Coin Street

Coin Street runs through one of London’s most contested patches of ground—the South Bank strip between Waterloo Road and the river, flanked by Waterloo Bridge to the west and Blackfriars Bridge to the east. Today it anchors a neighbourhood of co-operative housing, riverside gardens, and the landmark Oxo Tower Wharf. The street gives its name to the entire regenerated district around it.

2010

Coin Street, London

Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 2.0

2013

Coin Street Neighbourhood Centre

Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 2.0

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Historical image not found

Today

Structures outside flats, Coin Street, SE1

Geograph · CC BY-SA 2.0

What surrounds you here was derelict wasteland within living memory. The transformation is one of the most cited examples of community-led urban renewal in Britain. Yet the name on the street sign predates all of it, and its origin remains curiously unresolved.

The name is not recorded in available sources with a definitive etymology. The most plausible interpretation is that it derives from the architectural term coign (also spelled quoin)—the Old French word for a projecting corner or angle of a building—which appeared in a number of medieval London street names where a distinctive corner structure once stood. A connection to coinage or minting has occasionally been suggested, but no documentary evidence of a mint or coin-related trade on this specific street has been located. As documented by British History Online in the Survey of London, the street is firmly established in Waterloo by the nineteenth century, when St Andrew’s Church took its address from it in 1856.

The name may also simply reflect the street’s angular relationship to the riverside road grid—a “corner” street in the literal architectural sense. Until documentary evidence from earlier title deeds or parish records comes to light, the origin remains uncertain.

North Lambeth’s South Bank was marshland for most of its early history—low-lying ground prone to flooding, cut across by drainage ditches, and largely avoided by the church-builders and merchants who shaped the districts to the north and south. It was not until the first quarter of the nineteenth century that the need was felt for more ecclesiastical provision, and in fairly quick succession churches including St Andrew, Coin Street, were erected in North Lambeth in 1856. That church gave the street its most prominent nineteenth-century landmark.

When the population of London soared in the nineteenth century, people crammed into the area in small houses, and poverty and overcrowding were rife. A rapid deterioration followed the coming of the railways to Lambeth: streets were cut up and buildings torn down or dismembered, while the series of dark, damp arches under the lines encouraged the more disreputable element of the population to the district. Coin Street sat at the heart of this pressure, a working-class neighbourhood squeezed between grand civic projects it never benefited from.

The area was badly bombed during the Second World War and much housing was demolished. After the war, the South Bank was chosen as the site for the 1951 Festival of Britain, resulting in the building of the Royal Festival Hall. Later developments including the National Theatre and the National Film Institute turned the South Bank into Europe’s largest arts and media centre—but this development had an impact on the local community. The residential population decreased from 50,000 to 4,000 by the early 1970s and schools and shops closed.

Shortly after completing the Centre Pompidou in Paris with Renzo Piano, architect Richard Rogers developed a major office scheme for the Coin Street area on behalf of developers Greycoat and Vestey. Local people drew up a plan to address these problems, focusing on the derelict Coin Street site, and campaigned strongly against the planned development of the site for hotels and offices. The community won. Planning permission was given to both office and community projects, but in the end the office developers sold their site to the Greater London Council, which in turn sold the whole site to Coin Street Community Builders.

Since its creation in 1984, CSCB redeveloped the Oxo Tower Wharf, Gabriel’s Wharf, Bernie Spain Gardens and set up four housing co-operatives: Mulberry, Palm, Redwood and Iroko. The model attracted global attention as a demonstration that inner-city land could be reclaimed from speculative development through organised community action, without sacrificing quality of design.

Iain Tuckett became one of the most prominent figures in the Coin Street story, serving as Group Director of Coin Street Community Builders from its earliest years. He guided the organisation’s development through planning battles, co-operative housing schemes and the contested Doon Street Tower proposal. As reported by SE1 Direct, Tuckett’s leadership spanned three decades of the neighbourhood’s transformation, making him the most consistently associated individual with the street’s modern identity.

Bernie Spain, a community activist after whom Bernie Spain Gardens is named, was a central figure in the original campaigns that shaped the Coin Street Action Group. The garden’s name commemorates her role in winning back the riverside for the neighbourhood. MOLA (Museum of London Archaeology) has conducted investigations along this stretch of South Bank, recording the pre-industrial landscape beneath the regenerated ground.

Coin Street’s revised plans for a tower of only 43 storeys were described by some residents as a betrayal of the organisation’s founding principles. The proposed Doon Street Tower triggered a sustained internal debate about whether the organisation was still acting in the interests of the community it was built to serve. Planning permission was ultimately approved by the Secretary of State in 2008, though development remained contested.

In a twist of history, the residents of Coin Street formed a campaign group, Thames Central Open Spaces, to oppose the Garden Bridge, regularly protesting Coin Street Community Builders at meetings and calling for the organisation to oppose massive anti-community development in precisely the same way it had done in the 1980s. The cycle of community resistance that defined the street’s identity had turned inward. The Garden Bridge was ultimately cancelled in 2017.

In 2007, CSCB occupied new offices at the Coin Street neighbourhood centre, designed by Haworth Tompkins. As well as offices the building includes a day nursery and crèche, conference and meeting facilities. The street today is less a through route than a place name that defines a whole way of thinking about urban land—who it belongs to, and who it should serve.

Today Coin Street is an area under pressure from land values and visitors reflecting its location close to the heart of a world city. That pressure was always its defining condition—it just changed form. The green spaces below are among the closest to the street, built on ground that speculative developers once planned to cover in offices.