Your local Plumber – Peckham is on our radar!

As local plumbers, Peckham is one of the areas of the capital we’re very familiar with. We like to know a bit about the places we work simply because London is such a fascinating city, the place we love and call home. Here’s what we’ve found out about Peckham, a particularly vibrant and interesting area of London.

Our plumbers love Peckham – A familiar stamping ground

Originally part of the parish of Camberwell, Peckham is a Saxon place name. Some say it means ‘the village of the River Peck’, the Peck being a stream that ran through the area until 1823, when it was enclosed and disappeared under the streets you see today. Others say it means ‘enclosure by a hill’.

Peckham is also the site of Roman remains, which means people actually lived there long before the eleventh century. Whatever the origin of the name, Peckham played a part in the Domesday Book, written in the year 1086, as ‘Pecheham’. And it has a wonderfully long and colourful history.

By the 1500s Peckham was a thriving, wealthy district of large homes. And the 1700s saw the market garden and orchard-rich area taken over by industrialists who wanted to avoid the increasingly dirty, poor, chaotic and unsanitary conditions in the capital’s centre.

In 1767 the artist William Blake visited Peckham Rye, where he saw a strange vision of an angel in a tree. In 1993 the artist Stan Peskett painted a mural of the vision near Goose Green playground in East Dulwich, to celebrate the story. King John probably hunted at Peckham, and it was once the site of an infamous annual fair that celebrated a particularly good day’s hunting, a three week-long party that eventually became so rowdy and out-of-control that it was banned in 1827.

At the start of the 1800s Peckham remained a pretty village surrounded by farmland. The first omnibus service ran from Peckham to the city centre from 1851, and Peckham Rye railway station was opened in 1865, joining it to the rest of London and starting off the long assimilation process.

The 1990s saw the EU help fund the area’s regeneration. Peckham Library is one of the results, a building we always give a nod to when we drive past in our van because of its amazing architecture and colourful cladding. The new town square and housing, which replaced the old North Peckham Estate, is a lot better, and funding for art projects like Tom Phillips’ brilliant mosaics on the Peckham Experiment restaurant’s exterior walls has made such a difference.

Why does local knowledge matter to London plumbers like us?

You know the score… if you’re not familiar with the local area, you could easily spend hours driving in circles trying to find a place to park the van. Because we know where to find spare local parking spaces, we get to you faster to fix your plumbing.

Like every area of the capital, Peckham is studded with buildings of every age and style. We’ve been doing this for long enough to be able to tackle more or less every different kind of plumbing challenge with ease and confidence. There’s nothing we haven’t seen, there are no surprises, and nothing phases us. If we came across some ancient Roman plumbing, we could probably fix that!

Modern Peckham is an old-school London working class community that has been enriched over the decades by an influx of interesting people from all over the place. We work with families who have come here from Bangladesh, the Caribbean, China, India, Ghana, Nigeria, Pakistan, Turkey, Eastern Europe, Vietnam and more, all with their own fascinating stories to tell. And all with their own unique plumbing horrors to resolve!

If you live or work in Peckham and need a reliable, friendly plumber who won’t charge you the earth and will do everything possible to fix things, give us a call or send us an email. We’ll look forward to hearing from you