London’s Alleys: Sutton Walk, SE1

This is a very busy passage between the South Bank and Waterloo station, but at around 200 years old, it’s also one of the oldest streets in the area.

This part of London was still fields in 1800, with wharfs lining the riverside, but apart from a few roads behind the wharfs, there was not much else in the area. However, things were about to change rapidly, and in the 1820s, the area was urbanising fast.

In fact, one of the earliest new streets to be added was Sutton Street, lined with a row of small houses. The earliest reference I can find to Sutton Street is from June 1826, but as that’s an advert by a seemingly established business, I’d suggest the street was probably completed in the first half of the 1820s — so about 200 years ago.

The name Sutton Street comes from Charles Manners-Sutton, Archbishop of Canterbury between 1805 and 1828, and nearby resident in Lambeth Palace when the road was being constructed.

Suttton Street underwent two dramatic changes in its life before it became Sutton Walk.

The first was the arrival of the railway that now passes over the top of most of the passageway. This arrived in the 1860s when the South Eastern Railway extended its line from London Bridge to a new terminus station at Charing Cross.

Construction started in 1860, and a large number of houses on the southeastern corner of Sutton Street were demolished to make space for the railway arches. The first train to run over the tracks was on 1st December 1863, and passenger services started on 11th January 1864.

Enterprisingly, the houses that were demolished to make way for the railway weren’t sent to landfill but were sold off as building materials—bricks, tiles, timbers, floors, window frames, fixtures, and fittings were sold in January 1861. Someone living in the area may have bits of the demolished houses in their home today.

A plot of empty land next to the railway that was used as a construction site was left empty for a few years until eventually the railway decided it would be useful as a turntable for its locomotives. Maybe less pleasing to the local residents still living nearby as there are several reports of locomotives coming off the turntable and hitting the retaining wall around the top, sending a shower of bricks into the streets below.

The next major change was just after WWII when the area was redeveloped from the post-war rubble into the Festival of Britain. That’s when the remaining houses lining Sutton Street were demolished, and the passageway became the pedestrianised Sutton Walk that we recognise today.

Today, the passage is a very busy route between the Southbank and Waterloo station. Well, unless you turn up at 5am on a Sunday in the summer to get photos of the alley when it’s nice and empty.

From the southern approach, you can see a brick building to the left side (at the time of writing, covered in a Paddington Bear mural). It’s not obvious from looking at it, but you’re looking at the remains of the elevated turntable that was built in the 1900s for the railway company.

The turntable building was repurposed during the Festival of Britain as the appropriately named Turntable Cafe, with a roof terrace where the turntable had been.

Most of it was demolished after the festival closed but a small bit remains. This bit in fact.

Something that many people will walk past without noticing is the huge artwork along the entire eastern wall of the passage. Look closely, and you’ll realise that the brick wall is actually a glass artwork replicating the brick wall underneath and (when it works) backlit from behind.

The £250,000 glass wall and accompanying mirror monolith were created for the South Bank Public Art Project at the turn of the Millenium although not unveiled until November 2001.

Called A Gateway to South Bank, it was created by the artist Alberto Duman working with MacCormac Jamieson Prichard and paid for by the local businesses as part of wider improvement works in the area.

At the time, he said the artwork “conveys the idea that however much you cover things up or try to hide them, they always resurface”

Part of the reason it’s harder to notice these days is that the clutter of an expanding pub obscures it. The Waterloo Tap pub arrived in March 2016 filling one of the arches and more recently expanding into the passegway as well.

Hopefully, one day, it will resurface again.