Sydenham Garden

I stumbled across Sydenham Garden  (Wynell Road SE23) last month for the first time, a community well being space with various mental health, dementia and other projects .

The day I went it was participating in the Sydenham Artists Trail, including displaying some of the banners made at the garden for their participation in the 2024 Pride parade.

I liked this banner mapping Lewisham Urban Oasis green spaces:

 

Opposing the Iraq War in South London

The Iraq War started on 20 March 2003 with a massive American-led 'shock and awe' bombing campaign, followed by a land invasion of US, British and other troops. Over the next eight years more than 100,000 civilians were killed.

Early protests

There was a long build up to the war, with sanctions against Iraq dating back to the previous Iraq war in 1990/91 causing long term hardship to people living there. As a new war became increasingly likely, protests began to start. On December 14 2002 for instance, Lewisham and Greenwich CND and Lewisham Stop the War Coalition held a march and candlelit vigil in the centre of Lewisham, with about 100 people braving the cold wet weather.

The February 15th 'Don't Attack Iraq' demonstration

As the start of the war became imminent there was massive opposition across the world including the largest ever demonstration in London when on Saturday 15 February 2003 more than a million people took to the streets in a march from Embankment to  Hyde Park. I was there... who wasn't?

My son's 'peace not war' placard adorns a statue in Trafalgar Square. At his school - Edmund Waller Primary School - a group of around 20 older pupils staged an anti-war demonstration in the playground on 22 January 2003.

School students walk out

Between that day and the war actually starting there were many other protests, some of the most inspiring being led by students walking out of schools. I believe the first big schools walk out was on March 5th. The South London Press (7/3/2003) reported 'Pupils Walk Out Against War:  Hundreds of passionate anti-war teenagers abandoned their school books and disobeyed teachers to march through Sydenham on Wednesday. Eyewitnesses reported seeing about 250 girls from Sydenham School snake through the streets to Forest Hill Boys School in protest against war in Iraq. The gates there were locked but it seems some boys managed to escape to join the protest. Marchers then moved on to Sedgehill School where the gates were again locked but students apparently joined in with chanting from inside'.

Two weeks later on 19th March with war looming there was another schools strike with marchers converging on Whitehall to stage a demonstration. Some of them were interviewed in The Times (20 March 2003):

'A clutch of 14-year-old girls from Haberdashers’ Aske’s in New Cross, South London, said that teachers had refused to let them stage a protest outside the school, even though they had parental permission. “They threatened us with suspensions and detentions. Someone set off a fire alarm and the fire brigade arrived. We distracted the teachers, legged it and got the train here,” Naomi Benjamin said. “It’s important that we show Tony Blair we are against war. Our opinion matters as much as anyone’s... Sam Kinloch, 14, was one of of about 70 pupils who ran out of lessons at Langley Park School for Boys in Bromley, South London, and caught the train into town. He said: “It’s my first time on a protest, but I’ll be back when war is declared. It’s a brilliant atmosphere and there’s so many people from school here so we shouldn’t get into trouble.”'

A few of the Haberdashers students from the tie have shared memories of this with me. Alex, then aged 16, recalled: 'I remember we flyered the school to get people to walk out. I don't think people needed much encouragement. The head of sixth form implored us  to stop the younger kids from leaving, we refused and a bunch of them walked out too. It seemed like hundreds went down to catch the train at New Cross Gate into town. I think there were two walk outs around the time and on one of them we blocked the road outside parliament for a bit before being dragged off'. According to Fran and Debbie, who were in the Sixth Form:  'I remember wearing our old uniform, even though we were in sixth form, to stress the point we were students… and because of the uniforms (and being in the paper) then getting dragged into Dr Sidwell’s office' (head of school).

Haberdashers students pictured in The Times

I remember that on that night before the war started there was a protest on the (now gone) traffic island in New Cross Road by the White Hart. Between 50 and 100 of us gathered there with placards and candles.

