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

DECEMBER

2017

Necropolis Station
The London Necropolis Railway was opened in 1854 as a reaction to severe overcrowding in London’s existing graveyards and cemeteries. Waterloo station was originally the terminus for London’s daily funeral express to Brookwood Cemetery. Funerary trains bearing coffins (at 2/6 each - singles, naturally) left from the ’Necropolis Station’ just outside the main station. The Necropolis Station was totally destroyed during World War II.

It aimed to use the recently-developed technology of the railway to move as many burials as possible to the newly-built Brookwood Cemetery in Brookwood, Surrey. This location was within easy travelling distance of London, but distant enough that the dead could not pose any risk to public hygiene.

Although it had its own branch line into Brookwood Cemetery, most of the route of the London Necropolis Railway ran on the existing London and South Western Railway (LSWR). Consequently, a site was selected in Waterloo, near the LSWR’s recently-opened London terminus at Waterloo Bridge station (now London Waterloo). The building was specifically designed for ...
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DECEMBER

2017

Canterbury Music Hall
The Canterbury Music Hall was established in 1852 by Charles Morton on the site of a former skittle alley adjacent to the Canterbury Tavern at 143 Westminster Bridge Road. It was the first purpose-built music hall in London, and Morton came to be dubbed the Father of the Halls as hundreds of imitators were built within the next several years. The theatre was rebuilt three times, and the last theatre on the site was destroyed by bombing in 1942.

Morton and Frederick Stanley, his brother in law, purchased the Canterbury Arms, in Upper Marsh, Lambeth, in 1849. Morton was experienced in presenting ’Gentlemen Only’ entertainments in his other pubs, and he had been impressed with the entertainments at Evans Music-and-Supper Rooms in Covent Garden and decided to offer a harmonic meeting, held on Saturdays, in the back room of the public house. He brought in smart tables, with candlesticks, allowing audiences to sit and eat comfortably while watching concerts known as ’Sing-Songs’ or ’Free and Easys’ on Mondays and Saturdays. Soon, a Thursday evening programme was added to accommodate the crowds. Morton encouraged women to attend the ...
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DECEMBER

2017

Our Lady of Lourdes, Wanstead
Our Lady Of Lourdes church is the Catholic parish church of Wanstead, and is part of the Diocese of Brentwood. A mass centre was opened in Wanstead in 1910 by the parish priest of Walthamstow. In 1918 it was transferred to the hall of the newly opened St. Joseph’s convent school, Cambridge Park. Wanstead became a separate parish in 1919, and the church was opened in 1928, and completed in 1934.

The church was built in the Neo-Gothic style. The church exterior is of red brick with cream stone edgings. Inside, the plan is that of a nave and two aisles on either side. At the back, over the entrance, there is the choir balcony, on which a new organ has been constructed. The interior walls are simply whitewashed, excluding the stonework. Behind the altar is an elaborate stone gothic altarpiece. Two stained glass windows have been inserted in the left aisle.
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DECEMBER

2017

North Ockendon
North Ockendon is the only area of Greater London which is outside the M25 orbital motorway. North Ockendon parish had an ancient shape that was elongated east-west. With the adjoining parishes this formed a large estate that is at least middle-Saxon or, perhaps, even Roman or Bronze age.

The parish church of St Mary Magdelene has a probably re-used Norman nave door on the south side of the nave. Its tower was used in the first accurate measurement of the speed of sound, by the Reverend William Derham, Rector of Upminster. Gunshots were fired from the tower and the flash thereof was observed by telescope from the tower of the church of St Laurence, Upminster; then the time was recorded until the sound arrived, from which, with an accurate distance measurement, the speed could be calculated.

To the east is a small area of fenland, which extends into Bulphan and the rest is clays and Thames alluvials. The land is very low lying. The field boundaries are wholly rectilinear. To the far north, beyond the London, Tilbury and Southend Railway, it borde...
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DECEMBER

2017

Kenley Street, W11
Kenley Street, W11 was originally William Street before it disappeared. Avondale Park, directly to the north of William Street (Kenley Street) was opened in 1892 and known by the locals as the ‘Rec’. It housed a flower garden, a playground area for children and a bandstand with a public Mortuary Chapel.

In 1900, an act of the Kensington Borough Council purchased part of William Street. Houses for use as workmen’s flats and dwellings went up. District Nurses had a home erected in the same street for their use.

Five streets known as the ‘Special Area’ were Bangor Street, Crescent Street, St Clement’s Road, St Katherine’s Road and William Street. This area differed very little from the Potteries in terms of health and well being. But the ‘Special Area’ was especially overcrowded with a large number of pubs.

Lodging houses accommodated over 700 people, each paying about fourpence or sixpence a night. Houses for ‘ladies of the night’ were open from the evening till around mid morning, at a cha...
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DECEMBER

2017

Cobley’s Farm
Cobley’s Farm, also known as Fallow Farm, stood near to the "elbow" of Bow Lane. The area of Fallow Corner and of Cobley’s (Fallow) Farm (so called by the 17th century) was first recorded in 1429. By the 18th century there was a small hamlet of houses and the access roads from these to the main road formed the distinct Bow Lane. The route of the road was originally part of a lengthy track leading across from Muswell Hill through Coldfall Wood to the northern portion of Church End. Bow Lane, which was named for its shape, was constructed in 1814 after the enclosure of Finchley Common.

