A long forgotten Lewisham Street that disappeared from local maps in the 1950s is about to re-emerge – as Ladywell Park Gardens, the development on a site formerly occupied by the Ladywell Leisure Centre now behind the the Place/Ladywell building.
Ladywell Park was a late Victorian street of terraced houses that ran from Lewisham High Street to Campshill Rd. It was destroyed in World War Two and no trace of it now survives. The badly damaged street was finally demolished in 1957.
In his monumental survey of London, Charles Booth, shipowner and reformer, describes Ladywell Park in 1899 as a street of two and three-storey houses with basements and attics. Many were semi-detached. He writes that there were “very occasional servants, perhaps four or five in the whole road”.
In the Booth survey, Life and Labour of the People in London, the street is colour coded pink – which suggests the people living there were fairly comfortable, with good ordinary earnings. But the survey coments that the area had “gone down”.
Perhaps that is why a small corrugated iron church, St John the Evangelist, an outreach mission of St Mary’s, was built close to the Campshill Rd end of Ladywell Park. It was opened in 1908.
In a local newspaper report, the Sydenham,Forest Hill and Penge Gazette April 13 1910, the Rev CC Weeks who was in charge of the mission said the area attracted “a great deal of wreckage of human life in south London.
“Crowded into a comparatively small area they had much of the flotsam and jetsam of life and in their work they were endeavouring to re-create some of these people in the image of their master.”The church ran a school for mothers, clubs for men and women and a medical mission which dealt with 1,300 cases in a year.
The church was badly damaged in the war and what remained was cleared in 1956 to make way for the Elfrida Hall. This too was demolished a few years ago and a modest block of flats was built on the site.
Plans for Ladywell Park were set out in 1860 on “ground that was originally a nursery garden”. It was a time of rapid social change in Lewisham as the railways arrived (Lewisham 1849 and Ladywell 1857) opening up huge development opportunities on the farmland and market gardens of Lewisham.
The new development – Ladywell Park Gardens – will provide 47 council homes for local families on the housing waiting list and 55 shared ownership properties for people looking to get onto the housing ladder.
The approved plans include 11 wheelchair-accessible homes, as well as a new public garden and children’s play space.The development is part of Lewisham council’s Building for Lewisham programme.
*A big thanks to julian Watson for providing the information for this article