The 185 Bus incident

The next day when the war started school students were again in the front line of the protests. But some didn't make it as far as central London as they were stopped by police in Catford.  The South London Press (21/3/2003) reported:

'Just hours after the first bombs landed on Baghdad, there was chaos across south London as protesters took to the streets. Thousands of young people walked out from schools and protesters gathered across the area to send an anti-war message to the government. 

Yesterday morning Lewisham police stopped a bus in Catford and arrested and handcuffed six kids who had walked out of school to protest outside Parliament. One 14-year-old girl from Sydenham Girls School spoke to the South London Press from the bus which reportedly had 50 kids on it. She said 'the police took all our names and will not let us off. People are getting claustrophobic'. A police spokeswoman said 'police attended a demo outside Catford Town Hall where about one hundred people, mainly children aged 15 to 16 were demonstrating. After the demonstration many of them attempted to join a bus headed for central London. As they did so they caused a disturbance. Six children were arrested for public order offences and taken into custody"

One of those arrested was charged with assaulting a police officer, though he was acquitted at trial eight months later. He recalled:  'We boarded the 185 bus but before the driver could set off the police had ordered him to wait. They proceeded to take the names and telephone numbers of all school students present. When I questioned them about it they insisted on taking my name and asked me how they where supposed to know if I wasn’t a convicted criminal or paedophile...  All around students were arguing the case against the war, while the police kept accusing them of skiving off school and being truants... the order came to physically remove them. In the course of this the police used force against myself and others and arrested us... The Magistrate dismissed the case because he was not satisfied with the police evidence. The prosecution had failed to produce any proof, apart from the statements of the police themselves, that I had kicked PC Ashdown in the "groin area". No independent witnesses, no statement from the bus drivers, no records from the hospital. The police testimony was grossly overstated and in some cases entirely made up'. 

Day X

Elsewhere on that day, the South London Press (21/3/2003) reported 'Anti-war protests spread across south London yesterday including demonstrations in Peckham and Brixton... Shoppers and students joined a group of anti-war protesters outside Peckham library. Protesters from Unison handed out leaflets to passers-by and made rallying speeches in the street. Joining the walk out were staff in the library and council offices around the borough. One library worker who did not wish to be named said "as far as I'm concerned this war is just about oil. I accept Saddam Hussein is an evil dictator but I don't think this is the answer". He said most of the library staff felt the same. Southwark Unison branch secretary John Mulrenan said protesters would gather at Camberwell Green and Elephant and Castle later in the day before marching to Parliament. And outside the town hall in Brixton peace campaigners held a rally against the war.' A multifaith service for peace was held at South London Liberal Synagogue in Streatham with Jewish, Christian and Muslim representatives.

People had been planning in advance to take action on 'Day X' - whenever the war started. Like many others I headed up to Whitehall, where it was pretty chaotic, people pulling crowd control barriers across the street etc. The Guardian (21/3/2003) reported:

'Tens of thousands of anti-war protesters filled streets and squares, blocked roads, walked out of school and universities and temporarily stopped work yesterday. Trade unionists, students, hospital staff, civil servants and students joined hundreds of noisy, spontaneous demonstrations across the country.

More than 5000 gathered in Parliament Square London festooning statues with posters and stringing up a 'stop the war' banner in Whitehall. Police cordoned off the area immediately in front of Westminster but demonstrators blocked streets around Parliament. Whistles, drums, megaphones and chants penetrated the soundproofing of MPs offices. Police drew their batons to turn back a crowd of demonstrators who tried to force their way into Whitehall. Officers were pelted with bottles and sticks from banners. 20 people arrested for public order offences'.

The following Saturday there was another big demonstration in central London, with up to 500,000 marching to Hyde Park again (along with millions protesting across the world). I remember I bribed my young daughter to come with me by taking her to Hamleys toy shop on the way. 

