page_title: Kennington
section_title: 19th century
hierarchical_section_title: Kennington / History / 19th century
caption_attribution_description: English: Walcot Square Lambeth Walcot Square was laid out and the houses erected in 1837–39, the houses are terrace type in yellow stock brick with stucco surrounds to the entrances and a plain coping above the parapets.
context_page_description: Kennington is a district in south London, England. It is mainly within the London Borough of Lambeth, running along the boundary with the London Borough of Southwark, a boundary which can be discerned from the early medieval period between the Lambeth and St George's parishes of those boroughs respectively. It is located 1.4 miles south of Charing Cross in Inner London and is identified as a local centre in the London Plan. It was a royal manor in the parish of St Mary, Lambeth in the county of Surrey and was the administrative centre of the parish from 1853. Proximity to central London was key to the development of the area as a residential suburb and it was incorporated into the metropolitan area of London in 1855.
  Kennington is the location of three significant London landmarks: the Oval cricket ground, the Imperial War Museum, and Kennington Park. Its population at the United Kingdom Census 2011 was 15,106. Kennington is served by Kennington Police Station.
context_section_description: 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, 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.
  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).
  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.
  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 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. When his mother fell on hard times he was taken with his brother Sydney to another Kennington landmark the old Lambeth Workhouse now the home of the 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 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". The map shows that there existed in the district a great disparity of wealth and comfort between near-neighbours.
caption: Walcot Square was, like most of Kennington's 19th-century development, built in the gaps between main roads.
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