Lambeth High Street

Lambeth High Street is named after the district of Lambeth itself. The Survey of London gives the district's name a Saxon origin, probably meaning either a harbour or quay from which lambs were shipped, or a loam, or muddy, harbour. A separate account derives it from the Old English "lamb" and "hythe" — a landing place for lambs. Either way, the sense is of a riverside place for loading and landing, which fits the street's own early use by traders who worked the Thames.

The street itself was formerly known as Back Lane before it took the name Lambeth High Street. The sources used here do not explain exactly when the change was made.

A parish burial ground was consecrated on Lambeth High Street in 1705, on land provided by Archbishop Tenison, as an overflow to St Mary's churchyard. Tenison also provided a girls' school on the street in 1706, built in the space between the roadway and the burial ground. The burial ground was extended in 1814 by clearing a number of old houses and a passage called Tearoe's Alley, and was further enlarged the following year by demolishing buildings in the High Street and Old Paradise Street. It closed in 1853.

From 1826 the street became a centre of Lambeth's pottery trade. John Doulton and John Watts moved their stoneware bottle business here that year, soon joined by Doulton's sons. In 1853, when Watts retired, the Doulton family merged their separate ventures into Doulton & Co., and under Henry Doulton the firm expanded rapidly along the Lambeth waterfront. James Stiff ran his own pottery on the street too. The side streets off Lambeth High Street came to be dominated by the Stiff and Doulton potteries.

A new girls' school building went up on the street in 1863. It amalgamated with Archbishop Temple's Boys School in 1961 to form a mixed school, though the Lambeth High Street building continued to serve first-year pupils until its closure in 1974. In 1884 Lambeth Vestry converted the disused burial ground into a public garden, moving the gravestones to the boundary walls. It was enlarged again in 1929, when Lambeth Borough Council purchased a glass bottle factory on Whitgift Street to add to it.

Two buildings still carry the street's industrial and modest trading past. The Windmill pub stands beside the former Fire Brigade training tower, near the former site of a smock mill. At the southern end, Southbank House — the surviving part of the Doulton Ceramic Works, built in 1878 to a design by R Stark Wilkinson — has a landmark corner tower.

The reach of the street's pottery trade went further afield too: the glazed tiles on the White Hart pub on Whittlesey Street are reputedly from the Doulton Works on Lambeth High Street.

Francis Moore, a self-taught physician and astrologer who had served at the court of Charles II, lived on Calcot Street, a lane off Lambeth High Street that has since disappeared; he published Old Moore's Almanack in 1697. The street's industrial character was set by the Doultons, whose pottery business grew here from 1826, and by James Stiff, a Suffolk-born mould maker trained under Coade, who worked for Doulton and Watts before running his own pottery on the street.

The 20th century saw the old burial ground go through further change. By the late 1970s it had been asphalted over entirely, but it has since been re-landscaped with grassy mounds, a water feature, shrubs, seating and pergolas, and is now known as Old Paradise Gardens. It is listed in Lambeth's Local Heritage List as a historic graveyard turned public park.

Modern commercial use arrived too: the Royal Pharmaceutical Society's headquarters stood at 1 Palace View on Lambeth High Street from 1976 until 2015, an eight-storey building by the Louis de Soissons Partnership fitted onto a cramped site, serving as the Society's offices and museum.

Old Paradise Gardens still presents a long run of railings and mature planting. Only a short section of the street, along with the gardens, falls within the area protected around Lambeth Palace, and in winter the Blore Building of Lambeth Palace can be glimpsed from the Lambeth Road junction.