1836: Train jousting at Bermondsey Spa

If you've taken the opportunity of going up the Shard, you might have seen how the railway line between London Bridge and Deptford is arrow-straight - a long, wide, railway motorway that stretches several miles, very much at odds with other lines which twist and corkscrew through inner London.

Why should this be? To discover the reason why, we have to go back to the birth of the railways, and the tail-end of popularity for "pleasure gardens" in London, of which Vauxhall and Ranelagh was perhaps the best known. Slightly less celebrated were those at Bermondsey Spa, roughly halfway between central London and Deptford.

One of the first railway lines built in London connected central London to Vauxhall Gardens - seeing the opportunities, the owners of Bermondsey Spa resolved to do the same. In 1834 they became majority shareholders of what would become the London and Greenwich Railway, but the unique topography of the area and the lack of urban development led them to consider the opportunity to do something rather different with the line than just transport visitors back and forth...

1964: The Central London Service Deck

Many people know about the London Ringways plan - the ill-fated project to build four concentric rings of motorway in London, connected by radial expressways to allow traffic to race at 70mph directly through to the West End and beyond.

When the plans were very much a going concern in the 1960s, transport planners worried about one thing - what would happen to all this extra car traffic once it was off the motorways? The system was designed to feed traffic into London efficiently - but once in the central area it would be dumped onto existing streets which would hardly be able to cope.

The seminal 1963 report "Traffic in Towns", written by Sir Colin Buchanan, promoted the famous concept of segregating traffic from pedestrians. Now, we can see the Buchanan Report as the progenitor of the 70s obsession with bleak pedestrian overpasses and subways, snaking around uncompromising dual carriageways cutting through once-vibrant communities. But at the time it offered an ideal solution to a future where pedestrians and motorists would be seen to be in inevitable conflict.

London County Council's solution was to take things underground. 

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.