Old Kent Road - Preliminary Visuals

Pictures from a recent jaunt.

Theivery, Hanging, Early Capitalism and The Old Kent Road

After an intense OKR chat with Molly, I've gone back to an older idea and picked up the threads a little.

I'd been looking at the history of the road, which even to my cursory research had yielded plenty. Historian Edward Walford's chapter on The Old Kent Road in 'London Old and New' has loads of information about the area up to the mid 1800s. Originally was originally a Roman Road, it the main thoroughfare from Kent and the Continent, and the route of Charles II's 1660 post-exile return to the Throne:

"This day his Majesty Charles II came to London after a sad and long exile, and calamitous suffering... This was also his birthday, and with a triumph of about 20,000 horse and foote, brandishing their swords and shouting with inexpressible joy; the wayes strew'd with flowers, the bells ringing, the streets hung with tapestrie, fountaines running with wine: the Maior, Aldermen, and all the Companies in their liveries, chaines of gold, and banners; lords and nobles clad in cloth of silver, gold, and velvet; the windows and balconies well set with ladies; trumpets, music, and myriads of people flocking even so far as from Rochester, so as they were seven hours in passing into the Citty, even from two in the afternoon till nine at night."

The odd royal tickertape parade notwithstanding, the road was always a deeply 'unfashionable thoroughfare', noted for having a high concentration of inns and taverns. One notable establishment with the Thomas a Watering, later the Thomas a Beckett, name-checked in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, and the local place of execution. From Tudor times, till the mid 1700s, people were hung, drawn and quartered just opposite where Tesco is now. In one case, an unfortunate who had been quartered elsewhere had one of his quarters displayed outside the pub as a grisly visual warning from afar.

The Vicar of Wandsworth, his chaplain and two others were hung, drawn and quartered here in 1539 for refusing to recognise King Henry VIII as God's own representative during the break from Rome, but on the whole people were executed for crimes against property.

Five men were hung in 1650 for burglary and pickpocketing, one being a 'gentyllman'; the son of a Lord was executed for theft in 1556; and five men hung together in 1559, again for a 'grett robere done'.

Basically, we're now getting at one of the most interesting things about this. Apart from the four individuals hung for treason, all the reasons for exeuctions which Walford specifically lists are theft, robbery or pickpocketing. People were executed for breaking the relatively newly structured property laws. Rather than take someone's life, the ultimate trangression was to take someone's belongings. Capital punishment - in the form of public executions, in which the heads and parts of the bodies were displayed as they rotted - was a gruesome spectacle which inflicted more sophisticated ideas about private property firstly on the body of the individual and secondly on the imagination of the viewing public.

There's a book, The London Hanged, which goes into far more detail on the relationship between hanging and the development of early capitalism. Looking forward to digging further.

All quotes from:
'The Old Kent Road', Old and New London: Volume 6 (1878), pp. 248-255. URL: http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=45279 Date accessed: 19 September 2011

The Situationists and the Old Kent Road

'Make petrified conditions dance by singing them their own tune.. don't call us, do it yourself!'

The tagline at the top of the Bureau of Public Secrets website articulates very nicely a project we've been working on. It's about the Old Kent Road, which we've all lived or live near and have driven, ridden and walked up and down too many times to count. The magazine or booklet or whatever it ends up being will be part objectiv and part romantic, some essays and some pictures. I don't think it'll matter whether it's the decriptude or the sly beauty of the Road that it ends up waffling on about.

Hopelessly sentimental as it may be, I love the idea of singing the Old Kent Road its own song, reflective of its oddball alliances (the churches sitting above nightclubs is always a favourite) and really rather hidden identity. Empty car-parks and drive-thru take-aways may be all a cursory glance reveals but there are richer and more subtle truths, histories and dynamics at play. I'm just happy to be doing something that challenges the flippant dismissal the area receives at the hands of the rest of London, let alone the sodding Monopoly board.



I went to Foyles to check out the London history section, and amongst the beautifully illustrated tomes on Islington, Camden, Ealing, Hyde Park, Battersea and Clapham, the only book about South East London was a slender seemingly self-published book of oral histories of Bermondsey. Which I'm all for, but what I'm saying is for a entire quarter of London - Peckham, Camberwell, Southwark and Lewisham, Bermondsey - to be so totally overlooked is kind of indicative. Who gives a shit about South East London and the Old Kent Road? If you're looking for caricature Lahndan you're bound to venture further norf to Bow Bells and start banging on about the Krays and the Old East End. Even the Victorian writers who went undercover to expose the truth about how the 'other half' lived did so in the East End. And obviously once you've made a concession to slum dwellers in your overview of London, you'll be back to looking at the gratuitously, historically picturesque, the Cheyne Walks, the Hampstead Villages, the Eel Pie Islands. And again, I'm not slagging off the obviously pretty, I'm just saying our corner of South East London deserves its own songs to be sung at it too..

Through the Bureau of Public Secrets, I've found a Guy Debord essay called Critique of Urban Geography from 1955. I think what these situationists were talking about in terms of urbanism foreshadows today's fashion for psychogeography, and I kind of have the feeling their ideas and aims might align really rather nicely with ours.