London Districts: Nunhead (Documentary)

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Nunhead belongs to the family of districts parented by the London Borough of Southwark.

Nunhead has traditionally been a working-class area. The constituency has been a safe Labour seat since its inception in 1997 and as far back as 1945 falling under the Peckham ward, probably due to the relatively high number of poor people and those from ethnic minority communities at that time; two groups who traditionally tended to vote Labour.

The earliest mention of Nunhead we seem to be aware of came about in 1583 on a deed selling off a slice of the Camberwell manor. The deed listed the inclusion of estates at “Nunn-head”. Clearly something grisly took place here involving heads.

The Nunhead Cemetery of 1840 has over 250,000 people resting in peace there. Its got a mysterious kind of atmosphere and is very overgrown but is an attractive wilderness. After failed management and some ownership changes, the whole of it was simply abandoned and left to wrack and ruin.

There were two chapels in the Cemetery. World war all but wiped one of them out totally and it was then put out of its misery. This surviving Anglican one suffered serious abuse from a 1976 arson attack which hollowed out its inside and completely incinerated its roof. The state of the ruin today makes it conducive to music or theatrical performance.

Southwark Council purchased this 52-acre cemetery in 1975. It cost them £1. Despite some improvements, most of it is still in a wild state having been left untended for a long stretch.

There’s enough detailed information to assume that a nunnery existed here before falling fate to the Suppression of the Monasteries brought about by newly appointed Supreme Head of the Church in England, Henry VIII.

As the administrative and legal processes of this nunnery’s closure were rolled out around 1536, the feisty mother superior kicked up such mayhem over it she had her head removed and mounted on a pikestaff to display to everyone on the green for insubordination. The stout resistance she put forth against Henry’s men bought time for the sisters to duck out through underground caves into Peckham.

The old nun’s, head, is still perched there by the green till this very day. Obviously, I’m referring to the pub, of course. It’s been there in some form since 1745 and it is believed the district name took on the naming convention of the original inn when it was first constructed in the form of 'The Nuns Head'. It gradually advanced itself into the The Nunhead Tavern of 1934 before it closed for a spell and was rebuilt in a completely different mock Tudor style as The Old Nun’s Head in 2007.