Opposite Cobley’s Farm it diverged, the northern portion ultimately doubling back to the Great North Road from Fallow Corner in the form of a "bow," and the western portion proceeding across the fields of the farm to Church End, reaching Ballards Lane by the side of Willow Lodge. The northern of these two branches was known as Fallow Lane.

Fallow Farm was in the possession of the Cobley family in the year 1680. An earlier lease of the farm is in exis...
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DECEMBER

2017

Wellgarth Road, NW11
Wellgarth Road connects North End Road with the Hampstead Heath Extension. Sir Raymond Unwin was a mining engineer turned architect who turned Dame Henrietta Barnett’s vision for Hampstead Garden Suburb into reality.

Wellgarth Road was designed as one of Unwin’s large-scale formal approaches to the Heath Extension.

Towards the Heath it was intended to build two pairs of grand houses designed by Parker and Unwin’s friend, Edgar Wood, the pioneer of the flat roof. Evidently there was no one courageous enough to build these Wood designs, and in their place there is a much safer mixture of individual houses.

Of the houses along Wellgarth Road, Threeways (19 Wellgarth Road) is of neo-Georgian design by C Cowles-Voysey.

Number 17, with its lively bay windows, is probably by T Phillips Figgis. Numbers 9 and 15 are excellent houses of the mid-twenties in the Parker and Unwin dark brick style designed in Soutar’s office by his chief assistant Paul Badcock. Parker and Unwin themselves designed in 191...
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DECEMBER

2017

Park Farm, Finchley give much of its land to the later Hampstead Garden Surburb. One of the last occupiers of Park Farm was the circus proprietor Lord’ George Sanger, who retired there in 1904.

Sanger was an English showman and circus proprietor who set up the enterprise with his brother John. The first show was in February 1854 at the King’s Lynn Charter Fair in Norfolk. His circus visited over 200 towns in a nine month season, giving two shows a day, every day except Sunday.

In 1905 he sold off his zoo and some circus effects - these were auctioned by circus auctioneer Tom Norman. His descendants continued the circus in operation until the 1960s.

While he owned Park Farm, he allowed the circus animals to winter on his land. An elderly resident of Denman Drive - constructed in 1908 on what was once Westminster Abbey’s land - used to recall elephants grazing’ in the field between Big Wood and Little Wood, before Denman Drive North and Denman Drive South - constructed in 1912 on what was once the Bishop’s land...
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DECEMBER

2017

North End Way, NW3
North End Way is the name for the southernmost section of North End Road - running from Hampstead to Golders Green. North End Way runs through an area once known as Littleworth.

The advertisement for Old Court House in 1839, a detached residence with extensive views, suitable for a ’family of respectability’, could have applied to any of the houses along North End Way. Old Court House was used as an estate office during the 1850s and 1860s although there is no evidence that courts were held there but the other houses continued as substantial family homes.

In 1841 the inhabitants of the former Littleworth in other houses included merchants at Fern and Heath lodges, a banker at Hill House, a clergyman at Camelford Cottage, a solicitor at Crewe Cottage, and several described as ’independent’. A major-general lived in Fern Lodge in 1851 and his widow and daughter were still there in 1890.

From 1872 until 1890 or later Heathlands was the home of Hugh M. Matheson, the Far Eastern merchant.

By 1890 Sir Richard Temple, Bt., had built Heat...
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DECEMBER

2017

Burgess Hill, NW2
Burgess Hill runs off of Finchley Road. By the mid 18th century the Hampstead part of Childs Hill was divided in two by the road later called Platt’s Lane, which ran from West End and Fortune Green to the heath, Hampstead town, and Hendon. It was entirely occupied by two estates, both of which may have originated as land of the Templars.

The arrival of the Finchley Road lessened the area’s isolation. A house called Temple Park was built on the smaller Temples estate probably in the 1830s by Henry Weech Burgess, a prosperous Lancastrian. About the same time farm buildings were erected on Platt’s estate fronting Platt’s Lane.

Some nine and a half acres of Henry Weech Burgess’s estate had become a brickfield by 1864 and Temple Park had become the Anglo-French College by 1873. A few houses had been built in what became Burgess Hill by 1878 and in 1880 Weech Road was constructed between Fortune Green Road and Finchley Road on the portion of Teil’s estate purchased by the Burgesses in 18...
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DECEMBER

2017

Child’s Hill
Childs Hill, now a select area, was formerly reknowned for bricks and laundering. Child’s Hill was a centre for brick and tile making during the second half of the 18th century, supplying material for building Hampstead (which is to the east nearby), and run by a Samuel Morris. Being more than 259 ft above sea level (at the Castle Inn), Child’s Hill is visible for miles around. From 1808 to 1847 there was an optical telegraph station, one in a line from the Admiralty to Great Yarmouth. Only the name, Telegraph Hill, remains.

An Act of Parliament in 1826 allowed for the construction of the Finchley Road (completed by 1829) with a tollgate at the Castle Inn. In the early 1850s a Colonel Evans built houses in a field called The Mead (later renamed Granville Road). By the 1870s a number of laundries, servicing much of Victorian era West London, were established in The Mead. Clothes washed in London were thought to be susceptible to water borne disease, such cholera and typhoid, and Child’s Hill, then still in the countryside was supplied by a seri...
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