Santley Street

The sources used here do not explain the origin of the name Santley. No reference to a person, place or sponsor behind the name appears in the records consulted for this page. What is documented is the land the street was built on and what rose upon it, which is where this page's story lies.

The ground beneath Santley Street once belonged to one man. George Peabody, the philanthropist, bought an estate of around sixteen acres here in about 1865. When Peabody died in 1869, his Trustees sold the property, and over the following years a large number of small houses went up on the land between Ferndale Road and Acre Lane.

A temporary iron church served the growing district from 1874, standing on the site later occupied by the parochial hall in Allardyce Street. St. Paul's Church, the permanent replacement, rose on Santley Street itself: designed by W. G. Habershon of Habershon and Fawckner, built by Mr. Jones of Gloucester, and consecrated by the Bishop of Rochester on 29 July 1881. It was built to hold 1,500 worshippers, faced in yellow brick banded with red, in the Decorated Gothic style. A separate account describes it as built of white brick with stone dressings in a fourteenth-century style. A District Chapelry was assigned to the church the following year, in 1882.

Education followed close behind religion. A temporary iron school building for 450 children opened on Santley Road in April 1898 for the London School Board. In 1902, grounds at the rear of 48–50 Acre Lane were used to build the permanent Santley Street School, providing elementary places for more than a thousand children.

George Peabody never lived on Santley Street, but his money shaped it, from the purchase of the surrounding fields to the sale of his estate by his Trustees after his death.

The church itself was the work of named craftsmen: W. G. Habershon of the Bloomsbury Square firm Habershon and Fawckner drew the design, and Mr. Jones of Gloucester built it.

The school buildings outlived their original purpose. Lambeth's redevelopment of educational buildings in the 1920s is recorded as having allowed structures like Santley Street School to be converted for residential use. By the 1990s, Santley School had indeed been converted into residential apartments, now known as Alpha House.

Alpha House, the former Santley Street School, remains a local landmark, reached through an iron gate with brick piers, its ornate main building still recognisable from its board-school days.