History
It was on the Rye in the 1760s that the artist William Blake claimed to have seen visions, including one of "a tree filled with angels, bright angelic wings bespangling every bough like stars. " The novel The Ballad of Peckham Rye by Muriel Spark is based around this area. The park in the 50's - 70s was the site for a yearly fair.
The land for Peckham Rye Park was purchased by the London County Council for £51,000 and declared open on 14 May 1894. At that time the park was 54 acres (220,000 m2), 13 acres being occupied by Homestall Farm. One of the first features of the new park, an ornamental 'Old English Garden' was created. It was later renamed the 'Sexby Garden' after Colonel J.J.Sexby the London County Council's first Chief Officer of Parks. It was re-developed in 1936 and the paths re-laid with york stone paving.
During World War II, part of the Common became a Prisoner of War camp for Italian prisoners of war.
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“The disadvantage of men not knowing the past is that they do not know the present. History is a hill or high point of vantage, from which alone men see the town in which they live or the age in which they are living.”
—Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936)
“We are told that men protect us; that they are generous, even chivalric in their protection. Gentlemen, if your protectors were women, and they took all your property and your children, and paid you half as much for your work, though as well or better done than your own, would you think much of the chivalry which permitted you to sit in street-cars and picked up your pocket- handkerchief?”
—Mary B. Clay, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 3, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)
“Most events recorded in history are more remarkable than important, like eclipses of the sun and moon, by which all are attracted, but whose effects no one takes the trouble to calculate.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)