Neighbourhoods

London is often described as a collection of distinct urban villages rather than a single sprawling metropolis, due to the way it developed over time. Discover each neighbourhood's unique character and charm.

Peckham

Blake’s tree full of angels, a mile of Rye Lane, and a Stirling Prize library on splayed legs.

A blue-green box of a building held up on thin steel legs over an open square, LIBRARY in cut letters on its roof and an orange pod projecting from it, under a deep blue sky. — Peckham Library, which took the Stirling Prize the year it opened.

William Blake was about eight when he walked out to Peckham Rye and saw a tree full of angels, their bright wings bespangling every bough like stars. Only his mother’s word saved him from a thrashing for lying. The Rye is still common ground at the south end, and nobody has ever identified the tree. What came after was market gardens, then railways. Peckham Rye station opened in 1865, and above its concourse is a Victorian waiting room that was shut up for most of a century. Rye Lane ran south from it and still does: a long street of Nigerian and Ghanaian food shops, fabric stalls, butchers and hairdressers, with covered arcades behind it. Between the wars Peckham tried an experiment. The Pioneer Health Centre opened on St Mary’s Road in 1935, a glass and concrete building by Owen Williams where some nine hundred local families paid a shilling a week for a swimming pool, a gymnasium and a yearly examination, on the theory that health was something to be cultivated rather than repaired. It closed in 1950 and the building is flats. Will Alsop’s library of 2000 stands at the north end, a copper box on splayed steel legs with a reading pod slung under the roof, and it took the Stirling Prize. Behind Rye Lane the Bussey Building, once a cricket bat factory, holds studios and a cinema, and there is a bar on the roof of the car park next to it.