| Table of contents | Survey of London: Battersea Bartlett School of Architecture/UCL |
South of Wandsworth Common |
This article appears courtesy of the Bartlett School of Architecture at University College London
www.ucl.ac.uk/bartlett/architecture/sites/bartlett/files/50.17_between_the_commons_1.pdf
Used with permission. © English Heritage 2013
Cushioned between wide open spaces, far from the council estates and railways that crowd the north of the parish, this area is today best known for its gridded streets of Victorian and Edwardian housing, built up from the 1850s, constituting Battersea’s latter-day middle-class heartland. That story is told in the succeeding chapter. For 100 years before, this was a very different kind of district: a verdant, genteel suburb of large private villas, wooded grounds and farmland, through which ran the watercourse called the Falcon Brook, on the route of present-day Northcote Road.
It is with this lost elysium that the present chapter is concerned; in particular its villas, built by and for some of the capital’s richest and most influential men. Of these, only five survive, on Clapham Common West Side. A neighbouring early Victorian mansion of the 1850s (also included here) is evidence of how late such social and architectural aspirations persisted. But by then the tide was turning and of the rest no physical trace remains, though the disposition of their grounds or estates greatly determined the layout of the Victorian and later streets that took their place. The area was once agricultural, a mixture of arable land, pasture and meadow. Tenants of the lord of the manor in the early 1700s were gardeners, farmers, yeomen or labourers. Little building had taken place other than a farm complex (later known as Bolingbroke Farm) near the north-west corner, beside the Falcon Brook, approached from a lane off the main road (Battersea Rise), which itself had seen some ribbon development. This farm was probably the hub of a 100-acre holding known at this time as King’s Farm, owned from around 1719 by Thomas King, afterwards by John King.
Rich City traders did not venture this far south-west until c.1750, when John Akerman (d.1757), a glass merchant, took a house and land at the far west end of the common, formerly belonging to John King. The evolution of this house and its grounds into the celebrated Battersea Rise House and gardens and its association with Henry Thornton and the Clapham Sect are explored in detail below. Akerman was succeeded there firstly by his widow, then by his son, Isaac; the latter also took land opposite, on the common’s north side, where he built the matching villas known as The Sisters, probably to designs by (Sir) Robert Taylor.
By the early 1760s Akerman had been joined by others—namely Robert Lovelace, a wealthy banker; Christopher Baldwin, a West Indies plantation owner; and Thomas Bond, a timber merchant—each of whom took land on which to build a house.
Change was accelerated with the acquisition in 1763 of this whole tract between the commons by John, Viscount (later 1st Earl) Spencer as part of his purchase of Battersea manor, and his decision shortly afterwards to break it up and offer it for sale. And so Akerman, Lovelace, Baldwin and Bond embedded their houses within freehold estates, some big, some small. Subsequent sales—of the Bolingbroke Farm plot to Samuel Hoare, merchant (1765), and of large swathes of fields to the south and west to Robert Dent, another City banker (1772)—disposed of any remaining Spencer land.3 Baldwin would later sell part of his estate to Henry Cavendish, in 1786. But thereafter, barring the trading of a few fields here and there, the pattern of landownership remained relatively static until the area was hit by waves of suburban redevelopment in the later nineteenth century. When Baldwin sold his land in 1786 there were only eleven villas dotted around the ground between the two commons; by 1800 there were twenty-four; by 1838, twenty-eight. Along with the area north of Clapham Common and around Lavender Hill this had become a desirable spot for London’s bankers and merchants. In addition to the elevated, well-drained ground, there were the attractions of the common itself, recently improved largely through Baldwin’s own efforts, cajoling residents into providing funds, and using his influence as a magistrate to advance programmes of drainage, path laying and ornamental tree planting. Given the pattern of landownership, the new villas of the 1780s–1820s were nearly all speculations by existing landlords, increasingly aware of the appetite for such buildings here; this was true for example of those erected on the estates of Lovelace, Dent and Cavendish, and Bond’s descendants. The principal exception was Henry Thornton, who in 1792 bought the former Akerman estate and used his great wealth to build houses near his own in which to install like-minded evangelical friends and associates—though there was always a large social element to this (his use of the word ‘chummery’ to describe it is instructive) as well as a crusading one. The area beside Clapham Common’s north-west corner where the ground rose up from the valley of the Falcon Brook was known from the 1650s as ‘The Rise’, later Battersea Rise.
It was a name used widely to denote almost any of the higher ground populated with villas on the south Battersea– Clapham borders, at times applied also to Lavender Hill or to Five Houses Road (now Bolingbroke Grove). Today the nomenclature is no clearer, the area being regarded more as an outlier of Clapham than as a part of Battersea. It was to the far west, beside Wandsworth Common, that villas first began to fall to a new generation of builders in the 1850s and 60s. By 1890 the vanguard had reached Clapham Common, and within twenty years most of the illustrious houses there had been demolished for lower middle-class terraces.
