Lambeth Marsh

Records and maps show that it was a separate village until the early 19th century when the church sold off the land in small pockets, thereby leading to sporadic development of individual houses rather than the grander redevelopments occurring north of the river.

The area originally formed part of the extensive Manor of South Lambeth, which was held by the de Redvers family.

[3] In 1317 King Edward II granted the manor of Vauxhall, Surrey, to Sir Roger d'Amory for his "good services" at the Battle of Bannockburn.

In 1779 William Curtis established his London Botanical Garden on the site of the present-day Mitre Road and Ufford Street, to the south of The Cut.

[4] As the Horwood Map of 1799 shows, by the end of the 18th century Lambeth Marsh was still a predominantly rural area, with people maintaining market gardens.

These fragments exist alongside surviving courts and alleyways characteristic of urban development in the 18th and early 19th centuries.

[5] Waterloo station was built in 1848 and completely changed forever Lambeth Marsh's relationship to its surroundings.

The sheer scale and proximity of the railway created a barrier between the street and the rest of the Lambeth Marsh.

The broad thoroughfare, which, bordered with fitting houses, would make one of the handsomest streets in London, is gorged with vile, rotten tenements, occupied, by merchants who ofttimes pursue the very contrary to innocent callings.

Women appear there in their most unloveley aspect: brazen, slovenly, dishevelled, brawling, muddled with beer or fractious with gin.

The howling of beaten children and kicked dogs, the yells of ballad-singers, death and fire-hunters, and reciters of sham murders and elopements; the bawling recitations of professional denunciators of the Queen, the Royal family, and the ministry; the monotonous jodels of the itinerant hucksters; the fumes of the vilest tobacco, of stale corduroy suits, of oilskin caps, of mildewed umbrellas, of decaying vegetables, of escaping (and frequently surreptitiously tapped) gas, of deceased cats, of ancient fish, of cagmag meat, of dubious mutton pies, and of unwashed, soddened, unkempt, reckless humanity; all these make the night hideous and the heart sick.

The following quote is from "Old and New London" published in 1879: "The regular habitués of the place may be divided into two classes — the various deals and vendors, mostly of "perishable articles", with their regular customers, on the one hand; and on the dealers in miscellaneous goods, and the hundreds of men and boys of the working, and what some people call the "dangerous" classes — irregular customers — among whom may be seen the real British "navvy" as good a specimen of humanity after his kind as one need wish to look upon, whose Sunday morning costume differs only from his week-day in having his boots unlaced."

Many of Vauxhall's streets were destroyed during the construction of the railway to Waterloo station, by German bombing in World War II or ravaged through poor city planning.

[5] In the twentieth century war damage, and subsequent housing redevelopment has significantly changed the historic street patterns and urban scale to the south.

When the Eurostar was announced in the 1980s a wave of speculative property acquisition started, based on developers assumptions that Lower Marsh would be swallowed up by compulsory purchase orders to make way for hotels and car parks.

In 1804, he projected the drainage of Lambeth Marsh which he surveyed on the instructions of the Prince of Wales and the Archbishop of Canterbury.

He tried to raise interest in draining Lambeth Marsh again in 1808 and this time he proposed a tunnel under the Thames from College Lane (roughly in the middle of Jubilee Gardens) to Scotland Yard.

This area contains many business premises and nationally important locations such as St Thomas' Hospital, the London Eye, the Royal National Theatre, the Royal Festival Hall, County Hall, Lambeth Palace, and the Imperial War Museum (strictly this is just over the boundary in London Borough of Southwark).