On Saturday 29 March 2003 there were more local protests. Around 300 people marched from Lewisham shopping centre to Greenwich, and around 700 on various local feeder marchers met up for a rally in Brixton, including a contingent of Graveney School students who marched there from Clapham South (hundreds of pupils had protested at that Tooting school when the war started). After the Brixton rally some set off to try and protest at Foreign Secretary Jack Straw's house (ironically near the Imperial War Museum).

A large part of the population took part in those protests, including a lot of children who grew up through 20 years of more or less permanent war involving British forces in Afghanistan and Iraq. If the peace movement failed to stop the wars, the wars certainly failed to bring peace.

Any memories of these events? Please leave a comment.

Red Stage: the 1930s Workers Theatre Movement in South London

Some interesting material in the University of Warwick's digital archive on British Political Theatre 1930s to 1950s, including some newsletters from the 1930s from the Workers Theatre Movement, associated with the Communist Party. As mentioned here before, South London was a focus for this kind of theatre, with performances of agitational sketches and songs given in the streets, at meetings and at shows.


According to 'Class against class: the Communist Party in Britain Between the Wars', (Matthew Worley, 2002): 'Communist theatre groups had begun to appear throughouth the country by the turn of the decade [the 1930s]. In London alone, ten such troupes, including the Red Star Troupe of West London, Red Radio of Hackney, the Red Magnets of Woolwich, the Red Front of Streatham, the Red Players of Lewisham, the Red Blouses of Greenwich and the Yiddish-speaking Proltet, existed by 1931’.

The Lewisham Red Players performed in Lewisham High Street and elsewhere, with their group chorus going:

“There is a word you mustn’t say – revo-lution
All the same it’s on the way – the workers’ revolution
Every day the world turns round - revo-lution
A few more turns, it will resound - revo-lution
It’s coming here, it’s coming there - revo-lution
The ground is tumbling everywhere – the workers’ revolution”.

(source: Raphael Samuel in  Performance and Politics in Popular Drama: Aspects of Popular Entertainment in Theatre, Film and Television, 1800–1976, edited by David Brady, 1980)

The Red Players included in their ranks Charlie Mann,  son of the veteran Communist and trade unionist Tom Mann, the latter who lived in Brockley in the 1920s  (in 1927 his address was 1 Adelaide Road).


Charles B Mann (1905-1989) was editor of the Workers' Theatre Movement journal 'Red Stage', with his address given in the November 1931 issue as 61 Sydenham Park SE26.

Red Stage (November 1931) mentions new groups being set up in Croydon and Woolwich and 'the revival of the Deptford Group',  and open-air 'Red Radio' shows in Bermondsey and Greenwich. The January 1932 issue includes a report from the Streatham-based 'Red Front Troupe, South London' stating that it had 'nine effective members, three of whom are women' and that in November 1932 they had given five shows and set up an unemployed troupe linked to the National Unemployed Workers Movement. The South London 'Red Players' reported that they had helped set up new groups in Croydon, Woolwich and Camberwell and were planning 'full WTM shows in Croydon, Lewisham and Woolwich'. The folowing month's issue (February 1932) includes reports from Red Blouses in Greenwich, Red Magnets (Woolwich) - planning a big show at Plumstead Baths - and Red Players, planning shows in Croydon, Lewisham and elsewhere.




The movement, which argued that 'Our theatre awakens the masses', presented theatre that condemned capitalism and promoted the workers movement, but there were disagreements about the best way of doing this. Within the pages of these publications we see some healthy debate about the role of the theatre and other issues. For instance the Jewish communist theatre troupe Proltet mounted a strong defence of doing performances in Yiddish, against criticism from some in the Party (WTM Monthly Bulletin, February 1933). There was a debate about jazz, with a letter arguing that 'it seems a great pity that, when so  many fine revolutionary and other great melodies are available, it is found necessary to descend to the level of the American jazz exploiters' (Red Stage, January 1932) and a response that to reach the masses it was necessary to use tunes from popular culture - 'jazz brings us nearer to the workers' (February 1932).