Clapham Common West Side and Battersea Rise
Bluest of blood of all the residents of Clapham Common was the experimental scientist Henry Cavendish, son of Lord Charles Cavendish and grandson to the dukes of Devonshire and Kent. In 1785 he took the biggest house on the south side of the common as a suburban retreat and base for his scientific studies and experiments.5 But this was not his original plan. Cavendish had first asked Christopher Baldwin if he would consider selling fifteen acres of vacant fields to the south of his residence, on the common’s west side, with a view to building a large house there. This land had a frontage of over a thousand feet, equating to the sites of the present Hightrees House and 14–42 Clapham Common West Side.
At first Baldwin showed no interest but Cavendish persisted, and by June 1784 the two men seemed to have reached agreement. Cavendish was to build his villa on Baldwin’s ‘back field’, not immediately fronting the common, from which it would be approached by a private road—in the manner later followed for Broomfield (c.1795), William Wilberforce’s house. By July Baldwin had cut the grass in this field, to allow the ground to be laid out and foundations dug, but in the end nothing happened. Cavendish’s emissary to Baldwin during negotiations was John Hanscomb, a Clapham carpenter and builder, whom Cavendish presumably intended would build his new villa. Instead, Hanscomb and his partner and fellow carpenter Richard Fothergill were given the job of making alterations to the rented house on the south side, later known after its occupant as Cavendish House.
The scientist seems to have engaged the two men at the time as his architects, surveyors, builders and agents.6 But still Cavendish persisted with his purchase of Baldwin’s fields, which finally changed hands in 1786, for £5,000. Cavendish’s motivation was now speculative development. By May 1790 he had negotiated a lease of all the land to Hanscomb & Fothergill, in association with Thomas Poynder, an eminent City bricklayer, who between them agreed to spend £10,000 over eight years in building good-quality houses.7 The first four to go up, immediately south of Baldwin’s mansion, were all built in 1794–5, though Hanscomb, Fothergill and Poynder were not the lessees. By then they had found new owners willing to take on building leases directly from Cavendish and erect houses, though the three men may well have acted as contractors. The new owners were (from north to south): John Towgood, a City banker (recently married to a sister of the poet Samuel Rogers), who erected a large detached mansion with a long garden (later 31 West Side); Thomas Jarvis, a Charing Cross undertaker, who built a semi-detached pair (later Nos 29 & 30), one of which he took as his own house; and Anthony Horne, a Bankside coal merchant, who built the fourth house (No. 28). Horne’s Quaker family had been wealthy coal factors for generations and were keen supporters of Wilberforce’s abolitionism. All the houses were of stock brick, mostly of three stories over basements, and, though grouped quite closely together, were set back decorously from the common behind front gardens and carriage drives.8 Later occupants include: No. 29, Herman Sillem, European and West India merchant (c.1824–48); John Stephen Jarvis, silk merchant (c.1872–98), who named it Devon House: No. 30, Edward Vaux, merchant and insurance broker (c.1810–21); Henry Ravenhill, iron manufacturer (1854–94): No. 31, John Shewell, solicitor and stockbroker (c.1815–20); and John Kirton Gilliatt, Virginia merchant, MP for Clapham (c.1834–56). The biggest residence, at No. 31, came down in the 1890s for new housing; the others hung on until just after the war, when they were demolished for Marianne Thornton School (vol. 49). To the south, despite the terms of the agreement, the rest of Cavendish’s land remained undeveloped till 1805–6. The first of the two houses here, High Trees, which stood at the far south, seems to have been built in 1805 by Hanscomb & Fothergill for Benjamin Wright, a wealthy Russia merchant, recently married to Elizabeth Evans, a Tooting heiress. It followed the other houses in size and layout, with a carriage drive, long garden and good stabling. Wright died there in 1816, his widow remaining until her death in 1841. Subsequent occupants include: Robert Jones, timber merchant (c.1846–77); and John Mackrell, a retired solicitor (c.1888–1909). Prior to demolition in the 1930s the house and gardens were used by the Broomwood Wesleyan Church as a social and sports club.
The only house to survive from this burst of construction on Cavendish’s land is the present 21 Clapham Common West Side (formerly known as Heathfield). The last of the six to be built, in 1805–6, it seems always to have been regarded as the plum, both in terms of its architectural quality and its unusually generous 3½ acres of pleasure gardens, set to one side, rather than behind the house in the usual manner. The house has a wellproportioned, symmetrical front, faced in yellow stock brick, with a curved Doric entrance porch. It has for some time been attributed to James Burton but it is now clear that this is wrong, deriving from a misidentification of this site with land further north, where Burton and a partner built houses in the 1790s (81–84 Clapham Common West Side, below). No. 21 was almost certainly built by Thomas Poynder, who was its first lessee in 1805, though not for his own use. He later bought the freehold, in 1828, the house having failed to sell at a Cavendish family auction the previous year.
