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Featured · * ·
MARCH
19
2024
The Underground Map is a project which is creating street histories for the areas of London and surrounding counties lying inside the M25.

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 664 completed street histories and 46836 partial histories
Find streets or residential blocks within the M25 by clicking STREETS


JULY
31
2016

 

Broadwalk Centre
The Broadwalk Centre is a shopping centre located in Edgware. The Broadwalk Centre is a single-storey shopping centre and contains over 20 shops. It is linked to Edgware bus station.
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JULY
27
2016

 

Lavenham Road, SW18
Lavenham Road is named after a Suffolk town. An estate agents’ office was established opposite Southfields station in 1899. George Ryan and Henry Penfold were the prime developers at the start of the ’Grid’ scheme and they employed builders under contract to construct different sections of the various streets.

Their standards were high and they were constantly badgering the contractors about the quality of their work. Socially they were in advance of their time with their option for residents to own or rent their property, a flexible arrangement designed to attract a wide cross- section of different people.
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JULY
25
2016

 

Horsenden Lane South, UB6
Horsenden Lane South connects the Western Avenue with the Grand Union Canal. Perivale ’village’ was never more than a small complex centred on the church, rectory, and manor-house. By the time of the first detailed map in 1839, the manor-house had been demolished and the only domestic buildings were five widely separated farm-houses. Horsenden Farm, Church Farm, Grange Farm, Manor Farm and Apperton or Alperton Farm. At this time Perivale was said to be ’very secluded’. The only roads in the area were Horsenden Lane and Apperton Lane.

The opening in 1801 of the Paddington branch of the Grand Junction Canal had little effect and in 1876 Perivale was described as ’a curiously lonely-looking little place, lying in the valley of the Brent among broad meadows’. Horsenden Lane was split into Horsenden Lane North and Horsenden Lane South, depending on the particular side of the canal.

In 1821, the population census showed that there were only 25 inhabitants in Perivale and this had only grown to 32 in the 1851 census. Kelly’...
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JULY
24
2016

 

The Myriad Stores
Photo depicting 49 Shenley Road, WD6 Situated opposite Drayton Road, this general store sold just about anything from pots & pans to needles & thread. This photo was taken in the 1940s after new owners took over from Tom Wingate.
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JULY
24
2016

 

Fox and Clark Furniture Shop (1905)
The Fox and Clark Furniture Shop was situated at 73 Shenley Road, Boreham Wood.
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JULY
21
2016

 

Bullbaiter’s Farm Sale (1905)
Bullbaiter’s Farm was located at the bottom of the modern Bullhead Road. Auction of farm goods after the retirement of farmer George King.
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JULY
21
2016

 

Bullbaiter’s Farm
Bullbaiter’s Farm in 1905. Farmer George King (pictured standing at the gate) retired from running Bullbaiter’s Farm on 25 March 1905. The farm was the property of the Earl of Strafford of Wrotham Park, South Mimms.
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JULY
21
2016

 

Horse and cart at Bullbaiter’s Farm
Horses and a cart at Bullbaiters (Bullbeggar’s) Farm, c1880. The area has since been built over. The farm was approximately where Bullhead Road, Boreham Wood is now.

Bullbeggar meant "hobgoblin" or "scarecrow."
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JULY
20
2016

 

Theobald Street (watercolour)
Watercolour of the lower part of Theobald Street. The image seems to date from the turn of the twentieth century.
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JULY
15
2016

 

Station Road, N11
Station Road dates from the time that the railway came to New Southgate. Gas came to New Southgate in 1858. That year the Southgate and Colney Hatch Gas Light and Coke Limited set up a gasworks in Station Road.

Houses were provided for the gas company’s workers in Lee Street and Albert Street. These were demolished when the course of Station Road was altered in the 1970s. They were very basic terraced workmen’s cottages with outside toilets. They were built in the shadow of three huge gasholders.
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JULY
13
2016

 

Blomfield Road, W9
Blomfield Road is the road running beside the canal on the Little Venice side. It received its name in 1841. Charles Blomfield was a Bishop of London.

Very little building was taking place behind the Edgware Road frontage by the time the 1840s dawned and progress over the fields north of the canal continued to be slow.

In 1851 there were buildings only in Blomfield Road and in the quadrangle between that road, Clifton Place (later Villas), and the south end of Warwick Road enclosing Warwick Place. In 1857 Bristol Gardens still commanded uninterrupted country views to the north and west.
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JULY
6
2016

 

Ladbroke Crescent, W11
Ladbroke Crescent belongs to the third and final great period of building on the Ladbroke estate and the houses were constructed in the 1860s. Development of this area had suddenly become more attractive with the opening in 1864 of the Hammersmith and City line of the Metropolitan Railway with a station on Ladbroke Grove (the station was originally called ‘Notting Hill’), and the introduction in the early 1860s of cheap workmen’s fares.

