The Underground Map

The Underground Map is a project which is creating street histories for the areas of London and surrounding counties lying inside the M25.

Baker Street

In a series of maps from the 1750s until the 1950s, you can see how London grew from a city which only reached as far as Park Lane into the post war megapolis we know today. There are now over 85 000 articles on all variety of locations including roads, houses, schools, pubs and palaces.

You can begin exploring by choosing a place from the dropdown list at the top.

As maps are displayed, click on the markers to view location articles.

Licence: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike Licence

Click here to explore another London street
We now have 666 completed street histories and 46834 partial histories
Find streets or residential blocks within the M25 by clicking STREETS

MAY

2016

Addison Crescent, W14
Addison Crescent consists of north and south sections. Both parts run from Holland Park to Addison Road, but the south part forms the link in the red route one-way system. This part is an extremely busy traffic route. The road itself is wide and tree-lined.

The street was named after Joseph Addison who lived at Holland House. He was an essayist and poet of the late 17th Century who’s main claim to fame now is as the founder of the Spectator.

The houses are mainly detached and semi-detached villas, 2 or 3 storeys with basements. Most of the house have painted facades at ground floor level and exposed brick at upper floor levels. The houses have attractive front gardens.

Nos. 1-13 Addison Crescent were built by James Hall over a period of several years from 1857. James Hall built about 120 houses in the estate in the 1850s. He also built extensively in the Chepstow Villas and Pembridge Place area.

The plots in Addison Crescent had 60-foot wide frontages and the buildings were la...
»more

MAY

2016

Irving Street, WC2H
Irving Street is named after Henry Irving, the popular Victorian actor. The street was originally named Green Street, as it led to a bowling green near Leicester Square.
»read full article

MAY

2016

Hyett’s hand-drawn 1807 map
William Hyett produced an amazingly accurate map of the London countryside in 1807, using just pen and paper. An interior decorator with royal patronage, Frederick Crace amassed some 1200 printed and hand-drawn maps charting the development of the city and its immediate vicinity from around 1570 to 1860.

A couple of these maps date from 1807 as William Hyett put pen and ink to paper and drew a remarkable accurate view of the then countryside around north and west London.

The individual settlements that make up this area of London are shown by red blocks, with boundary lines indicating the fields separating them. Shading and soft interlining indicate relief, neatly illustrated at Primrose Hill, the summit of which is left bare. The barracks at the edge of Hyde Park are illustrated at the very bottom of the map.

Please note that this map is only available at this zoom level - i.e. zooming in or out changes to a different set of mapping - this is in our special mapping section. Just in case you think things are acting a little weirdly.
»read full article

MAY

2016

St Bartholomew’s Hospital
St Bartholomew’s Hospital, also known simply as Barts and later more formally as The Royal Hospital of St Bartholomew, is a hospital located at Smithfield in the City of London and founded in 1123. Barts was founded in 1123 by Rahere, a favourite courtier of King Henry I. The Dissolution of the Monasteries did not affect the running of Barts as a hospital, but left it in a precarious position by removing its income. It was refounded by King Henry VIII in December 1546, on the signing of an agreement granting the hospital to the Corporation of London, which was reaffirmed by Letters Patent of January 1547 endowing it with properties and income entitlements.

The hospital became legally styled as the "House of the Poore in West Smithfield in the suburbs of the City of London of Henry VIII’s Foundation", although the title was never used by the general public. The first Superintendent of the hospital was Thomas Vicary, sergeant-surgeon to King Henry, and an early writer on anatomy.

It was here that William Harvey conducted his research on the circulatory system in the 17th century, Percivall Pott and John Abernethy developed important principles o...
»more

MAY

2016

Orange Hill Road, HA8
Orange Hill Road is named after a house which was built around 1818 and which stood on Abbots Road. Orange Hill House was rebuilt in 1912 and became the home of the famous aviator Claude Grahame-White, before becoming a Roman Catholic School, St. Roses Convent (Orange Hill House), in 1930.

The land directly to the east of Orange Hill Road, including parts of Watling Park, was called Shevesfield, a series of what were called common fields.

Common fields were fields divided into strips and rented out to a number of different tenants. These fields existed from medieval times right into the 1860s, with 33 acres divided between 46 different tenants, a bit like allotments.
»read full article

MAY

2016

Alton Estate, SW15
The Alton Estate is a historically significant municipal estate situated on Roehampton’s border with Richmond Park Much of the land constituted the grounds of Parkstead, a Palladian villa built in the 1760s for Lord Bessborough and later renamed Manresa House. Parts of its grounds were developed from around 1850 as a high-class suburban estate known as Coombe Park or Roehampton Park. Alton Lodge was an early-19th-century villa on the Kingston Road, occupied by Dr Thomas Hake from around 1854 until 1872.

In 1951 the architect’s department at the London County Council selected this area as the site for one of the largest and most radical housing developments ever undertaken in London. The best villas and some of the landscaping were preserved but 130 acres were otherwise totally cleared to make way for the project.

The Scandinavian-inspired Alton East was completed in 1955 and it was followed four years later by the much larger Alton West, which was influenced by the high-rise creations of the French architect Le Corbusier. Both stages include a mix of tower block...
»more

MAY

2016

Allum Hall
Allum Hall was a community centre and lately a venue. Allum Hall was built as Elstree Manor House, probably with 17th century origins.

