Plaque

Photographed and numbered from north to south.

A nearby information board:
On your right is the old Roman road to the south coast (now the Brixton Road). Here, bridges once crossed the River Effra but today, the river flows beneath Canterbury Square on its way to the Thames at Vauxhall.
The village of Brixton did not exist until the end of the 18th century. The 1806 enclosure of the lands of the Manor of Lambeth (which belonged to the Archbishop of Canterbury) and the arrival of the railway in 1862 resulted in speculative house-building for commuters into central London.
A growing community needed shops. Nearby, Bon Marché on Brixton Road {building still there, the flat-iron between Ferndale Road and Stockwell Avenue} opened in 1877 and was the first purpose-built department store in the United Kingdom.
To your left is Canterbury Crescent, where you can still see the remnants of the old St John's School {the Tudor-style St John's Buildings, which you can see here}. It was built in 1853 at a cost of £1,600, on land donated by philanthropist Benedict Angell. Also in the Crescent were a stables for resting carriage horses, the Canterbury Arms public house and the dairy pictured above (London, Gloucestershire and North Hants Dairy}. The ornately styled mansion flats immediately to your left {the red brick Dover Mansions} were popular with music hall performers, and these artistes gave Brixton a bohemian flavour. In the 1920s, the pioneer sexologist Havelock Ellis lived here.
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