Beating the Bounds of Nunhead

The modern boundaries of the ward of Nunhead within the London Borough of Southwark go back some centuries. They roughly reflect the grounds of the nunnery that stood on the site, and a number of smallholdings attached to the convent (land originally granted by Faulkes de Breauté in around 1221). Because of the canonical ownership of the land, and its position on the border of what would later become Middlesex and Kent, following the Dissolution of the Monasteries there was uncertainty about which county Nunhead belonged to. This had its drawbacks for the area's residents; because it was legally beyond the reach of the Middlesex and Kent Assizes it became a useful spot for miscreants from London to escape to (being only three quarters of an hour's hard riding from London Bridge) and taverns, including the Old Nun's Head, were established to service this itinerant criminal population. It had its benefits too - disagreements between local burgesses in Peckham and what is now Brockley about the area's status meant that, for nearly two hundred years, Nunhead's residents paid no taxes. A local, informal "beating the bounds" ceremony around Nunhead's borders, was carried out annually between around 1600 and 1750 (with breaks around the Civil War and the year of the Plague) to preserve this customary freedom.

By the mid-eighteenth century a de facto agreement had developed between Middlesex and Kent that each would take responsibility, respectively, for the area north and south of the sheep and cattle droving route that ran along what's now Lausanne Road, Evelina Road and Nunhead Lane. The route was heavily used by Kentish farmers who would drive their livestock along the Dover Road before cutting away towards Peckham Rye, the closest common land to London, where informal livestock markets were held until around 1800. In the latter half of the eighteenth century an annual fair took place on Nunhead Green, the highlight of which was a tug-of-war between local farm labourers - one team from the Middlesex side, one team from the Kentish side - ostensibly, to define exactly where the de facto boundary between the two counties would lie. The tradition tailed off as the area became more built up; the last recorded fair on Nunhead Green took place in 1850.

Shortly afterwards Nunhead was formally subsumed by Act of Parliament into the area covered by Dulwich District Board of Works; later it became part of Camberwell Metropolitan Borough and later the London Borough of Southwark. It is, however, one of only three wards in London whose boundaries have not altered since the establishment of citywide local government in 1855.