Stockwell station
Stockwell is one of eight London Underground stations with an adjacent deep-level air-raid shelter, constructed during the Second World War. The total capacity of the shelter was around 4000 people and one of the entrances outside the station is now a local landmark.
London is well-known for being a collection of villages and many areas have their own character and indeed are famous for something in particular.
You might for instance focus on Camden Town with its myriad markets.
Alperton for its south Asian atmosphere.
You could visit Goldhawk Road – reknowned for its connections to The Who.
Straight ahead, if you walk far enough ahead from Stockwell – itself famous for its Portuguese community – along Clapham Road and you’ll reach Oval – known worldwide by fans of cricket.
But on the way, and even more of a London speciality, is an area known for its connection to the artist Van Gogh.
Stockwell Terrace
These three-storey mid-nineteenth-century terraced houses are Grade II listed.
In 1802, the Manor of Stockwell was sold and these first houses were constructed in the 1840s with the idea to form an elegant middle-class suburb.
A friend of a friend lived here in the mid 1980s and, when I first learnt to drive, I’d pick up my friend Jane from the house of the friend of my friend who lived here. I found the freedom of driving so darned fantastic after years on public transport. I wanted any excuse to drive so much that I was largely her taxi service to and from Willesden Green and Stockwell Terrace.
I fell out of love with driving around London in due course and back in love with public transport.
Clapham Road
Walk up Clapham Road and eventually right into Durand Gardens.
Durand Gardens
Durand Gardens is a street of terraces, semi-detached and detached houses.
The town houses of Durand Gardens were built from 1840 to the 1890s.
Originally called The Grove, it was renamed Durand Gardens in 1893 after Sir Mortimer Durand who established the dividing line between India and Afghanistan that year.
Hackford Road
While it was always known that Van Gogh had lived in Stockwell, the precise address was undetermined. The link of 87 Hackford Road to Van Gogh was only discovered in 1971 by postman and avid Van Gogh enthusiast Paul Chalcroft, who took it upon himself to locate Vincent’s London home during a postal strike.
At the age of 20, Van Gogh had arrived in London to start work at an art dealership – Goupil & company – in Southampton Street, Covent Garden. At first he lived in Brixton. London was twenty times the size of any town that Van Gogh had known.
He spent three years in the city, walking its streets, crossing its bridges and gaining inspiration from the surroundings. His time in Britain was a life-changing experience, influencing the art he would begin making four years later.
When he first came to London, he purchased a top hat, a symbol of the successful Victorian middle-class. Van Gogh had a love for English Literature and Charles Dickens in particular.
He enjoyed re-reading Dickens’s Christmas Stories every year and continued to read Dickens until his death. In his letters, Van Gogh mentions over one hundred books by British authors. Writers like George Eliot, with her social realism novel Middlemarch, influenced Van Gogh’s understanding of social reform.
His favourite novel was John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress. It is an allegory of a man who must travel on a path filled with many obstacles that test his faith in God.
During August 1873, Vincent van Gogh moved into 87 Hackford Road, Mrs Sarah Ursula Loyer was living at the house with her daughter Eugenie and another tenant called Samuel Plowman.
The tube didn’t arrive her until 1890 and Vincent walked to and from work each day from Hackford Road. It was a long way from Stockwell to Covent Garden. His usual route to work was up Clapham Road to the Oval, up Kennington Road, across Westminster Bridge and then various different routes to Southampton Street.
As a widow, Mrs Loyer was able to generate income by running a small school for children out of her front parlour and letting out rooms to lodgers.
With his career as an artist looming in the future, Vincent Van Gogh was judged as a bit of a ‘weirdo’ by the people he lodged with.
True to form, Van Gogh reputedly fell in love with Eugenie Loyer. His love was documented in letters dotted with Keats’s poems of love and desire. His advances were however totally unrequited and he became obsessive and a nuisance to the quiet Eugenie. He was asked to leave and find new lodgings in Kennington.
Having grown up in a middle-class home, Van Gogh was shocked by the poverty on the streets of London. He vowed to live a meaningful life. When he did decide to become an artist, he wished only to create art ‘for the people’.
In London, Vincent enjoyed visits to the Royal Academy to view favourites like John Constable and the Pre-Raphaelite painters. Later, Van Gogh would use English titles for some of his works, hoping that they would sell well in Britain.
During his time in London, Van Gogh became more and more religious. It was at this time that he decided he wished to pursue a career as a priest.
He left London in June 1874. Soon after, he was volunteering as a pastor in Borinage, a mining village in Belgium. Britain’s rising socialism had influenced Van Gogh so much that he donated much of what he and the Church had to the villagers to alleviate their poverty. The Church authorities were not pleased and fired Van Gogh for harming their governance in the region.
The year after he’d left London, he had visited Paris for the first time.
The Hackford Road sketch that Van Gogh made in 1873 is the earliest surviving drawing from Vincent’s English period.
87 Hackford Road, Oval
Vincent van Gogh’s earliest work
Caldwell Street
It was built just before the 1830s dawned and was named Holland Street after Henry Richard Vassall, the third Baron Holland who owned this area.
The road was once a shopping street and was renamed Caldwell Street in the 1930s.
Only a small section of the original street remains on the western side and a tiny cottage on the far eastern end by Brixton Road.
Brixton Road
Brixton Road dates back to the Roman era when it was part of the London to Brighton Way.
Fronting Brixton Road at the north end is the Neo-Byzantine style Christ Church, opened in 1902.
For much of its length Brixton Road remains lined by Regency period terraces of houses that once made a virtually continuous frontage from Kennington to Brixton. These had become semi-derelict by the 1970s when some were replaced, but many were refurbished by the Greater London Council, mostly as social housing.
Prima Road
Prima Road was laid out on land belonging a banker, John Wright. Wright granted several building leases of plots fronting Clapham and Brixton Roads.
The Effra river flowed across the northern part of Prima Road making the area boggy. The Effra was built over between 1837 and 1857 and St Marks’s paid £322 towards the costs. The raised banks of the Oval cricket ground were built with earth excavated during the building over of the Effra.
St Mark’s Church
The church was built on the site of the old gallows corner on Kennington Common, and was opened in 1824.
On Saturdays a farmers’ market is held in the churchyard.