OLD KENT ROAD Colour group: brown Purchase price: £60 Rent: £2 Length: 1¾ miles Boroughs:Southwark and Lewisham Postcodes: SE1, SE15
The Monopoly board kicks off with the longest, cheapest and easternmost street, the Old Kent Road, which is also the only location south of the river. Originally this was Watling Street, the Romans' long march to the coast, then a route of medieval pilgrimage and today it's a useful feeder to B&Q. Along its length are minor shops, long blocks of flats, community cafes, vast retail sheds, newly-rising towers, umpteen barber shops, a few historicalleftovers and a character that continually changes all the way down. Rents are a lot higher than £2 these days, but even now it's still in the right place on the board.
The Old Kent Road starts at the Bricklayers Arms roundabout where preferential traffic gets to glide in across a divisive concrete flyover. On one side are Supreme Care Services Ltd and Stephanie's Multicentre, on the other a well-fortified primary school, and ducking underneath is a chunky-looking subway. There are only two Lidl supermarkets on the Monopoly board, both of them on the Old Kent Road, and here's the first. As for the first blocks of flats - Waleran, Kingsley and Dover - these are late Victorian greybrick monsters with chilly-looking open stairwells all the way up to the sixth storey. And just beyond Kingsley, set back apologetically from the road, is the oldest house on the street.
House: The White House(155 Old Kent Road)
It's astonishing to find a detached villa built in 1795 squished inbetween all this later development. It has a steeply pitched roof, a sloping front lawn (designed to hide the basement underneath) and is painted in stucco, hence the nickname The White House. It was the home of Michael Searles, surveyor to the Rolls Estate which owned much of Bermondsey back when all this was fields. The Rolls were originally a Monmouthshire family and their most famous descendant, a century later, would be Charles Rolls the daredevil aviator and joint founder of Rolls-Royce. But he never lived here, and these days the White House is occupied by The Church Of The Living God, Pillar And Foundation Of The Truth, The Light Of The World. They only use the last five words on the sign outside, thankfully, which sits just behind the listed railings.
Hotel: Eurotraveller Hotel-Premier(194-202 Old Kent Road)
This understated 53 bed hotel runs at height above a row of restaurants, and is part new-build and part conversion behind what looks like a Victorian shopfront. If a foreign tourist were to read its website they might think the so-called Eurotraveller Hotel-Premier (Tower Bridge) was at the heart of things and close to many major tourist attractions. Instead its namesake Tower Bridge is a mile away and "The Houses of Parliaments", the Southbank and the London Eye further still. Reception contains a row of leatherette armchairs and a suspiciously pyramidal conifer. I see they have considerable availability for tonight at sub-£100 prices so maybe the London Dungeon is worth the walk.
This first stretch of the Old Kent Road is mostly shops - generally nothing recognisably chain. Some are really narrow, crammed into a subdivision of a normal unit because that's all you need for phone repairs or old school tailoring. Available cuisine includes Ethiopian, Lebanese, Somali and French, but if you prefer trad English then rest assured Ozzie's cafe serves up a variety of set breakfasts all priced at £7.90. The Milk Bar isn't a similar throwback but a coffee shop specialising in milkshakes and Algerian pastries, plus grilled chicken and merguez for the lunchtime crowd. Fading adverts at height occasionally reveal what buildings used to be, so The Redeemed Church Of God Mount Zion (The Dwelling Place Of God) was formerly Wells the Quality Furnishers.
The first pub on the Old Kent Road is the Dun Cow, except no that's now a doctor's surgery. The second, now a Vietnamese restaurant, used to be called the Thomas à Becket and was where pilgrims heading to Canterbury paused for refreshment. This location was special because it was once the site of a ford on the River Neckinger and marked the edge of the City of London's legal jurisdiction, as a plaque on the front of the old fire station attests. That in turn is now an antiques centre and fireplace showroom, because a modern fire station has been built just down the road opposite The Lord Nelson, which is now the first pub on the Old Kent Road. I hope you're following this.
The most important 20th century landmarks hereabouts are the entrance to Burgess Park and a ginormous Tesco, whose footprint was pencilled in as the site of the first stop on the Bakerloo line extension. Don't bet on the brown line reaching the brown road in your lifetime, or indeed ever. Beyond here, or rather beyond King Rooster takeaway, the road gets much more residential. On the left are chunky interwar LCC blocks and a single anachronistic Georgian terrace; on the right newbuild flats and an Asda even larger than the previous Tesco. This green shed acts as an overture to a concentrated burst of retail estates - anchor tenants Currys, B&Q and B&M - at the spot where the Old Kent Road was once crossed by the Grand Surrey Canal. This former waterway attracted large amounts of industry to its banks, all long since erased and replaced by ample car parking.
The derelict-looking cuboid on the corner of Peckham Park Road is the former North Peckham Civic Centre, a social hotbed built by Camberwell council in the mid-1960s. Its finest features are three gorgeous ceramic tile friezes by Adam Kossowski illustrating Canterbury pilgrims, monarchs on horseback, Pearly Kings and other characters from the OKR's long history. Alas 'The Civic' closed in 2003 and was subsequently hired by The Everlasting Arms Ministries, who have themselves pulled down the shutters because this site is now destined to host a 38-storey tower. The murals are Grade II listed so will be taken into storage before being 'incorporated' into the new structure, so best see them in situ soon.
Christ Church is unique down this road in that it actually looks like a church rather than a community centre, office block or other conversion. It sits beside the Livesey Museum, an ornate redbrick institution opened in 1870 and reopened by Sir John Betjeman following heavy wartime damage. In its later years the museum was targeted mainly at children, until budget cuts pulled the plug in 2008 and the building is now occupied by a special needs school with 15 pupils. The gasholder visible across the tyre depot is the last remnant of Southwark Gasworks, most of whose site is now occupied by a council waste management facility. I hope the tenants of multiple towers planned along this stretch enjoy its persistent whiff.
A few Victorian buildings survive around the top of Commercial Way, then it's back to retail sheds including that second Lidl I promised, whose car park would have been the site of the second Bakerloo extension station. The Tustin estate looks terribly 1970s with its concrete-arched shopping parade, and this too is due for higher-rise redevelopment, a fate that's already befallen the estate across the road (which is just topping out at 21 storeys). It seems Southwark council are hellbent on rebuilding properties at this end of the Old Kent Road at a rate more prolific than the most entrepreneurial of Monopoly players.
Immediately before the Overground bridge come a pair of splendid Georgian semi-detached houses, stucco-fronted, that'd sit happily in any conservation area. Immediately after the bridge is a final row of shops and a smart turrety pub, The Windsor, which it turns out is only the second option for Monopoly boardcrawlers. And it's here that Old Kent Road morphs silently into New Cross Road. There are no streetsigns, the only clue being that the Cheers Cash & Carry at number 915 is followed by Deptford Ambulance Station at number 1. It's astonishing that the Monopoly board nudges marginally into Lewisham, but the Old Kent Road always was an astonishing street in the first place.