A critical review in the Communist Party's Daily Worker attacked the tendency to 'individual self boosting' in the Workers Theatre Movement, provoking a firm response from the Red Players of South London: 'If Comrade Bennett's ideal state is one in which the individual is prohibited from personal expression, then that is not the state we are fighting for' (Red Stage,  January 1932). There is a tragic historical irony that in Stalin's USSR - celebrated by the Workers Theatre Movement - such views could lead to the Gulag in this period.

Red Stage, January 1932 giving contact addresses for the Red Front troupe (16 Buckleigh Road, SW16 and for the Red Players (S. Banks, 22 Campshill Road, SE13)

Adventures in the Anthropecene - talk in Sydenham

Tomorrow night (Wednesday 27th January 2016, 7:30 pm), Gaia Vince - author of Adventures in the Anthropocene - is giving a reading at Sydenham's fine Kirkdale Books.  The book, which won the 2015

Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books, looks at 'Growing evidence from around the globe... that we are living in a permanently changed world; a new geological age defined by the activities and industry of our own species. Scientists call this the Anthropocene: the Age of Humans. What can we do to ensure that humanity can survive and thrive in this new age? Gaia Vince has travelled the world to see just how people at the sharp end of these changes are developing new strategies for survival. The result is a book whose message is positive – we aren’t necessarily doomed, but we need to rethink our relationship with the biosphere'.

'Gaia will be reading from the book and will be happy to sign copies after the event. (Reserve a signed copy if you can’t make it.)'.  Tickets: £3.00 (redeemable against book) should be reserved in advance via:   mail@kirkdalebookshop.com

Kirkdale Books, 272 Kirkdale, Sydenham, SE26 4RS (Tel: 020 8778 4701)

The author in Greenwich Park

Althea Gyles (1868-1949), poet and artist: 'A Strange Red Haired Girl'

Althea Gyles (right) with Irish revolutionist Constance Markiewicz

The Irish poet and artist Althea Gyles (1868-1949) was born in County Waterford and moved to London in 1892. She knew Oscar Wilde, W B Yeats (who described her as "a strange red-haired girl, all whose thoughts were set upon painting and poetry"), Constance Markiewicz, Aleister Crowley (with whom she had an affair), Compton McKenzie and many other interesting people, and is best known for her book designs for Yeats, Ernest Dowson (now buried in Ladywell Cemetery), Wilde and others. For a period she was associated with the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn (famously connected to the Horniman Museum in Forest Hill), and was later interested in vegetarianism and Buddhism.

Gyles' cover design for Yeats' The Secret Rose (1897)

Sympathy - Althea Gyles (1898)

The colour gladdens all your heart;
You call it Heaven, dear, but I -
Now Hope and I are far apart -
Call it the sky.

I know that Nature's tears have wet
The world with sympathy; but you,
Who know not any sorrow yet,
Call it the dew.

She spent her later years in South London, including in Brixton, Sydenham (one of her last homes was at 19 Tredown Road SE26) and at a nursing home in Beckenham at 69 Crystal Palace Park Road where she died in 1949.

In Jad Adams' biography of Ernest Dowson (Madder Music, Stronger Wine, 2000) he writes: ‘Althea Gyles lived on... her flaming hair now grey.. She lived in bedsits in Tulse Hill and then Sydenham, casting horoscopes as the new century wore on, until she became a ghost from the 1890s in war-shattered London.’

"Lilith" by Althea Gyles, from 'The Dome' vol.I, Oct.-Dec. 1898

(The most detailed account of Gyles' life that I have found online is in 'Althea Gyles’ Symbolic (De)Codification ofWilliam Butler Yeats’ ‘Rose and Wind Poetry’' by Arianna Antonielli)

Related posts:

AE Waite and the Horniman

Beatrice Offor of Sydenham

WB Yeats, Mona Bergson and the Forest Hill Visions

Camberwell and Crowley

Recent Sydenham Street Art

Some recent Sydenham street art.

