Place Name
A reference to both the locality of Peckham and the area’s 18thCentury landowner, Mrs Martha Hill. The name Peckham was first recorded in the Domesday Book of 1086 as Pecheham. It means the village by a hill and comes from the Old English words, pēac and hām and probably refers to the old village which was to the west of today’s Telegraph Hill. By 1178 it had become Pecham before taking the contemporary spelling of Peckham in 1241. Mrs Martha Hill was the daughter of Sir Isaac Shard, former sheriff of Surrey. The Shards were already major landowners elsewhere in Surrey when Mrs Hill purchased Sir Thomas Bond’s Peckham mansion, which stood just west of Peckham Hill Street, where Whitten Timber Yard is today, in 1732. At that time the street was called Lord Lane. Bond, who served as Comptroller of the household of Queen Henrietta Maria and after whom Bond Street is named, built his mansion in 1672 upon the grounds of the ancient Peckham manor. It can be seen on John Rocque’s 1741 map of Camberwell as a U-Shaped property set back from the roads, amid ornamental gardens to the south, and radiating tree-lined avenues to the north east. After Mrs Hill’s death, the property descended through several generations of Shards before being demolished in 1797. The land itself was sold by Charles Shard in 1807. Both Mrs Hill and Sir Thomas Bond are buried in Camberwell Church. The street appears on the Ordnance Survey Map published in 1830 as Hill Street. The name endured about 100 years before being changed to Peckham Hill Street.
