Place Name
This was originally Blue Anchor Lane after a public house. But its name was one of many changed in 1937 by the London County Council as it sought to tidy up the city’s street names and reduce duplication. Some of the changes however were met with dismay at the time by local residents and historians. The current name refers to the Goldsmith Road Mission Hall or possibly the Shaftesbury Society Mission that both stood here. The road which did originally run from Peckham High Street to Goldsmith Road was curtailed with the development of Wakefield House. In a letter to The Sunday Times published in November of that year, Miss E Jeffries Davis, a reader in London history at the University of London, wrote: “Blue Anchor Lane has been needlessly (as the main GPO list shows) altered into Mission Place. It leads into Southwark Park Road, now bearing a name by which the predecessors of the LCC obliterated Blue Anchor Road in 1878. Or thought they had: the Bermondsey people new better. They kept the old name for the street market held in the ancient winding thoroughfare, not so long ago a track across fields; the local housewives are still shopping in ‘The Bloo’.”
