Charlie Chaplin was born on April 16th, 1889 to two music hall performers, Charles and Hannah Chaplin in East Lane, Walworth and shortly after moved to 39 West Square, St. George's Road, Lambeth. These early years of happy family life were to prove to be short lived, his parents separated when he was 4 and from that point forward his mother was consumed by an ever worsening cycle of depression and mental illness. As she struggled to feed and keep a roof over the heads of Charlie and his older brother Sydney the family eventually ended up destitute on the steps of the Lambeth Work House, the year was 1896 and Charlie was just 7 years old.

As her mental state deteriorated Hannan Chaplin was transferred to the asylum. The Chaplin boys were sent to live with their father and his mistress at 287 Kennington Road. Upon her release from the asylum Hannan Chaplin rented a room for her family at 39 Methley Street, Kennington. However, life continued to be hard and money scarce. Chaplin observed: "when the fates deal in human destiny, they heed neither pity nor justice." The family vacillated from one abode to another, eventually ending up in a small garret at 3 Pownall Terrace off the Kennington Road.

Charles Chaplin senior was an alcoholic and died aged just 37 when Charlie was 12. In his autobiography Chaplin recalls waiting outside the Queens Head Public House, Black Prince Road for his father. He also recollects his last sighting of his father alive was at the Three Stags Public House at the junction of Kennington and Lambeth Roads. After the death of their father, Charlie and his brother Sydney would eventually start earning enough money from their respective stage careers to finally escape from the poverty of their childhood. Chaplin comments: "unlike Freud, I don't believe sex is the most important element in the complexity of human behivour. Cold, hunger and the shame of poverty are more likely to affect one's psychology.". Before leaving for America with the Karno Company Chaplin and his brother resided at 15 Glenshaw Mansions, Brixton Road, Lambeth where they had hoped their mother would join them, however her body and mind debilitated from having suffered years of abject poverty and malnutrition, Hannah was never deemed fit to leave the asylum again.

Fred Karno and Company occupied three converted villas on Vaughan Road, Camberwell known as the 'Fun Factory' and it was as a vaudeville comedian with Karno that Charlie was to eventually travel to the United States in 1910 and finally secure his escape from a life of poverty and deprivation.

Charlie Chaplin was born in Walworth and would return to these roots to spend much time in the borough of Camberwell as his career as stage performer developed. A large percentage of Walworth was typified by the Booth Poverty Map (1886-1903) as either 'poor' or 'very poor in chronic want' and this is reflected in some of the surviving architecture of the period. The construction of public baths and wash houses became a priority at the end of the 19th century to address the chronic squalor of the slums. The buildings at both Manor Place, Walworth and Wells Way, Camberwell both survive to this day as grade II listed structures.

Slum clearance also became a pressing concern, The Four Per Cent Industrial Dwellings Company Limited, founded by the philanthropist Nathaniel Mayer Rothschild, constructed Evelina Mansions close to the terminus of the Grand Surrey Canal at Albany Basin.

Filmed over six weeks in the summer of 1958, We are the Lambeth Boys (1959) documents the lives of group of teenagers living in and around the same Kennington streets where Charlie Chaplin was born and would grow up some 70 years previously.

In its rare and honest approach to working-class life, a subject matter largely neglected by British cinema of the time, the film attempted to deliver a positive portrait of the lives of ordinary teenagers, far from the usual violent 'Teddy Boy' stereotype of the day. In this respect it proves itself most powerful when the camera is free to move around the group, capturing faces in close-up and with them the frustrations and aspirations of youth.

As the director Karel Reisz follows the lives of Kennington youth at work, at home and in their leisure time, one gets a powerful sense of the cross-roads in history at which the film’s subjects unknowing find themselves. Strongly evident and yet rapidly disappearing is the culture and values of a Victorian past, the Kennington of the young Chaplin, as the new of a post-war London rebuilding and reinventing itself from the ravages and scars of war charges the air with an electrical like quality; the hope of a better future.

The complete 50 minute film is available to download here from Google Video.