Newington Butts

The obvious story is the appealing one: Newington Butts, so runs the popular account, takes its name from an archery butts — a practice field where men of the parish once shot at targets, much as Newington's neighbours did across many English villages. It is a tidy explanation, and it has stuck.

But the detailed research behind the Survey of London complicates it. A careful study of the voluminous records relating to Newington turned up no reference at all to the existence of archery butts here, and the compilers concluded it seemed more probable that the name referred not to archery but to the shape of the ground itself — the odd triangle of land pinched between converging roads. They pointed to other instances, from Surrey and elsewhere, of "butts" being used simply to mean odd corners or ends of land, geometry rather than sport.

Whichever is true, the name is old. The first documented reference to Newington Butts dates to 1512, and by the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the triangular plot at the heart of it had picked up its own local nickname, the Three Falcons, while remaining copyhold of the Manor of Walworth throughout. The two explanations — bowmen and awkward geometry — have coexisted ever since, neither quite displacing the other.

Long before it carried carriages, a path ran from Newington Butts to Church Street in Lambeth and on to the horseferry there — a route that probably dated back at least to the thirteenth century, when the Archbishop of Canterbury built himself a house across the river. The earliest known plan of the surrounding fields, drawn around 1555, shows this path skirting Moulton's Close and its neighbouring plots. During the seventeenth century it was formed into a proper road, roughly on the line of today's Lambeth and St George's Roads — the first carriage road to cross the marshy open ground. An Act of 1751 extended the network further, prescribing New Kent Road as a continuation running from Newington Butts to the Old Kent Road, and by the 1760s ambitious published schemes for new roads from Blackfriars Bridge were routing themselves, on paper at least, straight through this junction.

Long before any of that road-building, though, the ground had already made theatrical history. Sometime between 1566, when Richard Hickes — one of the Queen's Yeomen of the Guard — took a lease of land here from the Dean and Chapter of Canterbury, and 1580, when it is first mentioned by name, a playhouse went up. Between 1580 and 1595, companies including Lord Strange's Men took advantage of Newington's position outside City jurisdiction to perform there during the summer months, when plague fears closed theatres nearer London. It may even have predated the more famous Theatre of 1576 and the Curtain. It did not last: by October 1599 sewer records already referred to "the sewer leadinge from the houses where the old playehouse did stand." Its actual site, traced through later leases, turns out not to be on the road now called Newington Butts at all, but on the east side of Walworth Road near New Kent Road, where the Reliance Building later stood.

Meanwhile the parish itself grew a cluster of charitable and religious buildings around the triangle. The Fishmongers' Almshouses, built in 1618 on ground bought from Jacob Smith, were reputedly named St Peter's Hospital by James I as he passed by on his way from Scotland — a nod to St Peter, patron of fishmongers. By 1814 they comprised twenty-two neat houses around three courts with a chapel and garden; a further almshouse for 42 men and women, founded by James Hulbert in 1719, stood alongside within the same enclosure. Both survived largely unaltered until 1851, when the Fishmongers' foundation relocated to Wandsworth. The parish's own almshouses, built nearby on waste ground on the north side of what became Draper Street, were last rebuilt in 1888.

The medieval church of St Mary, Newington stood on the west side of the street, its old rectory close by, until 1876, when it was pulled down so that the road itself could finally be widened — a small, telling sacrifice of the old to the pressures of traffic. A clock tower, gifted by churchwarden R. S. Faulconer, was raised on the old burial ground in 1877 to mark where the church had stood, while a new St Mary's rose on Kennington Park Road, designed by James Fowler and consecrated in May 1876. By 1802, surveyor Thomas Hardwick had already reported to the Dean and Chapter of Canterbury that the wider estate here consisted of small tenements, all in bad condition — decline that later building on the east side, granted to Samuel Brandon in 1816, only partly addressed.

The playhouse that stood near Newington Butts belongs to the earliest generation of purpose-built Elizabethan theatres, put up by Richard Hickes on leased Church land and drawing companies south of the river precisely because Newington sat outside the City's jurisdiction. It is remembered as the venue for the earliest recorded performances of some Shakespearean plays — a claim that places this unglamorous stretch of road, briefly, at the very origin point of English theatre, decades before the Globe made Southwark synonymous with the stage. The playhouse was gone by 1599, its site absorbed into later streets, but the association lingered in the area's name.

Nearly three centuries later the street acquired a different kind of cultural landmark. The Metropolitan Tabernacle, designed by W. W. Pocock and costing just over £31,000, opened in 1861 with Charles Haddon Spurgeon preaching to a congregation of more than 6,000 inside a building 146 feet long and 62 feet high, with galleries running its full length and seating for over 4,000. It became one of the great preaching-houses of Victorian Nonconformity, its reputation resting almost entirely on the pulling power of a single voice.

Michael Faraday was born in Newington Butts in 1791, into a street that was then still a modest edge-of-town parish of small tenements and almshouses rather than any kind of address of distinction. The pack offers no detail of his family's circumstances here beyond the fact of his birth, but the bare date is enough to mark this stretch of road as the starting point of one of the great scientific careers of the following century, long before laboratories and lecture halls entered the picture.

Richard Hickes, one of the Queen's Yeomen of the Guard, is the shadowy figure behind the earlier story — the man who took a lease of ground here from the Dean and Chapter of Canterbury sometime before 1580 and built the playhouse that would draw touring companies south of the river during plague summers. Little else is recorded of him beyond that act of construction, but it was enough to put Newington Butts briefly at the centre of Elizabethan theatrical life.

Charles Haddon Spurgeon dominates the street's later religious history. He opened the Metropolitan Tabernacle with his sermon on 25 March 1861, drawing a congregation of over 6,000 into a building built specifically to hold his following. Though he died six years before the Tabernacle burned in 1898, his name remained inseparable from the building through its rebuilding and its wartime damage in 1941.

The twentieth century dealt the street its share of setbacks. The rebuilt Metropolitan Tabernacle, restored after the 1898 fire to a design similar to Pocock's original, was severely damaged by enemy action in 1941 — one more Southwark landmark caught in the Blitz's path near the Elephant and Castle. The building nonetheless survives and was recorded as Grade III in the Survey of London's 1955 appendix of Southwark's listed buildings, a survivor of both fire and bombing.

Elsewhere, the street's older fabric has been gradually softened for present-day use. St Mary's Churchyard, on the northern border of Newington Butts, was renovated in spring 2008 to include a children's playground — a modest but telling shift from burial ground to public amenity, continuing a long pattern here of religious ground being repurposed as the parish's needs changed. The parish schools nearby, whose buildings dated back to 1820, had themselves already been almost completely rebuilt in 1932, part of the same slow turnover of institutions along the road.

Newington Butts today is defined chiefly by motion: it forms a segment of the A3, running south-west from the Elephant and Castle junction, one of the busiest interchanges in south London. Little remains to advertise the layered history beneath the traffic — no playhouse, no almshouses, no medieval church — but the Metropolitan Tabernacle still stands as a listed survivor of fire, war, and redevelopment, and the renovated churchyard offers a small green pause on a road built for speed rather than lingering. The name endures on street signs and maps, still carrying its unresolved debate between archers and awkward geometry into a landscape neither theory could have anticipated.