The Lambeth Century: 1908-2008

The 100th anniversary year of the opening of Lambeth Town Hall is a good moment to look back over the Lambeth century. What was already there in 1908 and what has been swept away since?

Lambeth's local government migrated south during the nineteenth century. From St Mary's parish church on the river in 1800 it had shifted to the 'old' town hall on Kennington Road in 1854. By 1908 it was in the centre of Brixton which was itself the economic, commercial and residential heart of the borough.

The movements of the town hall actually followed the suburban process. Lambeth was once a Thames side village with open fields running down to the Surrey Hills but became an ever-extending suburb of London with just a few parks and green spaces left in a sea of brick (Ruskin Park had been saved in 1907). There were the remains of fields still in Norwood and Streatham, but in the next 20 years the development process would be complete.

By 1908, amazing new technologies to hit the borough included the electric trams that started to creep their way up Brixton Hill, and the new fangled 'flying machines' that crowds had flocked to Crystal Palace to see.

The telephone was an expensive novelty and most local people could only dream of the luxury of an inside toilet or a bathroom. However, material conditions soon began to improve. Slum clearances in the 1930s and new council estates like Clapham Park provided better quality housing if not quite the 'homes fit for heroes' promised by government in 1918. People's habits changed - cinemas replaced music halls; the wireless meant people stayed at home more.

The bombing in the Second World War destroyed large areas of Lambeth and also encouraged many families to move out of the area for good to the outer suburbs and to post-war new towns. The comprehensive redevelopments of these bomb-damaged streets in the 1950s only accelerated that process of change and tower blocks changed the skyline forever.

Lambeth's most famous bombsite became the site for the 1951 Festival of Britain, now the South Bank. Starting with the arrival of the Empire Windrush in 1948, new communities were moving into Lambeth from the Caribbean encouraged by offers of work on public transport and in the newly created National Health Service. Brixton in particular became a second home for families from Jamaica.

In 2008 Lambeth is a yet more diverse place still. The 150-plus languages spoken in the borough's schools and the range of restaurants and food shops in centres like Brixton reflect the extraordinary range of communities - from Portugal, Eastern Europe, Africa, South America and Asia - that now choose to live here. At the same time the surviving streets of Victorian terraces - once despised and demolished by the post-war planners - now fashionably refurnished are sought-after homes for professional people.

If you want to look at more images of the changing Lambeth century then go to Lambeth Landmark, the Lambeth Archives website which now has over 8000 photos of Lambeth past and present, including the images used in this article.

An exhibition looking at Lambeth over the last century opened in Lambeth Town Hall on 29 April.

• Celebrating a Century - download our brochure that looks back at 100 years of history to mark the Lambeth Town Hall centenary.
• Lambeth Landmark - browse our online visual archive, which showcases the best 6,000 images from the Lambeth Archives collection.
• Lambeth Town Hall history - find out about the history of the building.