Lambeth Archives continues to go on record at new home

It is all change for the Lambeth Archives record office and local studies library – it is relocating after an incredible 133-year stay at the Minet Library in Knatchbull Road, Camberwell, writes Yann Year.

The Archives office holds the historic records of Lambeth council, the deposited records of many local organisations and a local studies and museum collection.

Later this year – July is the expected date – its historic collections will be accessible once more at a purpose-built archive building at 18 Brixton Hill.

The honour of being the very last person to sign the attendance register at the Lambeth Archives, on the very last day that the Archives was based in its present location went to Robert Holden, vice-chairman of the Lambeth Local History Forum.

“A truly historic moment, and now recorded on film for posterity,” he said with pride.

The present office closed to the public for the last time on New Year’s Eve.

Robert was there to research his paternal grandparents, who were married on August 5, 1895 at the former church of St James in Knatchbull Road, just 500 yards from the Archives building and it typifies the kind of priceless information contained in its shelves and cabinets.

He discovered his paternal grandmother lived with her 12 siblings at 1 and 1A Foreign Street, off Lilford Road, just round the corner.

The house and Foreign Street were demolished, probably in the 1950s/1960s, and the area was turned into a park, but Foreign Street was still in the 2005 edition of the London A-Z.

You can imagine how much space might be needed for such extensive documentation covering an area that stretches south from the Thames at Waterloo and Vauxhall and includes the districts of Kennington, Stockwell, Brixton, Herne Hill, Tulse Hill and Norwood as well as most of the previously separate parishes of Clapham and Streatham.

The Minet Library, as our illustrations show, has been part of the local fabric for a long time now – and the good news is that it will continue to operate as a lending library.

Not that its future can ever be taken for granted. It closed temporarily in 2016 and there was talk of it being converted into a gym, but public pressure saw it reopen in 2017.

The Minet was built in 1890 –- a gift from benefactor William Minet to Camberwell and Lambeth. The building was incendiary bombed during the Blitz on December 8, 1940.

The fire destroyed 18,585 books. Around 6,700 books were salvaged, and half of those were moved to Longfield Hall where a temporary library was established.

The Surrey Collection, a collection of archive records established by William Minet, survived the fire because they were housed in a strong room.

The library, which had been partially destroyed, was rebuilt in 1956 and reopened officially in 1959.

Minet was a descendant of French Huguenots who immigrated to London in the 1700s, and in 1889 he also gave 14½ acres of land to the London County Council to create Myatt’s Fields Park.

The library was originally designed to be a church hall for St James the Apostle and to be used by the tenants of the local estate.

It was an octagonal Gothic-style creation designed by architect George Hubbard.

When Minet’s first wife, Alice Evans, died in 1887 before the building was completed, he decided to turn it into a public library in her memory.

 

Picture: Robert Holden, the last visitor at the now-closed archives section Picture: R Holden