Place Name
Originally Canal Bank, it took its current name in the 1930s. It alludes to the nearby Surrey Canal (Peckham Branch) which in the 1970s was the last section of the Grand Surrey Canal to be filled in. The canal was built in 1826 and was used to transport cargo three-and-a-half miles from the terminal basin (now the site of Peckham Library) up to the main canal and then to the Surrey Commercial Docks in Rotherhithe. Decades of under-use meant that by the late 1960s much of the canal along the Willowbrook Estate was polluted. In 1971, one journalist wrote that to many locals, the canal was “just three miles of stinking water”.
