Keyworth Place and Keyworth Street

Keyworth Street is now home to London Southbank University’s Keyworth Centre, a contemporary teaching building near the Elephant & Castle. The street itself occupies a corner of one of South London’s oldest transport hubs, where roads laid down in the 1750s converged to transform Newington from rural parish into thriving commercial district.

But the street’s present identity conceals its past. For decades it bore a different name entirely—one rooted in Eastern Europe and Baltic trade networks. The renaming to honour a military hero marked the street’s transition from Victorian workshop to institutional space.

Keyworth Place and Keyworth Street take their name from Leonard James Keyworth, recipient of a Victoria Cross in the First World War. The honour reflects the street’s transformation in the early twentieth century from a site of commercial craft to one of public commemoration and institutional use. The street had been known previously as Dantzic Street, a name reflecting the Baltic timber and grain traders who once worked this corner of Southwark, where the Thames itself provided the transport artery for their goods.

Keyworth Street occupies a corner of Newington, the administrative parish created in the thirteenth century to distinguish the new settlement south of London Bridge from the ancient heartland of Southwark itself. Newington means ‘the new town’, a description apt enough when first coined. By the nineteenth century it was neither new nor rural. The Elephant & Castle’s role as a major transport hub was an important stimulus to development across a wide area of South London, and streets like Dantzic hosted workshops, small factories, and warehouses serving this growing commercial centre.

Leonard James Keyworth belonged to a generation of men for whom the Great War brought both sacrifice and recognition. His Victoria Cross—awarded for extraordinary valour in the field—became the justification for naming two streets in this corner of Southwark. It is a commemoration that speaks to the patriotic sentiments of the 1920s, when Britain was honouring its war dead and seeking ways to embed their memory into the fabric of cities and towns.

London Southbank University’s Keyworth Centre has become the dominant institutional presence on this street, housing teaching facilities and student spaces. The university itself, founded in 1892 as the Borough Polytechnic, reflects the nineteenth-century commitment to technical and vocational education for working-class Londoners. Its location here, at the junction of major routes and within walking distance of the Elephant & Castle Underground, makes it accessible to students across South London.

The street itself, sandwiched between major transport arteries (Southwark Bridge Road and Borough Road), remains primarily institutional in character. Its transformation from residential and commercial street to university campus reflects broader trends in London, where central and near-central locations have been repurposed to support education and knowledge-based industries rather than manufacturing or small trade.

Keyworth Street today bears no trace of its Victorian commercial character. The site has been thoroughly redeveloped to serve London Southbank University, and the street functions primarily as an approach to campus buildings rather than as an independent commercial thoroughfare. Students and staff move through it daily, but few may know its history or understand why it bears the name Keyworth rather than continuing as Dantzic.

The broader Newington area, anchored by the Elephant & Castle, continues to evolve. Major redevelopment projects in nearby areas aim to regenerate the transport hub and its surroundings, bringing new housing, commercial space, and cultural facilities to an area that has seen cycles of prosperity, decline, and renewal across two centuries.