New Cross & Telegraph Hill
Excellent transport links and close to London bridge and the city
New Cross was once a heavily wooded area known as Hatcham. The ancient and important road from London to Dover and Canterbury, now the A2, runs through the area and in the 18th century travellers using the road paid tolls at the junction of Queens Road and New Cross Road. The gate was called New Cross Gate, after the New Cross Inn, which stood nearby.
In 1614 most of the land here was bought by the Haberdashers Company. However, it wasn’t until the 1860s that they began to transform the area building palatial houses and founding a grammar school using money from a charity founded by Robert Aske.
The proximity of New Cross to Deptford and Greenwich, both of which have strong maritime connections, led to the establishment of the Royal Naval School in New Cross in 1843 (designed by architect John Shaw Jr, 1803–1870) to house "the sons of impecunious naval officers". The school relocated further south-east to Mottingham in 1889, and the former school building was bought by the Worshipful Company of Goldsmiths, who opened the Goldsmiths’ Company’s Technical and Recreative Institute in 1891. This was in turn handed over to the University of London in 1904 and is now Goldsmiths, University of London.
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