This is off Sydenham Road (by the car park near the Co-op/Lidl)

The kingfisher and fox are on hoardings on Sydenham Road, replacing the lemurs that used to be there.

Ishiguro in Sydenham

There was an article in the Guardian last week about the author Kazuo Ishiguro in which he recalled writing his 1989 novel The Remains of the Day (later filmed starring Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson) while living in Sydenham.

 

 

 

Kazuo Ishiguro: how I wrote The Remains of the Day

 

'I was then 32 years old, and we’d recently moved into a house in Sydenham, south London, where for the first time in my life I had a dedicated study. (I’d written my first two novels at the dining table.) It was actually a kind of large cupboard on the half-landing and lacked a door, but I was thrilled to have a space where I could spread my papers around as I wished and not have to clear them away at the end of each day. I stuck up charts and notes all over the peeling walls and got down to writing...

On my first Sunday off I ventured outdoors, on to Sydenham high street, and persistently giggled – so Lorna told me – at the fact that the street was built on a slope, so that people coming down it were stumbling over themselves, while those going up were panting and staggering effortfully. Lorna was concerned I had another three weeks of this to go, but I explained I was very well, and that the first week had been a success...

I'd consumed a substantial amount of “research”: books by and about British servants, about politics and foreign policy between the wars, many pamphlets and essays from the time, including one by Harold Laski on “The Dangers of Being a Gentleman”. I’d raided the second-hand shelves of the local bookshop (Kirkdale Books, still a thriving independent) for guides to the English countryside from the 1930s and 50s'

 

 

 

'When Ishiguro  first became a public figure he suffered greatly from  stereotyping by critics and reviewers, who.... nicknamed him the "Shogun of Sydenham" (Kazuo Ishiguro by Barry Lewis, Manchester University Press, 2000)

A South London Street Art Bestiary

Fox in Burgess Park (New Church Road, SE5)

Kingfisher in East Dulwich (Frogley Road, SE22)

Lemur in Sydenham Road, SE26

The other Lemur in Sydenham Road.

Lion in the car park of the Golden Lion, Sydenham (Daniel Morgan RIP)

Panther off Sydenham Road.

Ram in Sydenham Road (opposte Golden Lion)

Seahorses in Forest Hill (Devonshire Road, SE23)

Squirrel on Bellingham Green SE6

Festive SE London this Weekend

Lots going on this weekend, here's a few things people have asked us to mention.

Blythe Hill Fields Festival, Saturday 5th July 2014 - free event with music, stalls etc. in this Lewisham park gem.

Nunhead Beats the Bounds, also on Saturday 5th July, a procession around the boundaries of the Nunhead area, starting 2 pm at Nunhead Green and 'Ending at 4pm back on Nunhead Green with music, refreshments and a free glass of Nunhead Whacker, an ale specifically brewed for this event'.

Sydenham Arts Festival - two weeks of events kicking off on 5th July with the 'street celebration' launch event, featuring music, stalls, dance and performance.

Lewisham First World War Resisters

Today is apparently International Conscientious Objectors Day, marked around the world each year on 15 May to commemorate those who have refused to fight in wars.

Lewisham have launched an interesting and rapidly developing 'London Borough of Lewisham in the First World War' wiki, which includes information about local war resisters at that time. They have identified 'twenty-three men from Deptford and ninety-nine men from Lewisham who were conscientious objectors', with details of some of them (more to be added).

I will just mention one of them for now - Albert Edward Allen of 1 North Terrace, Fairlawn Park, Sydenham, 'a carpenter and trade unionist' and 'member of the Amalgamated Society of Carpenters and Joiners'. He told the Military Service Tribunal in 1916 that 'he had conscientious objections to all war, especially this war because of the scientific slaughter that was going on and to taking human life either directly or indirectly. He disputed the right of any government to say whether he should take part in warfare and said that he was not a member of any religious body and objected on moral grounds'.

