Nunhead Green

The origin of the name Nunhead is believed to be derived from a local inn named variously The Nun's Head or The Nunhead Tavern. The name is first recorded in a deed of 1583 relating to a land sale including estates "lying at Nunn-head." The pub name almost certainly reflected the area's medieval past. "Nun's Head" is quite an unusual name for a pub: it often signals that the area was a messuage, or a dwelling-house and all the domestic land around it. Such a small plot of land would be an extremely common gift for a pious mediaeval person to give to a convent of nuns.

A nunnery in the area may have been connected with the nunnery of The Augustinian Priory of St. John the Baptist, Holywell (now Shoreditch) which acquired lands in Camberwell and Peckham in the 12th century. The legendary association with a beheaded Mother Superior, though widely repeated in local tradition, is without historical foundation. There is no evidence to support this claim.

Until the early part of the 19th century, Nunhead was a typical rural hamlet: a cluster of cottages, surrounded by meadows, market gardens, and fields. Most of the dwellings were immediately adjacent to the tavern, although a few larger houses were scattered over the main road leading to Peckham Rye. The area's transformation began in the 1830s when London's burial crisis created demand for new cemeteries on the city's edges.

Transport provided a major impetus for growth in 1865, when the London, Chatham, and Dover Railway opened a station on the Crystal Palace-Peckham Rye branch line at Nunhead: intended to carry merry-makers to the entertainments of the Palace, it also improved access to the centre of London. By the late 1870s and early 1880s, housing was booming. Edward Yates's Waverley Park estate, where building began in Ivydale Road in 1884, is an excellent example.

The open spaces that define Nunhead remain tied to its Victorian heritage. Nunhead Cemetery is one of the "Magnificent Seven" Victorian cemeteries established in a ring around what were then the outskirts of London, and is one of two located south of the River Thames (the other being West Norwood). In 1840, three years before J C Loudon published The Laying Out, Planting, and Managing of Cemeteries and the Improvement of Church Yards, James Bunstone Bunning designed a layout for a cemetery on the Nunhead Hill site.

The Old Nun's Head remains the most visible landmark on Nunhead Green, though it has undergone radical changes. The Old Nun's Head was rebuilt – in a radically different style from its predecessor – as the Nunhead Tavern in 1934. The Nunhead Tavern was closed for several years in the early 2000s and "came back from the dead" as the Old Nun's Head in 2007. The pub has become a canvas for contemporary art. In 2014 the street artists Pure Evil, Inkie and APHQ created their versions of Carlo Dolci's St Catherine of Siena (1665) for the pub's exterior, as part of the Dulwich Outdoor Gallery project.

Across the green, the Man of Kent also dates from the 1930s. Today, the green functions as both a memory of Nunhead's modest rural origins and a focal point for the contemporary community. In 2016–18 two 1970s council buildings on the west side of Nunhead Green were replaced by the Green community centre and a development of flats and houses called Nunhead Green.

The green has attracted notable residents and visitors throughout its recorded history. It is reputed, in Claire Tomalin's biography of Charles Dickens' mistress Nelly Ternan, that Charles Dickens was taken on his death bed from the house he rented for Ternan, at Windsor Lodge in Linden Grove to Gad's Hill to die. The house no longer stands, but was at 31 Linden Grove. Nunhead Hill is mentioned by Hone in his "Every-day Book" (1827), as being "the favourite resort of smoke-dried London artisans."

The area's population transformed during the Victorian boom, as working-class and middle-class families made the suburb their home. The almshouses built around the green—Beeston's Gift in 1834 and the Asylum of the Metropolitan Beer and Wine Trade Association in 1853—housed the retired and elderly who had spent their working lives in London. These charitable institutions remain visible markers of the philanthropic impulse that shaped the Victorian suburb.

The late twentieth century brought decline and then careful restoration. By the middle of the 20th century, the cemetery was nearly full, and so was abandoned by the United Cemetery Company. With the ensuing neglect, the cemetery gradually changed from lawn to meadow and eventually to woodland. A lack of care and cash surrendered the graves to the ravages of nature and vandalism, but in the early 1980s the Friends of Nunhead Cemetery was formed to renovate and protect the cemetery. The cemetery was reopened in May 2001 after an extensive restoration project funded by Southwark Council and the Heritage Lottery Fund.

The conservation designation of 2007 recognized the heritage value of Nunhead Green and its surroundings. In 2016–18 two 1970s council buildings on the west side of Nunhead Green were replaced by the Green community centre and a development of flats and houses called Nunhead Green. This sensitive redevelopment maintained the character of the historic green while adding modern community facilities, balancing preservation with the needs of a living neighbourhood.

Nunhead Green remains a focal point for the Peckham neighbourhood, a quiet open space surrounded by the terraced houses and period shopfronts that define this corner of Southwark. The green's modest acreage belies its significance: it marks the spot where a medieval nunnery's gift became the identity of a Victorian suburb, and where London's nineteenth-century hunger for new burial grounds sparked the transformation of rural meadow into urban neighbourhood.

The community that uses the green today walks on the same ground where nineteenth-century Londoners came to escape the smoke and crowds of the city centre. The pub that gives the green its name—though rebuilt and renamed—continues the tradition that shaped the locality. The green itself, protected as a conservation area and anchored by new community facilities, remains open to the public in perpetuity, as promised in 1868.