The Herne Hill Society blog

Sunset over Herne Hill

This piece is reproduced, by kind permission, from Pat Roberts's Fawnbrake Blog

A new and deeply interesting book about John Ruskin and Herne Hill has just been published by the Herne Hill Society.

John Ruskin spent his childhood and most of his working life here in Herne Hill. When he died in 1900 just a year before Queen Victoria – about the same time as many of the houses in Herne Hill were built – he had become one of the most original,  controversial and globally influential thinkers and writers of the 19th century.

Despite the cascade of studies and biographies of Ruskin over the last hundred years, this is the first book to look with authority and in depth at the importance of South London in shaping Ruskin’s thinking.

Despite all his foreign travels, public lecturing, the academic posts at Oxford, his work for London’s museums, and those messianic forays into the new industrial regions of England, Herne Hill was the place where Ruskin spent his childhood and most productive years. Here he wrote the increasingly passionate books, articles and speeches that made him nationally and indeed globally celebrated.

It was also from here, and well into his old age, that he studied and pronounced upon his shifting world.

A witness to a degrading environment

Even from his early age a precocious and acute observer of nature, Ruskin loved the then unspoilt hills, skies, rivers and fields of Herne Hill, Dulwich, and Norwood.

But his affectionate memories of this unblemished (but as he discovered, all too fragile) environment also turned out to be a painful benchmark for what developed in later decades. So it was also in Herne Hill, as the years passed, that Ruskin witnessed and described, with increasing horror, the destruction of the natural environment through railway building and uncontrolled suburban growth.

A prophet of climate change?

As early as 1860, he had written “Whenever I look or travel in England or abroad, I see that men, wherever they can reach, destroy all beauty.” (Modern Painters V). His vivid 1876 watercolour “Sunset at Herne Hill through the Smoke of London”, featuring on the front cover of the new book, is a melancholy and prophetic attempt to illustrate this change.

This important new book by local historians Jon Newman and Laurence Marsh, based on meticulous research, brings sensitive and original insights into the development of Ruskin’s distress about the world and the environment, as he prophesied how manufacturing and hasty urbanisation was damaging society and the climate across England, and especially, from his own bedroom window, in the world metropolis that his native city had become.

Sunset over Herne Hill concludes with a rewarding examination of the social and historical context of Herne Hill and Denmark Hill during Ruskin’s lifetime and his family’s place within South London as the 19th century progressed, when London was becoming the most prosperous and populous city in the world, as well as probably the most polluted.

“This illuminating and touching book restores John Ruskin to South London… the authors of ‘Sunset over Herne Hill’ take us back to the neglected roots of the great Victorian romantic’s creativity” – Andrew Saint, Professor at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London, general editor of the Survey of London, and author of the newly-published London 1870-1914: a City at its Zenith

The book has 160 pages with 80 colour & b/w illustrations, with a map by David Western.

£17.00 (including delivery) by mail order from the Herne Hill Society, or from Herne Hill Books.

Patrick Roberts

Changes afoot in Herne Hill

You might have noticed that the First World War memorial stone in the station booking hall, which commemorates the death of over 550 Herne Hill residents and the suffering of thousands more, has been need of some TLC.

The memorial's creator, Mark Brooks, has been paying us a visit in order to gild and repaint the hard-carved lettering. It looks splendid now and is more readable in the unfavourable light of the booking hall. Mark will also create a permanent stainless steel label to replace the "temporary" one which has been there since the memorial was unveiled by Helen Hayes MP on Remembrance Day 2019.

The new(ish) row of retail premises at the south end of Station Square has recently been dominated by the stern-looking hoardings set up to protect the premises during the crucial works to install the electricity substation in one of the units. 

The foundations are being prepared and the kit is due to be installed next month. Thereafter, when it’s all wired up and running, the contractors will finally depart and the shop units can be returned to their intended purpose. There are reassuring rumours that at least one and perhaps two of the units have been let, or are at least under active negotiation, which would do wonders for this bit of Herne Hill. Meanwhile, with the recent relaxation of Covid rules, Lark has at last been able to reopen.

Across the square, much refurbishment has been going on outside and inside the Green Parrot Lounge. We understand that that it will be keeping the now-familiar name but is being redesigned and rebranded as a "networking cocktail lounge", supported by an expert cocktail barista lured over from Italy. It’s due to open mid-May. If you need to network, do make a note!

In the meantime, you can enjoy a pre-booked and strictly non-networked pint at the Florence or The Half Moon. Llewellyn's is also open (outside tables only), but the Commercial remains closed because it has very little "garden" space.

Over on Half Moon Lane, Bronwyn Lowenthal at Lowie has not only recovered from Covid but has now just opened her smartly designed and painted new womenswear and lifestyle shop in the long-empty premises next door to Peachy Goat, the temple to veganism. A very bright and colourful addition to this part of the town, and a more favourable location than her former premises on Dulwich Road. 

Finally, work on the new furniture workshop/store Unto This Last, on the corner site of the former Café Prov, is progressing nicely, with some pleasing and appropriate modern-but-traditional large windows. They tell us that they are excited to be opening up their second workshop here, with plans to be up and running by early May.

Pat Roberts

Calm or chaos? The traffic issue

Lambeth and Southwark have been busy during these troubled times working on ways – depending on where you stand on the issue – to drive residents to distraction or to give them a better world of calmer streets. Views are polarised. You need look no further than the views about Low Traffic Neighbourhoods on BrixtonBuzz. And this presents a quandary to a group such as the Herne Hill Society. Should we take a position, and if so what position? Should we be canvassing members to find out exactly where they stand on local traffic issues? Assuming there were a majority for one position, does it necessarily follow that the Society should therefore come out campaigning for that position?

The numbers of those for and those against might be very close. There will almost certainly be a significant number who either have no opinion, or none they wish to make public, or who do not want to see the Society taking a campaigning stance, particularly on such a divisive issue. And, in our view, we would also need to look at Herne Hill more broadly, because it is a place not wholly inhabited by members of the Society.

Some will say, "You should get off the fence" – but that assumes there is a “right” side to step down onto. We are not persuaded that there is a right side, or at least not one that this Society should be supporting or promoting. The inherent nature of the traffic issue is that it often affects the residents of one street very differently from those of another. It is calm and lower carbon emissions for some, and chaos and carbon overload for others. Residents of those streets can and do get together and promote their views. Local councillors have to listen and in turn our local authorities have to balance the multiple arguments in making policy. 

We think our Society works best when it plays to its strengths; and a particular strength, through its long-running Magazine (150 issues and still going strong!), is its ability to reflect, illuminate and report on issues and events in our area, great and small, present and past. So through whatever constraints, obstacles or diversions might be placed in the road we will do our best to follow that course.