Mills (2001) believes the name to be Old English meaning "farmstead or estate associated with a man called Cēna".

[3] The presence of a tumulus, and other locally significant geographical features, suggest that the area was regarded in ancient times as a sacred place of assembly.

At the start of the century, the area was essentially a village on the southern roads into London, with a common on which public executions took place.

On three dates in 1746, Francis Towneley and sixteen men who had taken part in the Jacobite rising were hanged, drawn and quartered at Kennington Common.

The area was significant enough, however, to be recognised in the Peerage of Great Britain and in 1726, the title Earl of Kennington was assumed by Prince William, Duke of Cumberland.

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).

[9] 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.

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.

Middle-class households ceased to employ servants and no longer sought the large houses of Kennington, preferring the suburbs of outer London.

Houses in Kennington were suited to multiple occupation and were divided into flats and bedsits, providing cheap lodgings for lower-paid workers.

[11] In 1913, Maud Pember Reeves selected Kennington for Round About a Pound a Week, which was a survey of social conditions in the district.

She found "respectable but very poor people [who] live over a morass of such intolerable poverty that they unite instinctively to save those known to them from falling into it".

A substantial part of the site has today been redeveloped for apartments, although some buildings are occupied by the Lambeth Community Care Centre.

[13] By 1926, construction of the Belgrave Hospital for Children, designed by Henry Percy Adams and Charles Holden, was complete.

In the 1930s, the Duchy of Cornwall continued to redevelop its estate in the district and employed architect Louis de Soissons to design a number of buildings in a Neo-Georgian style.

[14] Lambeth Council had decided to demolish the street to extend Kennington Park and the houses were empty by the late 1960s.

Lambeth Council's emphasis on conserving and protecting Kennington's architectural heritage and enhancing its attractive open spaces for recreation and leisure is illustrated by restoration of the centre of the listed Cleaver Square in the last decade of the twentieth century.

Originally grassed over in the 1790s, the centre of Cleaver Square had by the 1870s become a garden circumscribed by a formal path, but by 1898 it had been cultivated as a nursery with greenhouses.

In 1927 the centre of Cleaver Square was acquired by the London County Council to forestall a proposal to build on it, and more trees were then planted and the garden was gravelled over as a recreation ground.

During the war years, in particular, the recreation area became somewhat derelict but during the 1950s Cleaver Square's inherent charm was recognised anew and its fortunes once more began to rise.

In recent years, Kennington has experienced gentrification, principally because of its location and good transport links to the West End and the City of London.

In London: A Social History,[16] Roy Porter describes how "Victorian villas in ... Kennington, long debased by use as lodging-houses, were transformed into luxury flats for young professionals or snips for first-time buyers – or were repossessed by the class of family for whom they had first been built"; and "Chambers London Gazetteer"[17] observes the "reuniting of formerly subdivided properties" as "decline is being reversed".

The good architectural and structural quality of many properties in Kennington – characterised by Georgian and Victorian terraces of yellow London stock brick, typically three storeys or higher, fronting the main roads and squares – has unquestionably contributed to the gentrification of the area.

In the twenty-first century there has been an ongoing programme by Lambeth Council of upgrading its stock of housing and in many cases improving its external appearance.

Nearest places: Vauxhall, Waterloo, Walworth, Newington (usually known as Elephant and Castle), Stockwell, Camberwell, Brixton, and Lambeth North.

The area attracts young and affluent incomers who fall within the ABC1 demographic strand of the NRS social grade spectrum.

A weekly farmers' market takes place on a Saturday from about 10 am to 3 pm at St. Mark's Church opposite Oval tube station.

"The Gymnastic Society" met regularly at Kennington Common during the second half of the eighteenth century to play football.

The Oval has been labelled with the sobriquet "the Grand Old Lady" in recognition of the significant role the ground has played in the development of modern sport.

Some trains terminate at Kennington (on the Charing Cross branch), but others continue southbound to Morden via Clapham and South Wimbledon.