A day on Asylum Road trying to remember that event 56 years ago

At the entrance

Now sitting in my memory pretty much tucked right at the back is the day I visited the Asylum on Asylum Road.

It will have been 1959 and somehow I had discovered that on that day on what was a pretty indifferent day there was a fun day at the place.

Of course it wouldn’t have been called a Fun Day, but there was that familiar mix of stalls, silly things to do along with popcorn, and gas filled balloons which lifted up into the air and were gone in an instant.

looking across the lawn

I remember spending all my pocket money and then walking the long walk home under the railway bridge on Clifton Road, via Pomeroy Street to Lausanne Road.

So far back into the past was that day that I had come to question if it all happened and no matter how many times I went looking I couldn’t find the place.

And then Adrian Parfitt sent me a set of pictures he had taken so long ago that they were “in an old hard drive that I had forgotten, I don't know if you will recall this place?  It’s Catherine’s Gardens or maybe you might have heard it call the Asylum in Asylum Road at the Old Kent Road end. 

The chapel

I thought that it might be of some interest to you.”

I of course had no idea that this was the Asylum when I wandered in and paid my entrance fee and don’t remember the grand building that was the chapel.

To be honest all I remember is a bit of grass, a brick wall and those gas canisters used to fill the balloons, and the popcorn stall which was the first time I had eaten the stuff.

Detail of the asylum in 1872

"Caroline Gardens Chapel, in Peckham, forms the heart of London’s largest complex of almshouses originally known as the Licensed Victuallers’ Benevolent Institution Asylum.

However, despite being called an “asylum”, the grade-II-listed site was not a home for lunatics. Instead, the word was used in its older sense of “sanctuary” and it was in fact an old folks’ home for retired pub landlords (or “decayed members of the trade” as they were known at the time)."*

During the last war the residents had been moved out and while they returned when the war was over the decision was made to relocate to Buckinghamshire in 1959 and the asylum was sold to Southwark Council in 1960, "which to this day uses it as social housing. 

Southwark renamed it “Caroline Gardens” after Caroline Secker, a former resident and widow of James Secker, who was the marine in the Battle of Trafalgar (1805), said to have caught Nelson when he fell."*

The Asylum

And now there are lots more interesting things happening down at the Chapel, which is home to “an artist lead organisation based in Caroline Gardens Chapel in Peckham, London. 

It was founded in 2010 and is directed by artists Jo Dennis and Dido Hallett. Asylum uses the chapel as a project and exhibition space, hires it out for events and as a location for film and photography.”**

So that rather means that my Fun day may well have been more of a goodbye day.

Either way it is a little mystery that can now be laid to rest a full 56 years after I ate my first bag of popcorn and for that I have Adrian to thank.

Pictures; the Asylum and Caroline Gardens, and detail of the Asylum in 1872 from the OS for London 1862-72, courtesy of Digital Archives Association, http://www.digitalarchives.co.uk/

*Asylum history, http://asylumlondon.org/history/

** Asylum, http://asylumlondon.org/