Old Kent Road

The name Old Kent Road is deceptively simple: it is the old road to Kent. But that simplicity conceals a layered history of naming. For most of its life, this road was known as Kent Street — the street heading into Kent from Southwark. The section nearest Borough High Street ran from St George the Martyr church southeastward, and was known as Kent Street until 1877 when it was renamed Tabard Street to commemorate Chaucer’s famous inn. The remaining stretch, running from the Bricklayers’ Arms junction to New Cross, became ‘Old Kent Road’ to distinguish it from the newly renamed section.

Before any of these English names existed, the road was part of the great Roman highway known much later as Watling Street. The Anglo-Saxons called it Wæcelinga Stræt, a name derived from the Waeclingas, a people living near the Roman city of Verulamium — modern St Albans. The Old English word stræt (from Latin via strata) specifically meant a paved road, a distinction that mattered when most roads were little more than mud tracks.

Although maps show the name simply as Old Kent Road, Londoners almost always call it ‘the Old Kent Road’ with a definite article, as though it were a landmark rather than merely a street. It is also commonly abbreviated to OKR by locals, a shorthand that has gained currency as the area undergoes large-scale regeneration.

Old Kent Road may have prehistoric origins. Before the Romans arrived, the ancient Britons used a broad, grassy trackway that stretched from the Channel ports to a ford across the Thames near Thorney Island, present-day Westminster. After the Roman invasion in 43 AD, engineers paved and widened this route, constructing a proper metalled road that connected Londinium to the ports at Dover, Richborough and Lympne via Canterbury. This was Iter III of the Antonine Itinerary, one of the most important routes in Roman Britain.

In 2024, direct physical evidence of the Roman road was finally found beneath the modern surface. Workers excavating for a low-carbon heat network near the junction with Ilderton Road uncovered a section of road 5.8 metres wide and 1.4 metres deep, built from compacted gravel sealed by layers of chalk. The base of the modern road sits directly on this Roman fabric — two thousand years of continuous use with remarkably little deviation from the original alignment.

Throughout the medieval period, Old Kent Road was the main artery between London and the Continent. Pilgrims heading to the shrine of Thomas Becket at Canterbury walked this road, as did soldiers, merchants and kings. In 1415, Henry V and his army paraded triumphantly along it after their victory at Agincourt. At St Thomas a Watering, near the junction with what is now Shorncliffe Road, a stream crossed the road — and from the sixteenth century this became a place of public execution, where religious dissenters and traitors were hanged.

Old Kent Road has two claims to popular fame that have shaped its identity in the public imagination more than its Roman origins ever could. The first is the music hall song ‘Knocked ’em in the Old Kent Road’, written by Albert Chevalier and Charles Ingle in the 1890s. The song — a comic tale of a Cockney inheriting a ‘donkey and a barrer’ — became one of the most popular music hall numbers of the era and cemented Old Kent Road as an emblem of working-class London life.

The irony of Old Kent Road’s Monopoly status is considerable. The average property price in the Old Kent Road postcode now exceeds £1 million — a far cry from the £60 a player pays on the board. The road is undergoing one of the largest regeneration programmes in London, with Southwark Council’s Area Action Plan proposing 20,000 new homes, 10,000 new jobs, and a planned extension of the Bakerloo line with new Underground stations along the route.

The arrival of the Grand Surrey Canal in 1807 transformed Old Kent Road from a semi-rural highway into an industrial corridor. The canal, which reached the road from the Thames at Rotherhithe, was built primarily for transporting timber but quickly attracted other industries. The South Metropolitan Gas Works, established in the 1830s, grew to become one of the largest in London, eventually covering 36 acres with eight enormous gasholders — the surviving gasholder behind Sandgate Street remains one of the road’s most recognisable landmarks.

George Livesey, who managed the gas works from 1840 until his death in 1908, was a transformative figure for the area. He grew up in Canal Grove cottages near the works, established Camberwell’s first public library on Old Kent Road (later the Livesey Museum), served as a Sunday school teacher at Christ Church, and pioneered profit-sharing schemes for his workers. His statue once stood in the courtyard of the museum that bore his name.

The industrial and working-class character of Old Kent Road made it a very different place from the genteel London depicted elsewhere on the Monopoly board. During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, boxing clubs proliferated, and the area gained a reputation for toughness. The Blitz hit Old Kent Road hard on 7 September 1940, when nearly a thousand German bombs fell on London in a single night. The post-war decades brought council housing estates, retail parks, and the filling-in of the now-redundant canal — though traces of the old waterway are still visible behind the Asda car park.

Old Kent Road today runs for roughly two miles from the Bricklayers’ Arms junction in the northwest, where it meets New Kent Road, Tower Bridge Road, and Great Dover Street, to New Cross in the southeast, where it crosses into the borough of Lewisham. This boundary was once the historic county line between Surrey and Kent — hence the change in name to New Cross Road at precisely that point.

The road is now part of the A2, a major route from London to Dover that still follows much the same alignment that the Romans established nearly two thousand years ago. Large retail parks — Asda, B&Q, Currys — line stretches that once held terraced housing and small factories. But the most significant change is yet to come. Southwark Council’s Old Kent Road Area Action Plan envisions a fundamental transformation of the corridor, with the planned Bakerloo line extension providing Underground stations along the road for the first time in its history. For a road that has been carrying travellers since before London existed, another reinvention is simply the latest chapter in a very long story.