World’s End

World’s End. What a heartbreakingly beautiful place name – so suggestive, so laden with meanings, with peace, with foreboding, with beginnings, with endings. Who first stood here and declared this to be World’s End? According to Peter Ackroyd, this is the very spot where boats sailing into the city from the sea had to turn, or risk ‘bottoming out’, running aground in shallow water. And so, for sailors coming here from around the globe, this place marked World’s End. And here we are.

World’s End is a Harbor. Some come here by choice, some by accident. Some seeking excitement of the Kings Road, some because they had nowhere else to go. Some have been here since the beginning, before the plaster dried and the mortar set. Some have travelled a long, long way. 

Lawrence O’Connor, whose portrait hangs here, has made his mark in many ways, as a father, a son, an artist. After enduring homelessness, he and his young mum were the first to move in. He remembers his first night, the air thick with the smell of wet concrete and plaster and breathing a deep sigh of relief to be home. He remembers the first snow and how he wrote in enormous letters, underneath a skinny sapling, LAWRENCE LIVES HERE. The imprint stayed all winter and could still be seen in the grass through the spring. That sapling has grown to an impressive tree with deep roots that still stands here.