Patrick Comerford
I was recently strolling around the streets between Judd Street and Gray’s Inn Road, to the south of King’s Cross and St Pancras station, exploring some of the interesting churches in the area on the edges of Bloomsbury, including Holy Cross Church on Cromer Street and Lumen Church on the corner of Tavistock Place and Wakefield Street, facing Regent Square.
I have known the Bloomsbury area all my adult life, but I only got to know this particular area around the time Charlotte and I were married in Camden Town Hall three years ago.
While I was walking from Lumen Church to Holy Cross Church I strolled through Bamber Green, and noticed for the first time what I thought was a sculpture in the style of Henry Moore in Bramber Green, on the south side of Holy Cross Church. It also looks like a modern stone circle, but it is, in fact, part of a playground, a climbing sculpture designed for children and visitors to climb or sit on.
Bramber Green is a pocket park off Judd Street and Cromer Street, created in the early 1960s. The green space also includes a children’s play area, an outdoor gym, winding paths, and local street art nearby.
Before World War II, many of the nearby streets were lined with well-to-do Georgian terraces and mews running behind, with houses facing into what is today the park, but was at the time, streets and housing. On the other hand, the Cromer Street Estate evolved from 19th century working-class lodgings and model dwellings into a post-war council housing estate, before undergoing major community-led resistance, municipal regeneration, and recent safety modernisations.
Cromer Street was originally developed as Lucas between 1801 and 1837 across the Harrison and Lucas estates. It was first named Lucas Street but was renamed Cromer Street in 1818. In the early 1840s, it was described as being occupied by a class of ‘more or less poor … small tradesmen and artisan lodgers’ in densely crowded lodgings.
Throughout the 19th century, the street and surrounding alleyways housed thousands of labourers, street traders and Irish immigrants. Overcrowding was severe, with multiple families squeezed into single-room and multi-room tenements.
From 1890 on, the East End Dwellings Company, founded by Samuel Barnett, built red-and-white stock brick tenement blocks, known as the Hillview Estate or Cromer Houses, near Tonbridge Street, to replace local slums. The area also included Holy Cross Church, built in 1888, and notable local pubs like the Boot at the west end of Cromer Street and the Lucas Arms at the east end, at the junction with Gray’s Inn Road.
The Boot was the headquarters of the Gordon rioters and later provided Charles Dickens with a location in parts of Barnaby Rudge. Kenneth Williams filmed a sequence in the Boot for the 1980s TV programme Comic Roots as his parents and their friends met there when he was a child, and he had lived at 14 Cromer House.
Much of the old 19th century housing was heavily damaged or cleared following World War II. Between 1949 and 1951, post-war six-storey flat slabs designed by the architects Hening & Chitty were built by the local authority to replace older railway tenements. They were singled out by Pevsner in 1952 as some of the first good post-war flats.
Some housing survived the bombs to the south end of where Bramber Green is today. But they were badly damaged and the whole area was cleared and the pocket park was created in the early 1960s on a World War II bomb-damaged site. The park took its name from Bramber House, an orange coloured block of flats nearby.
By the early 1970s, parts of the aging estate had fallen into severe neglect, prompting Camden Council to acquire the properties around 1974. From 1978, Shortlife Community Housing (SCH) managed short-life licenses on the estate, inadvertently helping to cultivate an active, co-operative community of residents who fought back against local crime, drug issues, and proposed demolition plans.
By the late 20th century, Cromer Street had become a core heartland for London's Bangladeshi community. The estate underwent major £46 million regeneration phases starting in the mid-1990s to upgrade residential blocks like Bramber House, Glynde Reach, and Gatesden. The estate has celebrated its oral histories and cultural roots through public art, including the interactive spray-painted mural by artist Mohammed Ali next to Bramber House, unveiled during the 2019 Bloomsbury Festival.
In the 2020s, Camden Council invested millions of pounds through the national Building Safety Fund to replace high-rise façades and complete fire safety modernisations across Bramber and neighbouring estate buildings.
The park at Bramber Green was refurbished in the 1990s, when it was renamed Judd Street Open Space. But local people continued to insist on calling it Bramber Green, and when it was refurbished again in 2019 Camden Council gave in to to local opinion, and the name Bramber Green was restored.
The park has a simple design with open grass lawns, trees, a playground, an outdoor gym, and a winding path. The most noticeable feature in the park is the climbing sculpture in the corner, which adds a unique touch to the park, although it has prompted a debate about whether it is safe for children.
The £65,000 playground has been redesigned as part of a government scheme to improve children’s play areas. The redesign was carried out by charity Groundworks, and the structure was designed by Rockworks Climbing Walls, who specialise in building climbing walls.
It is designed to look like natural sandstone formations or modern grey sculptures, and these climbing boulders provide free-access, low-level physical challenges that help local children develop balance and co-ordination.
But, on an early morning stroll through Bramber Green before meeting a friend for coffee at Friends’ House in Euston Road, the climbing sculpture in the corner still reminded me of the work of Henry Moore.
No comments:
Post a Comment