Asylum Chapel is a unique Grade II listed venue steeped in London history. Built-in 1826, Asylum Chapel has played witness to London’s rich and troubled history, Asylum Chapel is now one of Peckham’s most-loved flexible spaces for weddings, events and photo and film shoots. Here, ‘asylum’ traditionally meant ‘sanctuary’ and was, in fact, a home for elderly retired pub landlords. In 1858, the Albert Wing was extended and opened by Prince Consort himself, with 31 additional dwellings.
The chapel soon became a focal point of the community. Interestingly, the association consisted mainly of young members of various families who attended the Asylum Chapel. There are several expensive tablets in memory of the benefactors, and most of these stone-carved memorials are still there today.
During World War II, the Asylum was bombed, and the chapel was almost destroyed by incendiary bombs, except for the iconic stained-glass windows and a beautiful collection of stone-carved funerary monuments. After the war, the chapel was filled with concrete and roofed with asbestos cement to make it stable and watertight. The Second World War holds an important place in the chapel’s history and surprised many with the fact that not even bombs could defeat the chapel’s immovable stained glass and other historical symbols. The Asylum was sold to the London Borough of Southwark in 1960, and to this day, its wings are used as social housing. A local newspaper in 1960 stated that the chapel would become a ‘little theatre’, but this never materialised. The cottage is still in use, but the chapel was not used again until recently.
Apart from the evidence of a temporary wooden room in the chapel for use by artists in the 1990s, the building remained abandoned. In 2010, Joe Dennis and Dido Hallett began using the space for art projects, exhibitions, theatre productions, and filming and set up an arts and conservation non-profit company called Asylum. Later, in 2013, Joe and Dido formed the Maverick Projects team to run the Asylum Chapel, as it is now known.