A Lambeth walk honouring Mary Seacole

Carole Wright

Carole Wright is a South-London based community garden manager and beekeeper

This Lambeth walk is to honour Mary Seacole (1805 – 1881), a Jamaican businesswoman and pioneering nurse who learned folk and traditional medicines in her Black mother’s boarding house in Kingston, Jamaica.

Mary gained experience treating the tropical diseases of her mother’s patients, who included plantation slaves and European service men. Her father was a white Scottish soldier in the British Army.

Pasley Park, SE17 3ES

Mary had returned to London from nursing British soldiers in the Crimean War, almost destitute. A four-day military fundraising festival was held for her in 1857, at this former site of the Surrey Music Hall and Royal Surrey Gardens. Over 80,000 people attended, including military figures and Royalty.

The walk then proceeds via Manor Place and onto Braganza Street. It turns onto Doddington Grove, which is lined with London plane trees – some of the first systematically planted street trees. From Doddington Place the walk turns right onto Kennington Park Place.

Kennington Park, SE11 4JJ

Here is where Mary’s fellow Jamaican, Bob Marley, a global Reggae star and noted Rastafarian, – played football whilst exiled in London in 1977. He visited the Rastafarian Temple in nearby St Agnes Place. This religious and social movement developed in Jamaica in the 1930s.

Kennington Road, SE11 6HR

The route proceeds along Kennington Road until reaching Black Prince Road. The London plane trees on the western side date back to the mid- 19th Century, and have the names of the twelve Apollo astronauts who walked on the lunar surface. The walk continues up Kennington Road until the junction with Lambeth Road.

Captain William Bligh House, SE1 7PT

At 100 Lambeth Road is a 1780s townhouse with an English heritage blue plaque, currently for sale for £2.7 million. Coincidentally, the cost of the house is equivalent to the number of slaves that were taken from West Africa to the West Indies in the Transatlantic slave trade. Bligh, a naval captain, made an unsuccessful 1789 trip on HMS Bounty to transport 1,000 breadfruit trees from Tahiti to the British colonies in the Caribbean. A second trip brought the trees to Mary’s homeland, Jamaica.

Continuing west down Lambeth Road, pass number 17, the former Lambeth Walk pub (now residential flats). Lambeth Bridge and the Garden Museum can be seen.

Garden Museum, SE1 7LB

A carved breadfruit sits on top of the tomb of William Bligh in the Garden Museum – the first museum in the world dedicated to garden history, and housed in the deconsecrated St‐Mary-at-Lambeth church.

The walk takes in the Thames Path along the Albert Embankment towards St Thomas’ Hospital. Steps lead onto Westminster Bridge and then right into the hospital gardens.

Statue of Mary Seacole, SE1 7GA

Unveiled in 2016, a 4.9 metre bronze statue of Mary Seacole, sculpted by artist Martin Jennings, towers in the garden of St Thomas’ Hospital.

In these times of COVID-19 and Black Lives Matter, Mary’s statue is a fitting reminder of the thousands of BAME doctors, nurses and frontline workers who have died because of the pandemic. She faces the Houses of Parliament, as a constant reminder of the debt owed to migrant workers, and of how we must remain visible in the landscape, whether we are made out of bronze or flesh.