To conclude this year's selection of festive streets, here are both ends of the donkey's journey.
Nazareth Gardens SE15
Sometimes I research an interestingly-named street in advance but sometimes I just turn up, and in this case I did the latter. According to my London A-Z no other thoroughfare is named after Mary and Joseph's hometown so I simply located it, planned a route there and blundered in. It's in Peckham, not far from Peckham Rye station, and is tucked into the V-shaped notch where the two eastbound railway tracks diverge. Hop aboard a train heading towards Nunhead and you can see it out of the window, and perhaps you can already identify something institutional about Nazareth Gardens. I realised none of this when I turned up.
The only access is from Gordon Road, because we have yet another cul-de-sac on our hands here. The site looks fairly incongruous from the front, dominated by a substantial block of potential council housing, though with a larger than necessary arched entrance in the centre. Nazareth Gardens wends round the right hand side past wheelie bins, private parking notices, communal doors with buzzers and a tabby cat sitting defensively in front of an empty cardboard carton. I cannot guarantee that the cat will be there if you visit, nor indeed the carton. Appropriately some wag has scribbled 'Jesus of' on the street sign.
Round the corner is a large space given over to parking surrounded by old flats and two terraces of postwar townhouses. If you've ever wanted to live above your garage in the shadow of a tall railway viaduct, the latter are for you. But it's the back of the older flats that's most intriguing, now seen to be linked together to form three sides of a square. On the crosslink a covered palisade crosses at first floor level, and at the focal point is a small ornamental garden with four scattered benches. It felt like there really ought to be a plaque or information board somewhere but I didn't find one, and only when I got home did I discover that what this place really used to be.
It's another workhouse, and also a nunnery, and it turns out you'd need a cluster of information boards to properly cover the backstory of this backwater. The nuns came first, 175 years ago this month, from a French order called The Sisters of the Christian Retreat. They liked the peace and quiet of rural Peckham, at least until the arrival of the London, Chatham and Dover Railway shattered the peace so they sold their chapel and moved out. In 1867 Camberwell's Board of Guardians took over and instead used the site to house elderly and infirm male paupers. Over 100 poor men worked as farmhands cultivating pigs, poultry and vegetables - a relatively cushy life "involving no severe physical toil" - at least until Victorian society demanded something tougher.
In 1878 the Guardians constructed a new workhouse on Gordon Road, morphing the old convent into a central administrative block and connecting it via covered walkways to two pavilion dormitory blocks. Inmates were now expected to perform hard manual tasks like stone-breaking and wood-chopping, or heavy laundry for the ladies, and over 700 able-bodied inmates were crammed inside the institution's walls. Life was relentlessly grim. Workhouses were officially abolished in the UK in 1930 but Peckham's continued as Camberwell Reception Centre, one of the largest homeless hostels in the country. George Orwell is thought to have checked in incognito while researching Down And Out In Paris and London. Ownership passed to the National Assistance Board in 1948.
If you were homeless in London in the 1950s or 60s then Gordon Road, or 'the Spike', was likely where you'd end up. Doors opened at 4pm each afternoon and inmates were expected to queue up to follow official admission procedures even if they'd stayed here the previous night. Those deemed suitably destitute were allowed in, initially to the bathhouse for an obligatory disinfection, then to an 'interview' where promising to knuckle down and look for a job would be rewarded with tickets for a meal and a bed. The 8 dormitories each housed 140 inmates, many in a fractious mental state so a good night's sleep would have been a rarity. In the morning residents had to present cleanshaven to be granted breakfast, which merely encouraged a black market in razor blades, and after doing chores would be sent out to the labour exchange to fail to get a job. Victor's published an illuminating account of life at the Spike in 1965 here.
Camberwell Reception Centre finally closed in 1985 and good riddance. A housing association then took over the site, their plans slowed by a mysterious fire in 1991 which destroyed the roof and top floor of the original convent building. Then in 1999 an old doss house at the rear of the triangular site was squatted by locals who ultimately created a flourishing creative community. They called it The Spike Surplus and it offered studio space, rehearsal facilities, craft options and a community garden. Southwark council initially turned a blind eye, then charged a peppercorn rent, then got stroppy and sent the bailiffs in, bolting the gates shut after 10 years. One of The Spike Surplus's final projects was to summarise 160 years of history in a 15 minute video which you can watch here, and if you listen carefully you'll even hear performer Kae Tempest before they got famous.
Their squat has since become Holdron Street, a vernacular newbuild corridor, which I only photographed on my visit because it included a festively-appropriate sign saying 'Stable Yard'. As for the buildings of the old Camberwell Reception Centre proper, the pissy dormitories became 40 housing association flats and the old convent building turned into 17 more. And it's that original convent which first took the name Nazareth House in 1848, a title which has somehow carried through the years and is the ultimate reason why this extraordinary backroad is called Nazareth Gardens. You knew we'd get there in the end.
Bethlehem Close UB6
London also has just one street named after Bethlehem, out Perivale way, and it's only seven years old. The tale of its origin is unsurprisingly religious in nature and turns out to involve four different church buildings. The first is St Mary's, a delightful 13th century flintchurch beside the River Brent, whose congregation dwindled after it found itself the wrong side of the Western Avenue dual carriageway. The second is its 1935 replacement, St Nicholas, which first occupied a community-built hall on the other side of the A40 in Federal Road. A permanent church was needed and this finally appeared immediately in front of the old church/hall in 1965. Architect Lawrence King designed a classicpostwar church with a glass lantern rising to a shallow point, all topped off by a copper roof. It looked great but proved a nightmare to maintain, especially as the congregation slowly dwindled. So between 2014 and 2016 they knocked it down and built this.
The new St NicholasChurch is on the right, a double height space doubling up as the footing of a block of flats. Its parishioners once again worship in what looks like a church hall, this being considerably more sustainable, and come together every Thursday for an exercise class followed by Bible study followed by lunch. They also have a full immersion pool for baptism, which the Reverend Natasha will no doubt be putting to good use when she becomes the new vicar in at the end of February. There are ten flats upstairs, hopefully suitably soundproofed in both directions. These form part of the portfolio which helped fund the new church to the tune of £3.5m, all either for affordable rent or shared ownership. The others wend down the cul-de-sac to the left and this, at last, is Bethlehem Close.
It's essentially the road to the car park, because even here in Perivale it's more essential to have somewhere for ten vehicles than to squeeze in a couple more houses. Numbers 1-3 Bethlehem Close form a modern terrace with integral solar panels and front gardens barely one bin wide. Number 4 is separate and looks more like a church hall, but they don't need one of those any more, remember, so it's actually because it's been designed as a wheelchair accessible flat. And yes the street is much less interesting than the church, but remember this street is effectively two of the old churches reborn, oh little townhouses of Bethlehem.
That'll do for Christmas 2023, but don't think I've run out of festive streetnames yet, and who knows what's lying in wait to be discovered there...
