Lambeth Fantastical - July 2025

 

August Blog - A Fantastical Four

Welcome Lambeth Fantastical number two. This month I have four people born in Lambeth, all with connections, one way or another to the fantastical.

E Nesbit

Edith Nesbit was born on 25th August 1858 in Kennington. As well as being a prolific author and poet she was a committed socialist and founder, with her husband, Hubert Bland, of the Fabien Society, named after their son who died at the age of 15. The society itself became one of the founding organisations of the Labour Party.
Her best known novel is the Railway Children, published in 1905 and made into a much loved film in 1970, staring Jenny Agutter and Bernard Cribbins.
Her connection with the fantastical lies firstly in children's fantasy novels, including The Enchanted Castle, The Magic City and The Story of the Amulet. Her popular children's fantasies - Five Children and It and The Phoenix and the Carpet were both made into BBC television series.
She was also a writer of terrifying ghost stories for adults in a style similar to that of MR James. These were collected in a number of anthologies including Grim Tales (1893),  Something Wrong (1893) and Fear (1910).
Later in life she lived in Lewisham with her second husband, who was the skipper of the Woolwich ferry. In September 1995 her great granddaughter, Fen Ravandi, unveiled a plaque in her honour at 28 Elswick Road SE13

Rachel Hurd-Wood

Rachel Hurd - Wood is an actress born on 17th August 1990 in Streatham. She first came to prominence at age thirteen playing Wendy Darling in the 2003 fantasy adventure version of Peter Pan, with Jason Isaacs as Captain Hook and Richard Briars as Smee.
Since then her career has regularly taken a fantastical slant. Her film credits include, Betsy Bell in An American Haunting (2005), Meredith Crowthorn in Solomon Kane (2009), Sibyl Vane in Dorian Grey (2009) and Corrie Mackenzie in Tomorrow, When the War Began (2010).

Michael de Larrabeiti

Michael de Larrabeiti grew up in Battersea. But as he was born on 18th August 1934 in St Thomas's Hospital he can rightfully be claimed as Lambeth born.
Not only did he write some pretty fantastical fiction he lived a pretty fantastic life. His mother was Irish and his father was from the Basque Region of Spain. During the Blitz he was evacuated to a mining village near Doncaster. After the war he attended Clapham Central Secondary School. During the Festival of Britain he worked as a projectionist in the pioneering 3D cinema which was one of the most popular exhibits. He went on to work as a travel guide in Morocco and France and joined a group of shepherds herding 3,000 head of sheep across the Provence Region. He was the official photographer on Oxford University's Marco Polo Expedition, traveling for four months through Afghanistan to India in a motorcycle side car, accompanied by Boris Johnson's dad, Stanley.
His first published novel was a western, The Redwater Raid (1972).
But he is best remembered for his fantastical Borrible trilogy - The Borribles (1976) - The Borribles go for Broke (1981) and The Borribles: Across the Dark Metropolis (1986).
Despite the company he kept in Afghanistan de Larrabeiti was a life long socialist and irreverent anti-establishment themes are constantly referenced in the books.
Imagine Peter Pan's Lost Boys as a multiracial South London Street gang with girls as well as boys as members. Once they become feral Borribles grow pointed ears and never become any older.
With their inner city setting and working class characters the books seek to subvert the middle class tropes of earlier children's fantasy series.
The name Borribles was a tongue in cheek reference to The Borrowers, the 1950s series by Mary Norton. The arch enemies of the Borribles are the Wimbles, hairy creatures who live on Wimbledon Common, a less than subtle jibe at The Wombles created by Elizabeth Berisford.
The Borribles are harried and hunted by the SBG (Special Borrible Group). If captured SBG officers clip their pointed ears and turn them back into normal children. The SBG is a reference to the SPG (Special Patrol Group), a notorious division of the Metropolitan Police Force in the 70s and 80s. The SBG is led by Chief Inspector Susworth, a reference to equally notorious Sus Laws, considered by many to be one of root causes of the Brixton uprisings.
The Borribles trilogy was re-released as a single volume in 2002 and is referenced by many writers of fantasy and the new weird as a key influence.

Susan Shaw

Susan Shaw (real name, Patricia Sloots) was born in West Norwood on 29th August 1929.
She trained as a screen actress at the J Arthur Rank Organisation's School of Charm after attending a screen test while working as a typist at the Ministry of Information.
One of her early roles was playing alongside Petula Clarke as one of the Hugget sisters in the three movies about the family, with Jack Warner (the future Dixon of Dock Green) as the father.
She appeared in dozens of films in the late 40s and 50s and was considered one the UK film industry's busiest actresses. She met her future husband, Bonar Colleano, on the set of Pool of London (1951).
Her one and only foray into the realms of the fantastical was the 1956 B movie, Fire Maidens from Outer Space, in which she played Hestia one of seventeen female descendants of the Lost City of Atlantis, discovered by the crew of an Earth mission to the thirteenth moon of Jupiter. Another Lambeth born actor, Harry Fowler, played one of the rocket ship's crew members. The cardboard sets and terrible story line earned the film the unfortunate crown of probably the worst British Scifi film ever made.
A few years later Shaw's life began a downward spiral into chronic alcoholism when Bonnar Colleano died in a tragic car crash. She ended up living alone in a small flat in Soho and died aged 49 of cirrhosis of the liver in 1978.

Coming up in September three sons of Lambeth with links to Planet of the Apes, His Dark Materials and Grimm's fairy tales.