The Grade 2 listed building has records of residents living here as early as 1827 when Thomas Jemmitt lived here, over the next 100 years the house stayed as private residence where many different families called the manor house home including army captains.

In the 1940s it was decided a community centre was needed in Elstree and Borehamwood and, after many years of discussions, in July 1953 Allum Hall filled this purpose.
»read full article

MAY

2016

Shenley Road (1930s)
Shenley Road, Borehamwood in the 1930s In this 1930s view, we are looking along the line of Shenley Road when the road featured houses rather than shops.

All Saint’s church (built in 1910) is just out of shot on the right. Central Garage is likewise out of shot but outside of it is roughly where the camera is positioned.

A stench pipe can be seen running along the road.

The near-left hand side on a 2015 view would be dominated by a branch of Nando’s.
»read full article

MAY

2016

ABPC Elstree Studios
British National Pictures Ltd purchased 50 acres of land on the south side of Shenley Road and began construction of two large film stages in 1925. The first film produced there was Madame Pompadour in 1927. British International Pictures Ltd (BIP) took over the studios in 1927 and the second stage was ready for production in 1928. In 1929 Blackmail, the first British talkie to go on release, was produced at the studios. With the death of silent films came the construction of 6 new sound stages on the site and three of these were sold on to the British and Dominions Film Corporation with BIP retaining the remaining stages. BIP were absorbed into the Associated British Picture Corporation (ABPC) in the early 1930s.

In 1946 Warner Brothers acquired a substantial interest in ABPC, appointed a new board and decided to rebuild the stages. The rebuild was completed in 1948 and work began on Man On The Run followed by The Hasty Heart starring Richard Todd and Ronald Reagan. In 1968 Electrical and Musical Industries (EMI) bought control of ABPC and the studios were renamed EMI Studios, later Thorn-EMI Studios. In 1985 they were put up for sale. Under Herron-Cannon Group ownership,...
»more

MAY

2016

66 Shenley Road, WD6
66 Shenley Road used to lie on the corner of Furzehill Road.
»read full article

MAY

2016

Nine Elms Lane, SW8
Nine Elms Lane was named around 1645, from a row of elm trees bordering the road. In 1838, at the time of construction of the London and Southampton Railway, the area was described as “a low swampy district occasionally overflowed by the Thames [whose] osier beds, pollards and windmille and the river give it a Dutch effect”.

Nine Elms railway station opened on 21 May 1838 as the first London terminus of the London and South Western Railway. The station was closed in 1848 when the L&SWR opened its metropolitan extension from Nine Elms to Waterloo. The area adjacent to the station housed the L&SWR’s carriage and wagon works until their relocation to Eastleigh in 1909. In 1941 the building was damaged by German bombs and it was demolished in the 1960s. The site became the flower section of the New Covent Garden Market in 1974.

Gasworks were established in 1853, close to the existing waterworks of the Southwark and Vauxhall Waterworks Company. Later Battersea Power Station was built on this site.
»read full article

MAY

2016

Royal Artillery Memorial
The Royal Artillery Memorial is a stone memorial at Hyde Park Corner, dedicated to the First World War casualties of the Royal Regiment of Artillery. The memorial was designed by Charles Jagger and Lionel Pearson, and features a giant sculpture of a BL 9.2-inch Mk I howitzer upon a large plinth of Portland stone, with stone reliefs depicting scenes from the conflict. Four bronze figures of artillerymen are positioned around the outside of the memorial.

The memorial is famous for its realist contrast with other First World War memorials, such as the Cenotaph designed by Edwin Lutyens, and attracted much public debate during the 20th century.
»read full article

MAY

2016

St Pancras and Islington Cemetery
St Pancras and Islington Cemetery is actually two cemeteries, owned by two other London Boroughs, Camden (formerly St Pancras) and Islington. Following the Metropolitan Burials Act 1852 and later acts which were designed to alleviate serious health and other problems caused by over-crowded burial grounds and lack of management and accountability, the cemetery was established in 1854 as the first municipally owned cemetery in London when the St Pancras Burial Board bought 88 acres of the former Horseshoe Farm on Finchley Common. A further 94 acres were annexed in 1877 and the total area was divided between Islington and Camden, the former having two areas to the north-west and east, the latter having the remainder. A bank and ditch along the eastern edge marks the parish boundary between Finchley and Hornsey. To the south the cemetery is bordered by the ancient woodland of Coldfall Wood, to the north the North Circular road and to the west by the A1000 Great North Road. The cemetery features several chapels and a large crematorium built by Albert Freeman in 1937.

Although Brookwood Cemetery in Woking, Surrey, ...
»more

MAY

2016

Cranbourn Street, WC2H
Cranbourne Street was named after local landowner the Earl of Salisbury, Viscount Cranbourn (Cranbourne) after the town in Dorset. It was built in the 1670s.
»read full article

MAP YEAR:	1750	1800	1810	1820	1830	1860	1900	1950	2024	Show map without markers
	TIP: Using the pile of paper control at the top right of the map, you can change historical mapping without affecting the markers

PREVIOUSLY ON THE UNDERGROUND MAP...