The show must go on

Established in or around 1827, Caroline Gardens Chapel in Peckham formed the heart of London’s largest complex of almshouses (charitable housing) originally known as the Licensed Victuallers’ Benevolent Institution Asylum (LVBI). The Grade II listed site was not a psychiatric facility – here, ‘asylum’ traditionally meant ‘sanctuary’ – and was actually a home for elderly, retired pub landlords.

Residents were entitled to a small weekly cash payment, coal, medical care and medicine. With the welfare state still being over 100 years from creation, almshouses were an important part of life, offering impoverished Georgian and Victorian elders the only alternative to destitution or the workhouse.

The chapel soon became the beating heart of the community.

During the Second World War, the LVBI evacuated its tenants to Denham, in Buckinghamshire, for safety away from the city.

The Asylum was bombed and the chapel was almost completely gutted by an incendiary munition – with the astonishing exception of its iconic stained-glass windows and fascinating collection of carved stone funerary monuments. After the war, the chapel was stabilised and made watertight by filling the crypt with concrete and adding a rudimentary asbestos-cement roof.

In 1960, the local paper described how the chapel was to become “a little theatre”, but this did not come to pass. Although the cottages are still in use, the chapel was never really used again until recently.