Pullens buildings

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Pullens buildings are some of the last Victorian tenement buildings surviving in London, England. Located in Amelia Street, Crampton Street, Iliffe Street, Penton Place and Peacock Street they are protected by Conservation Area status granted by Southwark Council. In the Walworth area, they are near Elephant and Castle and Kennington Underground stations.

The Pullens Estate was built by James Pullen, a local builder, who acquired the land and developed it over a 15 year period from 1886.

The full estate, which originally extended southwards as far as Manor Place, comprised 684 dwellings in 12 blocks. Attached to the rear of the dwellings, arranged round four yards, were 106 workshops. The estate’s shops were located at the entrances to the workshopyards.

In the 1970s the council planned to demolish the buildings but were stopped in the 1980s by an alliance of tenants and squatters under the umbrella of the residents association who campaigned and fought successfully to save them.

The residential buildings are four storeys in height, and each unit is three bays wide with an ornate central entrance to a common stair well. The ranges vary from three to twelve units in length. They are faced with yellow stock brick, the front being enriched with the use of decorative terracotta arches to the door and window openings. The roofs are flat, providing amenity space for the residents. The workshops attached to the rear of the residential blocks are simpler and more “functional” in appearance. They are two storeys high, and also built of stock brick andflat-roofed. The two-storey loading bays are edged with blue brick quoins. The shops, flanking the entrances to the workshop yards, have traditional painted timbershopfronts, with pilasters supporting a fascia and cornice, and stallrisers.

Some of the builings were destroyed during German bombing in World War II. Others were demolished. According to records at www.flyingbombsandrockets.com a V1 rocket at Manor Place by the Railway on 27 June 1944 at 22:45. The V1 demolished six houses in Crampton Street and 4 in Manor Place as well as damaging a public wash house and stores in Manor Place, a railway bridge, 2 arches, and 300 houses and buildings in Manor Place and surrounding streets.

Many of the remaining 351 flats in the buildings are local authority owned but just under 50 per cent are now in to private ownership and prices have rocketed boosted by the imminent £1.5billion development plan for the Elephant and Castle area. In the first part of 2007 asking prices for properties without balconies ranged between £255,000 and £270,000. The second floor balcony propeties were priced between £275,000 and £285,000. In 2007 the local authority - Southwark - embarked on a refurbishment scheme of the Pullens Buildings.

A young Charlie Chaplin lived in one of the Pullen buildings for nine months in 1907.^{[citation needed]} Supermodel Naomi Campbell lived in Iliffe Street.^{[citation needed]}