He was conscritped into the army but refused order and was court martialled. As an 'absolutist' who refused not only military service but any civilian work supporting the war effort, Allen spent the remainder of the war in  'a cycle of disobeying orders, being sentenced to a period of hard labour in civilian prison and on discharge being handed back to the army for the cycle to recommence. From 1916 to 1919, he would serve three sentences of hard labour in Wormwood Scrubs, Wandsworth, Brixton and Portsmouth prisons. He was one of 120 absolutists who were sent to Wakefield prison'.

Check out No Glory and the Real WWI for more on commemorating the hidden histories of the war to end all wars.

Louise Michel: a Paris Communard in South London

The International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam is probably the most significant archive of radical movements in Europe. Recently it has made accessible large parts of its archives in digital form, including the papers of Louise Michel.  This has enabled me to solve something that has been bugging me for a long time - where did she live in South London? As I wrote here before:

'Louise Michel (1830-1905) was a celebrated figure in 19th century French politics, an anarchist who fought at the barricades in the Paris Commune of 1871 and was subsequently exiled to New Caledonia. Returning to France in 1880 she was frequently in conflict with the authorities, and decided to flee France for London in July 1890, shortly after being arrested following May Day riots'.

 According to Edith Thomas's biography, Louise Michel lived at one point at '79 Arspley Terrace' in East Dulwich, an address I have never been able to find, but I now think may have been an error.

Louise Michel

I believe that Louise Michel's first visit to London was in 1880. After being released from New Caledonia, a French colony in the Pacific, she and other amnestied Communards were taken to Sydney, Australia, from where they travelled on the mail ship 'John Helder' to London. As the ship waited in the fog in the Thames Estuary to be guided to port, French exiles in London made their way to greet it in small boats, singing Communard songs to their comrades (Butterworth, 2011, p.62). On this occasion, Michel only stayed for a couple of days before returning to Paris, but she mentions that with her friends she smuggled five cats from Nouméa (capital of New Caledonia) 'down the gangplank in London' and that 'Once in London, in front of a fire, with an enormous bowl of milk my friends brought them, they began to stretch out, yawning' (Michel was a big animal lover).

In 1883 she returned to London on a speaking tour, where among other things she visited a workhouse in Lambeth. Her account in her memoirs shows that she had become quite a Londonphile: 'London! I love London, where my exiled friends have always been welcomed, London, where old England, standing in the shadow of the gallows, is still more liberal than the French bourgeois republicans are'. All this despite the weather - 'the black London winter on which a cloud of fog floated. Raindrops condensed in an unceasing mist and now and again came in broad sheets... a frozen evening in the large, cold meeting hall in front of a cold and correct audience drawn from the grand neighbourhood of immense palaces under which the wretches have holes like animals. But despite that, I felt an impression of human honesty persisting regardless of the accursed chains that people interminably fasten on each other' (Michel, p.148)

She did flee to London in 1890 and apparently stayed here until she returned to Paris in 1895, but she continued to spend time living in London on and off until her death in 1905. She definitely lived for some of the earlier period at 59 Charlotte Street, Fitzroy Square - an area where many radical refugees hung out. The earliest reference I have to a definite address n East Dulwich is from August 1894, when Louise Michel sent a letter to the artist Lucien Pissarro (son of Camille) from '15 Ardley Terrace, East Dulwich' (this letter is in Ashmolean Museum collection).

The IISH archive includes a letter written in 1897 or 1898 in Michel's own hand with this address: 15 Ardley Terrace, Placquet Road, East Dulwich:

There is also the envelope of a letter written to her here in July 1898. People do make mistakes when writing addresses which causes problems for later historians! This one does read more like Ardsley, and I wonder the 'Arpsley Terrace' false trail might have arisen from copying such a mistake. 