By that time the Ladbroke family had disposed of the land, either by selling the freehold or by giving 99-year peppercorn rents. The land on which Ladbroke Crescent lies was in the hands of the speculator and ex-Calcutta merchant Charles Blake, who had already developed successfully several other parts of the Ladbroke estate. In 1864, he granted a lease of the whole crescent to G. and T. Goodwin, builders. The normal pattern was no doubt followed, according to which the builder had to build houses meeting certain standards; he was then given a 99-year lease of the property which he could let, thus recovering his costs, but he had had to pay a ground rent to the landowner...
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JULY
5
2016

 

Ladbroke Gardens, W11
Ladbroke Gardens runs between Ladbroke Grove and Kensington Park Road. By the early 1850s the Ladbroke family had sold the freehold of much of the undeveloped part of their estate, including the land on which Ladbroke Gardens now stands, to various speculators. The north and south sides of what is now Ladbroke Gardens ended up in different ownership. It was a time of building boom, and in 1852 the owners of both sides began to let building leases, under which contractors undertook to erect houses in exchange for a promise that, once the houses were completed, they would be given 99-year leases, enabling them to recover their costs by subletting the new houses.

Unfortunately the building boom did not last. The excessive building had outstripped demand and it soon became clear that the developers were unable to continue financing their plans. In about 1855 building ceased almost completely on the Ladbroke estate. Ladbroke Gardens was one of the streets most affected, becoming known as “Coffin Row” because of the many half-built and cr...
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JULY
4
2016

 

Ladbroke Square, W11
The huge Ladbroke Square communal garden is part communal garden accessed from the backs of the houses lining it and part traditional London Square with roads between the houses and the square. It is bordered by Ladbroke Grove on its west side, Kensington Park Road on its east side, and the road called Ladbroke Square on its south side – so the latter is something of a misnomer, being a single long road. All the houses are numbered consecutively.

Felix Ladbroke, the owner of the Ladbroke estate, signed an agreement in 1840 with a developer, Jacob Connop, a bill broker in the City of London, to develop inter alia the road now called Ladbroke Square. Under this agreement, Connop let building leases of the individual plots to various builders. Then, when the houses were built or nearly built, Ladbroke granted 99-year leases of the houses to Connop or some other person at his direction, usually the builder, allowing the developer and/or the builder or financier to recover their capital outlay by subletting or selling the leaseholds..

It seems to have taken Connop some time to find people willing to take up building leases. The first plots to be ...
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JULY
2
2016

 

St John’s Gardens, W11
St John’s Gardens runs around St John’s church. The road that runs down to Clarendon Road was originally known as St John’s Road, although by 1923 it had become St John’s Gardens. The road is bordered almost entirely by the railings of the neighbouring communal gardens or the sides of the back gardens in neighbouring streets. There are only two houses with an address in St John’s Gardens, both in the semi-circular section facing the back of the church.

Nos. 1 and 2 St John’s Gardens form part of a trio with No. 44 Lansdowne Crescent. Indeed, until a renumbering in 1925, all three houses were considered to be in St John’s Gardens and No. 44 was known as No. 3 St John’s Gardens. All three were built by William Reynolds, a builder turned developer to whom James Weller Ladbroke (the freeholder) and Richard Roy (the developer) gave a lease in 1846 at a ground rent of £5 for each house. They are handsome half stucco houses, as well decorated on their rear elevations (also half stucco) as on the front. They a...
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JULY
1
2016

 

Westbourne Park Road, W11
Westbourne Park Road runs between Notting Hill and the Paddington area. This part of the Ladbroke estate was the last to be developed. In 1847, a convent of the Poor Clares was established at the south-western end of what is now Westbourne Park Road, in its own large walled garden. At the time, the site was described by the journal Building News as a ‘dreary waste of mud and stunted trees’, apart from ‘a melancholy half-built church’ (All Saints in Talbot Road) and ‘a lonely public house’ (the Elgin). The street was at first called Cornwall Road though the section nearest to Ladbroke Grove, ’Somerset Road’.

For more than a decade, the convent and the pub remained alone. It was a period of financial crisis for developers, and it was not until the early 1860s that any other buildings were erected.

The first houses to be built on the southern side (apart from the convent) were Nos. 305-317 (odds), dating from around 1860, as the 1861 census records three occupied houses next to the Castle pub, and four of...
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