page_title: Kennington
section_title: 20th-century history
hierarchical_section_title: Kennington / History / 20th-century history
caption_attribution_description: English: Courtenay Square Picture taken from Cardigan Street
context_page_description: Kennington is a district in south London, England. It is mainly within the London Borough of Lambeth, running along the boundary with the London Borough of Southwark, a boundary which can be discerned from the early medieval period between the Lambeth and St George's parishes of those boroughs respectively. It is located 1.4 miles south of Charing Cross in Inner London and is identified as a local centre in the London Plan. It was a royal manor in the parish of St Mary, Lambeth in the county of Surrey and was the administrative centre of the parish from 1853. Proximity to central London was key to the development of the area as a residential suburb and it was incorporated into the metropolitan area of London in 1855.
  Kennington is the location of three significant London landmarks: the Oval cricket ground, the Imperial War Museum, and Kennington Park. Its population at the United Kingdom Census 2011 was 15,106. Kennington is served by Kennington Police Station.
context_section_description: Two social forces were at work in Kennington at different times during the twentieth century: decline, and – later – gentrification. Decline began in the early part of the twentieth century. Middle-class households ceased to employ servants and no longer sought the large houses of Kennington, preferring the suburbs of outer London. Houses in Kennington were suited to multiple occupation and were divided into flats and bedsits, providing cheap lodgings for lower-paid workers.
  Kennington ceased to be the administrative centre for the Metropolitan Borough of Lambeth (as it then was) in 1908. The Town Hall, built as the Lambeth Vestry Hall (Surrey) for the business of the Parish, in a neoclassical style on Kennington Road, was not large enough for the Council to properly carry out its functions. A new Town Hall was built in Brixton. The Old Town Hall was the registered office of the Countryside Alliance until September, 2015 .
  In 1913, Maud Pember Reeves selected Kennington for Round About a Pound a Week, which was a survey of social conditions in the district. She found "respectable but very poor people [who] live over a morass of such intolerable poverty that they unite instinctively to save those known to them from falling into it".
  In an initiative to improve the district, from 1915, the Duchy of Cornwall set about an ambitious project to redevelop land. Courtenay Square, Courtenay Street, Cardigan Street, Denny Street and Denny Crescent were laid out to a design by architects Stanley Davenport Adshead, Stanley Churchill Ramsay and JD Coleridge, in a Neo-Georgian style.
  In 1922, Lambeth Hospital on Brook Drive was created from a former workhouse. Under the control of the London County Council, Lambeth Hospital, which had a capacity of 1,250 patients in 1939, was one of the largest hospitals in London. After the National Health Service was formed, Lambeth Hospital became an acute general hospital. In 1976, the North Wing of St. Thomas' Hospital opened; services transferred there, and Lambeth Hospital was closed. A substantial part of the site has today been redeveloped for apartments, although some buildings are occupied by the Lambeth Community Care Centre.
  Kennington station was substantially remodelled in 1925 to accommodate the Charing Cross branch of the Northern line along with the improvements to the City and South London Railway to form the Northern line. Because tram and bus routes converged at Kennington, in the 1920s St. Mark's became known as the "tramwayman's church", and Kennington was referred to as the "Clapham Junction of the southern roads".
  By 1926, construction of the Belgrave Hospital for Children, designed by Henry Percy Adams and Charles Holden, was complete. The hospital was subsumed within the King's College Hospital Group and closed in 1985. It was restored and converted to apartments in 1994.
  In the 1930s, the Duchy of Cornwall continued to redevelop its estate in the district and employed architect Louis de Soissons to design a number of buildings in a Neo-Georgian style.
  On 15 October 1940, the large trench air-raid shelter beneath Kennington Park was struck by a 50 lb bomb. The number of people killed remains unknown; it is believed by local historians that 104 people died. Forty-eight bodies were recovered.
  The Brandon Estate was endowed in 1962 by the London County Council with Reclining Figure No. 3: a sculpture by Henry Moore.
  St Agnes Place was a street of mid-Victorian terraces built for the servants of Buckingham Palace. Lambeth Council had decided to demolish the street to extend Kennington Park and the houses were empty by the late 1960s. In 1969, squatters moved into one of the houses and later entered the other empty properties and established a Rastafari temple. The street became London's longest-running squat. From 1977, Lambeth Council sought to evict the squatters and eventually succeeded at the High Court in 2005. The houses and the temple were declared to be unfit for human habitation and were pulled down in 2007. The Kennington Park Extension now covers much of the site.
  Lam
caption: Courtenay Square was part of the Duchy of Cornwall's major redevelopment of part of the district in the early twentieth century.
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