Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
21
selling everything from cheap clothes to reggae soundtracks: weekday lunchtimes, there
are also food stalls for the workers; on Saturdays, the market usually has a theme (from
kids' market to flea market), and on Sundays the farmers' market takes place here.
Brixton Windmill
Blenheim Gardens • April-Oct check website for open days •
T
020 7926 2559,
W
brixtonwindmill.org •
!
Brixton
Brixton is about the last place in London you'd expect to find a fully functioning
windmill
, but if you duck down Blenheim Gardens, off Brixton Hill, past the venue of
the same name (see p.401), you'll see
a tower mill nearly 40ft high, built in 1816, with
its blades intact (but no sails) and a fetching weatherboarded “hood”. Wind power
drove the mill until 1862 when the area became too built-up, then steam and gas
followed until the mill fell into disuse in the 1930s. Now restored, it's only open
sporadically and you need to book in advance. In the 1820s, the mill gained another
source of power for its corn-grinding: the country's first
treadmill
, designed by William
Cubitt and worked by inmates of Brixton Prison.
Dulwich and around
Dulwich
is just two stops from Brixton on the railway, but light years away in every other
respect. This a
uent, middle-class enclave is one of southeast London's prettier patches
- its leafy streets boast handsome Georgian houses and even a couple of weatherboarded
cottages, while the Soane-designed
Dulwich
Picture Gallery
is one of London's finest
small museums. If Dulwich has a fault, it's the somewhat cloying self-consciousness
about its “village” status, with its rather twee little shops, rural signposts and fully
functioning tollgate (£1) from 1789 - the only one remaining in London.
A day out in Dulwich can be combined with a visit to the nearby
Horniman Museum
,
an enjoyable ethnographic collection, and, for the very curious, the remnants of the
old
Crystal Palace
, further south. The green spaces between these sights are also worth
exploring.
Dulwich Park
, opposite the Picture Gallery, is a pleasant enough public park,
but for something a bit wilder,
Sydenham Hill Wood
, a nature reserve south of Dulwich
Common, is the one to head for.
Dulwich College
Dulwich came to prominence in 1619 when its lord of the manor, actor-manager
Edward Alleyn, founded the
College of God's Gift
as a school for twelve poor boys on
the profits of his whorehouses and bear-baiting pits on Bankside. Dulwich College has
long since outgrown its original buildings, which still stand to the north of the Picture
Gallery, and is now housed in a fanciful Italianate complex designed by Charles Barry
(son of the architect of the Houses of Parliament), south of Dulwich Common. The
college is now a large, fee-paying, independent boys' school, with an impressive roll call
of old boys, including Raymond Chandler, P.G. Wodehouse and Ernest Shackleton,
although they tend to keep quiet about World War II traitor Lord Haw-Haw.
Dulwich Picture Gallery
Gallery Rd • Tues-Fri 10am-5pm, Sat & Sun 11am-5pm • Permanent collection £6; exhibitions £10 • Guided tours Sat & Sun 3pm; free
•
T
020 8693 5254,
W
dulwichpicturegallery.org.uk • West Dulwich (from Victoria) or North Dulwich (from London Bridge) train stations;
buses #3 or #P4 from Brixton
Dulwich Picture Gallery
,
the nation's oldest public art gallery, was designed by John Soane
in 1814, and houses, among other bequests, the collection assembled in the 1790s by the
French dealer Noel Desenfans on behalf of King Stanislas of Poland, who planned to
open a national gallery in Warsaw. In 1795, Poland disappeared from the map of Europe,
Stanislas abdicated and Desenfans was left with the paintings. Neither the British nor
Russians would buy the collection, so Desenfans proposed founding a national gallery. In
the end it was left to his business partner, the landscape painter Francis Bourgeois, and
