Retired fireman recalls surprising impressions of old Southwark, 1970s London
The headquarters of the London Fire Brigade were once located in Southwark Bridge Road. (Photo credit: Courtesy Dave Pike, left, and Google Maps, right)
My name is Dave Pike. I am a long retired London fireman. I was invited to share some of the Brigade's history together with images of the “old firm". Once, the Headquarters of the Brigade was located in Southwark Bridge Road, SE1. It was also my fire station for a number of years and the link between the history of the place and what we did in the 1970s was never lost on me.
Old Southwark
I joined the London Fire Brigade at the tail end of the London County Council’s era. By the time I started training, the Greater London Council had been created. My first fire station was Lambeth, on the Albert Embankment. In early 1970, I was promoted to the exalted rank of a Leading Fireman and posted to Southwark fire station in Southwark Brigade Road. It was, and remains, a special place to me.
Only a few miles separated Southwark and Lambeth fire stations. Yet Southwark’s ground was quite different from that of Lambeth’s. This was strange, as the two grounds shared a common boundary that extended from the river down to Elephant and Castle. Southwark then had heavy industry mixed amongst the decaying, but occupied, riverside warehouses. New modern office developments had sprung up along Southwark Street, including a vast government department building, plus a high security banking complex and a range of other commercial buildings.
Guy’s Hospital, itself the size of a small town, was farther to the east. Its state-of-the-art multi-storey tower (still under construction) would be topped off by its distinctive cantilever lecture theatre overlooking the Thames and St Paul’s Cathedral. The other hospital on our ground was the former Evelina Children’s Hospital, that was directly opposite the fire station. The gargantuan brick built structure of Bankside Power station directly faced St Paul’s Cathedral, whilst our own, more modest, Southwark Cathedral was hidden from the river by St Mary Olave’s Wharf. It could be found amongst the narrow cobbled roads that formed Bankside and Clink Street (site of the original Clink debtors prison).
Clink Street led into the famous Borough fruit and vegetable market, with its plethora of stalls and adjoining warehouses, supplying produce to swanky West End restaurants and South London street markets traders alike.
However, the most surprising and noticeable aspect of the immediate area surrounding the fire station was the range and quantity of impoverished housing. These included drab little terraces, tenement buildings (run by charities), poorly maintained pre-war council flats (none of which had its own inside bathroom) and the former artisans' dwellings. Peeling paintwork and brickwork deprived of mortar combined to tell of the community’s own sad hard-up story.
Looking farther back in time, pictured above is Southwark Fire Station's fire escape, in this 1939 photo. (Credit: Collage: The London Picture Archive)
Dickensian London in the 1970s
Add to this canvas the proliferation of dingy and grubby little public houses, with their bare wooden floors and simple tables and chairs, and you could be forgiven for believing you were still in the very streets that Charles Dickens had brought to a wider public’s attention when highlighting the most appalling social deprivations that Southwark’s inhabitants had to endure then.
"Things had improved in this rundown area since those Victorian times, but I was still bemused by the level of squalidness, meagreness and scarcity that I had not realised still existed in the 1970s."
Things had improved in this rundown area since those Victorian times, but I was still bemused by the level of squalidness, meagreness and scarcity that I had not realised still existed in the 1970s. Parts of this area, to my impressionable eye, looked reminiscent of the harsh poverty-stricken living conditions in the works of Dickens. Especially so when the rows of smoking chimney pots added their own exhaust fumes to the frequent autumn fogs that still occurred (despite the implementation of the Clean Air Act).
Yet, despite the physical appearance of the surrounding streets, the local population came across as cheerful with a remarkable toughness and resilience. Most local inhabitants also worked within the immediate area and were either costermongers, local factory workers or other blue-collar workers. These workers could bring home only a meagre wage, so seemed imprisoned in these conditions. It appeared to me that this was evidence enough of an enduring class system that would keep them in their place: the bottom. I also could not help but notice that for many of them social justice was just an ever-present dream.
Fires and public awareness
Unsurprisingly, it was these very conditions which provided Southwark fire station with a fair chunk of its considerable operational workload. Candles were still regularly used to supplement, or provide the only, lighting; poorly maintained property meant electrical systems became incapacitated, overheated and started fires. Careless smokers, often fuelled by too much drinking, discarded lit cigarettes with insufficient care. These, when falling onto armchairs or beds, led to smoky, sometimes fatal, smouldering fires. Young children, left unattended, discovered the sometimes lethal attraction of playing with lighted matches.
Yet around this time, the most frequent and potentially serious cause of a house fire was the portable paraffin heater. These devices (sometimes bought second-hand and generally poorly maintained, if at all) when knocked over, whilst lit, provided a ready cause of fire. Tragically, and in increasing numbers, they were the cause of frequent fires including many where lives were lost. The headline, “Children die in oil heater blaze” became an all too commonplace winter feature in our daily newspapers.
The London Fire Brigade was the very first UK Fire Brigade to take a fire prevention initiative and bought prime time on commercial television to back up its public awareness campaign in an attempt to reduce the number of these often fatal fires.
Southwark’s less than prosperous neighbourhood and its resultant fires was not unique. Many of London’s fire stations were located in areas that had similar problems of social deprivation and who saw increased operational workloads because of it. Some stations, such as in the East End of London, far exceeded the number of calls that Southwark had to deal with. But regardless of wherever these areas were located the fires tested the crews’ teamwork and fireground skills. In those early months at Southwark, I helped pitch the 50-foot wheeled escape ladder at more fires than in all the previous four and a half years I had served at Lambeth.
Human drama
A “small fire flat/house, hose reel, breathing apparatus” may well have been one of the most frequent “stop” messages sent from our run-of-the-mill “domestic” incidents. However, those few words simply could not portray the reality of these dramas nor the intense effort that went into resolving them. Neither could that simple message portray the plight of the occupants.
Often, these heart-rending scenes would also involve the human and social predicaments that the impoverished found themselves facing. There might be child welfare dilemmas that had to be passed onto Social Services, or in the case of careless or uncaring parents the police. Lastly, unscrupulous landlords of neglected and run-down properties left their tenants exposed to serious fire and other health hazards.
Southwark fire station’s ground provided a valuable schooling for this new Leading Fireman. Some of the lessons, for this twenty-two-year-old, were much harder to absorb than others.
