Burgess Park (Peckham Rye to Elephant and Castle) walk

7.1 km/4.4 mi with negligible ascent/descent and 1 ½ hours net walking time.

An urban route entirely in the London Borough of Southwark, leading through some gritty parts of inner southeast London but largely along green corridors or through parks.

You walk through some quiet streets in North Peckham and along a linear park on the line of the Peckham Branch of the infilled Grand Surrey Canal to Burgess Park, created on land formerly filled by industry around the canal as well as dense housing but heavily bombed in WWII, and now with only a few listed remnants of its industrial and canal heritage, such as almshouses, a well-preserved limekiln and the ‘Bridge to Nowhere’.
You follow a meandering westerly route through Burgess Park to the Camberwell end and the splendid Addington Square, and walk back on a loop through the park and then on further through Walworth with its very large brutalist Aylesbury Estate. From there, the route links up a handful of small and not so small parks, leading eventually to Elephant Park, a new development on the site of the former brutalist Heygate Estate, and to Elephant & Castle Station on the boundary of Newington.

The areas walked through are a mix not atypical of the Borough of Southwark: well-kept parks and open spaces, some old and worn council estates (often of brutalist architecture), plenty of reused or part-replaced former industrial buildings, some new and more enlightened council accommodation as well as some fully gentrified areas, culminating in the still not quite finished Elephant Park.

Terrain & Access: Almost only hard surfaces. The parks and open spaces on the main walk are open 24/7.
Shorter Walks:
- Bus stops are never far away.
- Outbound and return route meet in two places in Burgess Park, enabling cutting off a part of the route.
Extension: A longer loop around Burgess Park’s fishing lake is described (add 450m).
The walk can be combined with #short41 - Nunhead, Honor Oak & Peckham Rye (15.2 km/9.5 mi).

Motown Caffé, Coal Rooms restaurant, café and bar, Persepolis Persian restaurant, The Kentish Drovers, Fowlds Café, Clubhouse Café, Stomping Grounds Café, Burgess Park Angling Club Café, Amigos, HEJ Coffee, Diogenes and the Dog wine bar, several recommended places in Elephant Park and in the railway arches, Elephant and Castle pub, The Rockingham Arms.

Start: Peckham Rye Mainline and Overground
Finish: Elephant & Castle Mainline and Underground

Peckham Rye Station is located in Travelcard Zone 2 and served by the East London Line (Overground), Thameslink and Sutton & Mole Valley services; trains arrive from Dartford, London Bridge, Victoria, Highbury & Islington, Blackfriars, Sevenoaks, West Croydon, Beckenham Junction and Clapham Junction. Elephant & Castle Station is located in Travelcard Zones 1 and 2 and is served by Thameslink services along the Wimbledon Loop line and by trains to Sevenoaks via Catford. The Underground station is served by the Northern Line (Bank branch) as well as being the southerly terminus of the Bakerloo Line.

Grand Surrey Canal

The Grand Surrey Canal (GSC) was a canal constructed during the early 19^th century, with plans to link the Surrey Commercial Docks at Rotherhithe with Mitcham and later Portsmouth. It opened from Rotherhithe through Deptford and South Bermondsey to the Old Kent Road in 1807, on through Walworth to Camberwell in 1810, and the branch to Peckham in 1826. A short-lived Croydon Canal was built as a separate enterprise and linked to the GSC at New Cross. The GSC ran through flat terrain and needed no locks or inclines, while any development further south would have necessitated locks and therefore been much more expensive.
It closed progressively from the 1940s, with all but the Greenland Dock closed in the 1970s. Much of the route is still traceable though, as it has been turned into roads and linear parks.