Placquett Road no longer exists, but the 1893-96 Ordnance Survey Map shows that Placquett Road was the East Dulwich end of what is now Copleston Road, which at that point hadn't been extended to join up with Copleston and hence renamed. Note that what is now Oglander Road was then Wildash Road. It seems that the houses on Plaquett Road were demolished and replaced with new housing in 1900s, so the building that Michel lived in is no longer there.

Thomas mentions that Michel was visited in East Dulwich by a number of French journalists and by fellow Communard Charles Malato, who found the then 62 year old Michel surrounded by cats, dogs and a parrot that cried 'Long live anarchy!'. Michel was 62 in 1892, so that would suggest she was living in East Dulwich by then, and perhaps at the Ardley Terrace address. She may also have been at that address when in December 1893 a United Press representative interviewed 'the notorious woman Anarchist, who occupies a little house at East Dulwich, a suburb of London' (New York Times, 19 December 1893):

'A union of the strong against the weak has existed since Governments existed. The masses can unite equally against a common enemy. They may rise like the springtide of the ocean, and overflow the world' (Louise Michel, interviewed in East Dulwich, 1893)

Houses at East Dulwich end of Copleston Road, originally Placquett Road

Thomas gives another East Dulwich address in her book, stating that when Michel returned to London in December 1899 'She was still living in East Dulwich at this point, though no longer at 25 Chesterfield Grove' - so she must have lived at the latter, still standing and in fact recently sold:

25 Chesterfield Grove, East Dulwich.

Thomas also states that Michel moved again in March 1900 to 'to join Charlotte's father at 8 Albion Villas Road, Sydenham'. Charlotte Vauvelle was Michel's long term nurse and companion, and her father was Auguste Vauvelle. The 1901 Census for 8 Albion Villas lists Auguste, Charlotte and her brother Achille, with Louise Michel as 'boarder' described as 'authoress. Achille Vauvelle is listed as a 'Chromo artist' (i.e. chromo-lithographic printer) - he later worked with Waddingtons.

The house in Albion Villas is still standing:

8 Albion Villas today

Finally the archive has some letters sent to Louise Michel at another address in December 1903, 53 Dahomey Street, Mitcham Lane.

This is now Dahomey Road, Streatham SW16. Must admit I haven't been there, but from Google streetview, I think this is the house:

53 Dahomey Road SW16

Louise Michel died in Marseille in 1905, this picture shows her in bed in Toulon in the previous year, with Charlotte Vauvelle at her side:

Here's a flyer form October 1896 for a meeting of 'London Anarchist Communists' to 'bid farewell to Louise Michel and Pietro Gori on their departure to America on a lecturing tour' (Gori was an Italian anarchist poet). The meeting at the Club & Institute Union Hall in Holborn also featured the prominent anarchists Errico Malatesta and Sebastian Faure, as well as Tom Mann (later of Brockley), one of the leaders of the 1889 dock strike in London.

Speaking to some friends at the Radical Bookfair at the Bishopsgate Institute last weekend, we came up with the idea of doing something over the summer to mark Louise Michel's time in the area, possibly linked to some kind of Sydenham/Forest Hill radical history walk finishing with a picnic and some Communard songs. Let us know in comments or by email if you're interested.

Update September 2015:

In August 1897, Louise Michel spoke at a public meeting in Southwark Park in support of anarchist prisoners in Spain (Reynolds's Newspaper, Sunday 08 August 1897):

Notes:

Butterworth, A. (2011), The World That Never Was: A True Story of Dreamers, Schemers, Anarchists and Secret Agents, London: Random House,p.62.

Michel, L. (1981), The Red Virgin: memoirs of Louise Michel, Alabama: University of Alabama Press.

Thomas, E. (1980), Louise Michel, Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1980.

[updated July 2020 - earlier version wondered whether current houses in Copleston Road included Louise Michel's former Placquett Road house, but comment pointed out that street seems to have been rebuilt since she lived there]