This unassuming passageway* is one of the oldest roads in Lambeth, dating back to a path through fields long before the area was developed.
It appears on John Roque’s 1746 map of London as a long path, which today roughly aligns with King Edward Walk and Morley Street.
John Roque’s map showing rough location of King Edward Walk
While the half to the north of Westminster Bridge Road survived, it seems that the southern half – the modern-day King Edward Walk was turned into back gardens for the houses that were built here by the 1790s.
R Horwood map showing rough location of King Edward Walk
However, about 50 years later, the area was rebuilt with more housing, and that’s when King Edward Walk appears as a defined road that, more by coincidence than design, aligns once again with the old farmland path. Despite having some fine semi-detached houses and probably thanks to its vicinity to the Bethlem Asylum, the area appears on Charles Booth’s 1886 poverty maps as a lower working-class area.
OS map 1896 showing location of King Edward Walk
The northern corner is marked by the Yorkshire Society’s School, which was established in 1812 by Dr James Saner to support children of “respectable Yorkshire parents” who had fallen on hard times in London, so long as they lived within ten miles of the General Post Office on St Martin’s Le Grand.
The school continued educating Yorkshire children until 1917, when it finally closed after running out of money. The building then served as the Britannia Club for Soldiers and Sailors before being taken over by Morley College in 1923.
King Edward Walk would probably be one of those areas that transformed in recent years from poverty to a painfully expensive row of Georgian houses, if not for the diligent efforts of German bombers, which did considerable damage to the area.
Pretty much every single building in the row was damaged, with most of the western side completely destroyed, including the former children’s school. In fact, the only survivors were a small row of the cheapest houses on the eastern side, which are today the aforementioned painfully expensive houses.
Starting at the northern end, the modern Morley College dominates, sitting opposite the former King’s Arms pub and now the Morley Gallery.
A bit further down, on the left, is a modern extension of the college, and in 2016 there was a plan to build a bridge over the road to link it to the main college building. Although permission was granted, work stopped in 2019.
The college building is worth taking a closer look at, as there’s a row of ten mosaic portraits added in 2013 celebrating significant women who have lived in the area, with short biographies underneath each. From left to right they show: Hester Thrale, Mary Seacole, Mrs Mallett, Octavia Hill, Annie McCall, Violette Szabo, Margaret Mellor, Jude Kelly, Heather Rabatts, and Natalie Bell.
Further down, the row of surviving original houses faces a modern row of council flats built on what had been the posh row of houses with the big gardens.
And at the end, the passageway faces the former Bethlem Asylum, now Geraldine Mary Harmsworth Park, a much-appreciated public park that opened in 1934 and surrounds the Imperial War Museum.
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* more of a road these days, but it ticks my personal rule that it mustn’t be called a road or street to be included in my articles.
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