Carlton Grove One-Place Study

The One-Place Study for Carlton Grove Peckham SE15, where I grew up, is an open ended piece of research that will look at the houses in an area of Peckham (4 roads and parts of the 3 roads which bound the area) which was built in the second half of the 19th century (roughly 1870-1890) and demolished in 1960/1 to make way for a new council estate known as “The Acorn Estate”. The area included Honiton Street (formerly Clarkson Place), Shard Road, Acorn Place and Pemell’s Place and was bounded by Meeting House Lane to the West and North, Carlton Grove to the East and Peckham High Street/Queens Road to the South. The original streets contained just over 300 houses and shops.

Starting with the census returns and then using electoral registers, the Lloyd George valuation survey of 1910 and street directories for the area I hope to build up a database for each house and its occupants, their occupations and family structures.

The area of Peckham north of Queens Road consisted of market gardens until about 1840 when a network of terraces called New Peckham began to be laid out.

As the 19th century drew to a close the last of the market gardens and fields vanished under housing developments. The real spur for residential building in this area of south London came with the arrival of the railways with Queens Road station opening in 1866 and also following the 1870 Act of Parliament which allowed tram services in London, with one of the first five lines running from Blackheath to Vauxhall and going along Peckham Road and Queen’s Road.