When I booked a weekend in London at the Premier Inn London Southwark (Southwark Station), my London-based friend Eric prompted me to seek out the Roupell Street estate as an unexpected historic experience.
It takes only a couple of minutes to walk into a nineteenth-century time-warp of neat little terraces that are now marketed as two-bedroom houses at close on two million pounds each.
The area was developed in the early nineteenth century by the son of a jeweller, John Palmer Roupell (1771-1835), an ambitious, indeed rapacious gold-refiner and metal merchant, who bought seven acres of land in Lambeth Marsh in 1792. The area was previously tenter grounds, used for drying new-made cloth, until John Palmer Roupell introduced iron and lead works and later, from 1824, laid out streets which were initially named after him and his wife and only son.
This was not a happy family. The son, Richard Palmer Roupell (1782-1856), feared his father, who he knew would disapprove of his liaison with a carpenter’s daughter, Sarah Crane, with whom he had four clandestine children. He did not marry Sarah until both his parents were dead, and subsequently had a sole legitimate son, Richard (1840-1883).
The second of the four illegitimate children, William Roupell (1831-1909), assisted his father in developing fifty-five acres of land around Streatham Hill into the Roupell Park estate. He too was ambitious, and became MP for Lambeth in 1857 after spending £6,000 on campaigning. This was expedited by destroying his father’s will that left his estate to sixteen-year-old Richard, and forging a substitute that made his mother sole heir and himself sole executor.
This fraud unravelled in 1862, and though he destroyed documents and fled to Spain, he chose to return and face charges. He repented in a confessional pamphlet, and after serving a fourteen-year sentence he went to live with his mother and sister on Brixton Hill, made himself respectable but not frugal, outlived the rest of the family and died in poverty. Three hundred people attended when he was buried in the family vault in West Norwood Cemetery, the last of the Roupells.
Roupell Street is the sole memento of these doings, an urbane enclave that takes no notice of Waterloo East Station and the South Bank. The elegant little cottages are built in a warm brown brick, many of them with gables that are oddly out of step with the rhythm of the front doors.
In the middle of the grid of streets is a dignified pub, the King’s Arms, which looks as if it hasn’t changed for a century, but boasts a fine Thai kitchen. The Londonist website [King’s Arms | Londonist] advises, “[it] might lazily be declared a ‘hidden gem’. Judging by the crowds who find the place every evening, there’s nothing very ‘hidden’ about it. Turn up of an afternoon, however, and you’ll find the perfect corner pub for a quiet pint.” Its interior is described and evaluated at King’s Arms, London – CAMRA – The Campaign for Real Ale.
If I didn’t know Eric, who knows London, I would never have found it.