Burgess Park

At 56 hectares (140 acres), Burgess Park is Southwark's largest park and the only area in South London to have been de-urbanised. The park stretches from Camberwell and Walworth to Peckham and the Old Kent Road. It is named after Camberwell's first woman Mayor, Jessie Burgess. The park was built between the 1950s and 1980s and developed as a result of the Abercrombie Plan for open spaces made in 1943.
The area had originally been rich farmland and market gardens supplying London’s growing population during the 18^th century and attracted wealthy middle-classes trying to escape the stench of the city at the time. But after the building of the Grand Surrey Canal, it became home to factories and densely populated streets. Businesses included timber and lime-related enterprises, cloth and wool works, mineral water works, as well as a Bible Factory.
The area was badly bombed during WWII and the park slowly emerged from the space left by the demolished factories, churches and streets as well as from bomb damaged areas and the canal stretch from Camberwell to Peckham (which was only drained and in-filled in the 1970s).
2012 saw the park being re-landscaped by Southwark. Traces of the park’s history can be found in the few buildings that remain, such as the listed Chumleigh Gardens, former almshouses now housing offices and a café. Other listed buildings: an early 19th century limekiln, St. George’s Church, the Passmore Edwards library, baths and wash-houses.
https://bridgetonowhere.friendsofburgesspark.org.uk/ https://artinthepark.co.uk/park

Aylesbury Estate

The Aylesbury Estate in Walworth in the London Borough of Southwark was designed in the brutalist style and built between 1963 and 1977 on an area of 28.5 hectares (70 acres).
The estate was an attempt by planners to house some of London's poorest families as part of a comprehensive slum clearance policy and it was the largest industrialised housing scheme ever undertaken by a London borough: the 2,758 dwellings were designed to house a population of more than 10,000 residents, also making it one of the largest public housing estates in Europe.
The estate's design embraced many ideas of modernist urban planning expressed by Le Corbusier in his 1935 vision of the Ville Radieuse, such as standardisation, free circulation of pedestrians and traffic and generous access to sunlight and natural ventilation.
It went through a period of decline from the 1980s onwards with frequent problems and later breakdowns of the communal heating systems, coupled with major problems with the physical state of the buildings and is now considered to be in the bottom category on a classification for inner city adversity, signifying an area of extremely high social disadvantage. It is now past its service life. Together with the poor image of council estates in the UK, this led to the Aylesbury being dubbed ‘one of the most notorious estates’’.
In 1997, Tony Blair chose to make his first set-piece speech (‘No forgotten people’) as Prime Minister here, in an effort to demonstrate that the incoming Labour government would care for the poorest within society.
The estate is currently undergoing a controversial phased regeneration programme which started in 2010 and will last at least 20 years, after a decision was made to demolish and replace the dwellings with modern houses mostly controlled by housing associations rather than spending money trying to update the estate to modern living standards. The plan involves increasing the density of housing to more than 4,200 dwellings.

Heygate Estate/Elephant Park

The Heygate Estate in Walworth in the London Borough of Southwark was built between 1971 and 1974 between Walworth Road and New Kent Road. The estate had 1,214 dwellings, designed to house a population of more than 3,000 residents.
Its neo-brutalist architectural aesthetic was one of six tall, concrete blocks dwarfing smaller blocks and surrounding central communal gardens and it was initially a popular place to live, the flats being light and spacious. Later, the estate developed a reputation for crime, poverty and dilapidation due to a lack of maintenance and good management. It was demolished between 2011 and 2014 as part of the controversial regeneration of the Elephant & Castle area with the land (now dubbed ‘Elephant Park’) planned to provide 2,704 new homes, of which only 82 will be social rented.

Elephant & Castle

The Elephant and Castle was a coaching inn first mentioned in 1765, located at a major crossroads in the village of Newington in the manor of Walworth, where the old Roman road from London Bridge and other routes from Central London split into routes towards the Kent and Sussex coasts (now: New Kent Road and Newington Causeway – the A201 and A3). The name now refers to much of the surrounding area of Walworth and Newington, due to the proximity of the Underground station and traffic roundabout of the same name.

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National Rail: 03457 48 49 50 • Traveline (bus times): 0871 200 22 33 (12p/min) • TFL (London) : 0343 222 1234

Mar-24 Thomas G