BermondseyBoy

Looking at a 1930s map it shows a pub on the left side not the right,I would think that is more right than me, sorry

Havil Street Junction Southampton Way. Orange Tree Pub on the right of Havil Street which shut down in 1999.

31 Havil Street, Mr G H Locks shop in 1938.

The Havil Street Workhouse was established in 1818 as one of three main sites in Camberwell. It was a long and narrow two-storey brick building, which was already being criticised in an 1865 report in The Lancet for being dilapidated, unfit for purpose and for not treating the infirm as sick patients. As for the food available to inmates, Simon Fowler recalls the dire state of affairs at Havil Street in his book Workhouse:

In the late 1880s a guardian of Camberwell workhouse in southeast London, Miss Augusta Brown, tried to improve the soup served there, which was made out of water, onions and grease. She took a bowl of it to the board meeting, but her fellow guardians refused to touch it. As the soup had already been rejected by her cat and dog, she thought that wise.

By 1890, the transition towards medicalised care had begun and the call for a new infirmary was answered when a circular tower was added to the workhouse site. By this time, St Gile’s Hospital had already opened just next to the workhouse near Brunswick Park. It served the people of Camberwell from 1875 right up until 1983. Much of the original administration and staff-residential blocks of the hospital are still standing, and are now housing. The workhouse site later operated as an infirmary until it was heavily damaged by a V1 flying bomb during the Second World War. All that remains of the Havil Street workhouse is the elegant circular infirmary tower that dominates the low-rise modern housing estate that surrounds it on all sides (see kiwi’s pic above)

I think the main entrance may have been in St Giles Road It joined the NHS in 1948.

Night Nurses at St Giles Hospital, Camberwell, c1922, wearing fancy dress of course.

St Giles Hospital, Camberwell, Bentley House bomb damage 1944.