
** Parish Churches - Church of England, http://www.peckhamhistory.org.uk/churchesCofE.htm
***Ideal Homes; http://www.ideal-homes.org.uk/lewisham/assets/galleries/new-cross/telegraph-hill-park-2
 |
| St Mary's Church, 1906 |
It stood at 39a Lausanne Road and was pretty much just opposite where we lived.
I can’t remember any services being held in the place or if it was used for anything.
But back then I was just too young to take any notice of the building unless of course it offered an adventure.
And there were plenty of other places that offered that mix of edgy opportunities and hours of endless fun.
Of these the crypt on the site of St Mary’s Church was just one of those places. The entrance was boarded up but all too often it was open to anyone who had the courage and a candle to venture down its damp and smelly stairs.
Of course there was nothing to see. No treasure, no dark secrets just that musty smell and the echoing sounds of the kids in front exploring one of the corridors.
It was one of those meeting places where total strangers became friends united by a common sense of purpose and the vain hope that we would turn up something which it never did and if I am honest its attractions were limited.
It had been destroyed by a landmine in 1940 and was rebuilt in 1962, not that I remember that rebuild and now my fondest memory is one from dad who was doomed in one of those awful fogs of the 1950s to have walked around the island looking for the bit of St Mary’s that would have taken him to Belfort Road and home.
I suppose the real reason I didn’t like the place was that simple one of feeling uncomfortable in enclosed spaces which did me no favours when I was taken down Seaham Colliery in the early 1970s.
Hundreds of feet down and three miles out under the North Sea was not my idea of an adventure, but you don’t turn down the invitation of the chief mechanical engineer of the pit who was my prospective father in law.
But that as they say is another story for another place.
 |
| Telegraph Hill Park, 1904 |
It began with that vast expanse of grass which stretched away from the entrance and which at the top along the Pepys Road side provided a secret rat run where you could creep through bushes and trees undetected from view.
But my favourite must have been the small dusty enclosure which might once have been a pond but long ago had been turned into a play area with that hollowed out tree trunk which became everything from a tank to the conning tower of a submarine.
Sadly magical places fade and by the time we were making our way up to Samuel Pepys the park was just a place to walk through. I doubt I even gave much thought to what was left of the band stand and only remember that expanse of grass with its slope as the place in the big freeze of 1962/3 where we hauled up park benches to slide back down over the frozen ground.
All of which is a long way from the church hall and is beginning to border on nostalgia so I shall go looking again for the South London Mission.
I have written off to the one in Bermondsey and just maybe someone will have a picture.
We shall see.
Pictures; St Mary’s Church, 1906,from Parish Churches** and Telegraph Hill Park, circa 1904, M G Bacchus, Telegraph Hill Society, http://thehill.org.uk/society/Telegraph.htm
*The story of one house in Lausanne Road, http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/The%20story%20of%20one%20house%20in%20Lausanne%20Road
** Parish Churches - Church of England, http://www.peckhamhistory.org.uk/churchesCofE.htm
***Ideal Homes; http://www.ideal-homes.org.uk/lewisham/assets/galleries/new-cross/telegraph-hill-park-2
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