At Camberwell we have a long history of doing things differently defined by our south London location and commitment to the local community. We are very proud of our strong social reform heritage, which all started with our neighbour the South London Gallery (SLG).
In 1889 William Rossiter the manager of South London Working Men’s College bought Portland House, now our halls of residence, and the surrounding land to build a fine art gallery in the heart of Camberwell. He believed that art, literature and learning should be available to all, not just the privileged few. The gallery opened in 1891 to ‘bring art to the people of South London’.
A mission that attracted the newspaper magnate and leading proponent of the Public Library Act, John Passmore Edwards who in 1893 donated funds to build a library and lecture hall at the rear of gallery. But he had ambitions to do more, and with the support of a band of social reformers philanthropists and artists, including Edward Burne-Jones, G F Watts and Walter Crane the local authority was persuaded to establish a technical institute alongside the gallery. And in 1898 Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts opened in an extension to the gallery paid for by Passmore Edwards. In the reception of the SLG you can still see the plaque celebrating the school opening, and the door that connects our building to the gallery still remains hidden in an office in C Block. In another office nearby you can also find Walter Crane celebrated with other leading figures of the Arts and Crafts movement in stained glass.
The ethos of the Arts and Craft movement was very much alive at the school that mainly ran evening courses ‘to give the best artistic and technical education to all classes in the district’, ‘supplement knowledge gained by craftsmen in workshops’ and ‘help the craftsman become the designer of his own work’.
At the school opening, the painter and designer Sir Edward Poynter, President of the Royal Academy, suggested in his speech that ‘Schools of art might be of greater value if their proper purposes were kept in mind, and if it was remembered that a dilettante admiration for old art and enthusiastic talk about beauty of form and feeling for colour went for nothing … They had in this country designers enough and to spare … What they wanted were fine and thorough handicraftsmen who would put their best work into all they did for the love of art’.
Technical and trade classes included architecture, cabinet design, embroidery, wood carving, wood block and stencil cutting, masonry and stone carving, plasterwork, house painting and decorating, plus drawing and design, life classes and modelling. The school proved very popular, and an extension opened in 1904, followed by another in 1913. Students’ work was regularly exhibited at SLG.
With the advent of the First World War and increased mass production, the school was a gradually moved away from the craft and trade courses to focus more on art and design, with the establishment of the Fine Art Department in the inter-war years. Following the Second World War, many ex-servicemen entered the school. It became a major influence on British art, as head of painting, Victor Pasmore attracted many notable artists from the Euston Road School and it gained a reputation for a new form of realism in contrast to the Romantic painting prevalent at the time. A strong focus on drawing was established as part of that, which prevails today with our BA dedicated to drawing. The tradition for attracting ground-breaking painters to teach continued into the late sixties with Frank Auerbach and Euan Uglow among others as well as many talented students who gained national and international reputations. The school expanded notably for sculpture and ceramics as well as painting and expanded into buildings nearby until the early 70s when a new building was added to the Peckham Road site, now our A block.
Its very modern brutalist architecture at the time sat alongside the traditional arts and crafts school and both now architecturally significant Grade 11 protected buildings. The new building provided more studio workshops and classrooms, new assembly and lecture halls, library and common rooms. The expansion continued with taking over the Wilson School just down the road, and now the home for the CCW Foundation course and BA drawing.
The arts course continued to flourish. An in 1989 Camberwell was renamed Camberwell College of Arts, after having become a constituent college of the London Institute in 1986. Throughout the decades Camberwell has stayed committed to social purpose and its local community evidenced by the North Peckham Estate murals, which you can still see, painted by textiles students in the mid-1970s and free ‘live art’ classes for the unemployed launched in 1984. And more recently the development of Peckham Space, now Peckham Platform, which was founded by the college in 2009 and became independent charity in 2014.
And in 2016, the Camberwell campus underwent a major redevelopment – you can see the press release of March 2018 celebrating the official launch of the new facilities.