Poynder (d.1837) emerges as a significant figure in the London building world, with interests in lime and cement manufacturing and stone quarrying, as well as his bricklayer’s, brickmaking and contracting businesses. He and his son later branched out into speculative development, and they also worked for Sir John Soane. By the 1790s Poynder had done well enough to move to a large house on the north side of Clapham Common (The Eukestons). Poynders Road, running off the south side of the common, is named after him.11 Inside No. 21, the highlight of the house was its spacious, pillared entrance hall, leading to a curving main staircase lit by a window in the south wall.
A large rear reception room led onto a loggia, with a veranda, overlooking the back garden. Upstairs were six first-floor rooms, leading off a generous landing, with about seven more on the floor above. As with all the Cavendish houses, a conservatory was attached (on the south side of the house, beside the pleasure gardens) and there was a capacious basement floor for kitchen, stores and other services. The first occupant was George Pindar, or Pinder, a principal in the Charing Cross firm of Greenwood & Cox (later Cox & Co.), agents and paymasters to the British army (resident c.1807–22); he was followed by John Britten, a City clothworker, latterly with his son, the solicitor John Meek Britten (c.1823–43). Later residents include: Thomas Merryman Coombs, silk merchant (c.1844–64); Edward Colman, mustard manufacturer (c.1864–78); and John Cobeldick (c.1904–14), the West Country builder-developer who bought and demolished several old mansions near by and covered their sites with suburban housing—but not, for some reason, this one. However, under Cobeldick part of the pleasure gardens disappeared beneath the middle-class semis of Sumburgh Road and the eastern end of Thurleigh Road (c.1905–8); the remainder was probably sold off, as it was later added to the site of High Trees to make room for the 1930s flats of the same name. By then No. 21 had been converted to apartments, before in the 1950s it became a residential home for former actresses fallen on hard times. Sold in 1999 for £3.25m—a record price at the time for ‘Clapham’—it has since been converted back to single family use.12 The Grange, Broxash, Leveson Lodge & Broadlands (all demolished) These four detached villas occupied the frontage now taken up by 43–68 Clapham Common West Side, with gardens reaching back as far as presentday Wroughton Road. The Grange, the oldest of the three, owed its origins in the early 1760s to the West India merchant and Surrey JP Christopher Baldwin—a pioneer of settlement and improvement in the area. Baldwin was born c.1720 in Antigua, his family having been early settlers, and owned estates and plantations there and in nearby Dominica. Like many Antiguan planters he migrated to London where he had established a merchant’s business by 1750, when he married Jane Watkins, daughter of the Chief Justice of Antigua. The City remained his family home until around 1762.13 By then he had taken a lease of three fields on the west side of the common, at its south end, amounting to about thirteen acres, and erected a house with stables and gardens. Once Lord Spencer let it be known that he was willing to sell his newly acquired land here, Baldwin began negotiations to buy the freehold of these and several adjoining fields, eventually in 1765 paying Spencer £1,520 for nine fields (over 38 acres). These stretched back to the Falcon Brook, with a frontage extending to Balham (now Nightingale) Lane. At this time Baldwin’s house was known as ‘Laurentum’.
This choice of name for his villa underlines Baldwin’s intentions at Clapham Common. He aimed to create for himself an idyllic suburban retreat from city life in the spirit of the patriarchs of ancient Rome, notably Pliny the Younger, the description of whose coastal villa among a colony of similar residences at Laurentum, near Ostia, was well known to classical scholars. The seclusion of this west side of the common would have appealed, with at the time only the Akerman family at Battersea Rise House, and Isaac Akerman’s tenants in the Sister Houses for near neighbours. Like the ancients, Baldwin was also interested in the relationship between his house, its garden and the surrounding countryside. A skilled gardener and farmer, he cultivated exotic plants and experimented with new ways of growing animal-feed crops, inventing in the process a new type of hoe-plough for mowing, which was manufactured and made available to the public by a Clapham wheelwright.
Baldwin was proud of what he had created, later describing his fields as ‘the delight of my heart’, and when pressed upon to give up land for building said ‘the very idea of doing it, makes me start’. He was also interested in science generally, assisting Benjamin Franklin with his well-known experiments with oil to still troubled waters on one of the Clapham Common ponds.16 Laurentum was a neat mid-century Palladian villa, with two principal storeys between a semi-basement and mansard attic, the main front enlivened by a small central pediment, entrance steps and door surround. A view of c.1800 shows it set behind a carriage drive, framed by shrubberies and neatly clipped trees.
Under later owners the pediment was taken down and the house extended to either side and at the rear.17 Despite maintaining his Caribbean interests, Baldwin was beset by financial worries. His Clapham Common estate was heavily mortgaged, and though reluctant at first in 1784–6 he sold much of the land south of his house to Henry Cavendish. Baldwin finally left Clapham Common around 1801 for Bentley, near Farnham, where his deceased son’s wife lived, and where he himself died. The Grange, as his house became known, was taken around 1802 by Thomas Ravenhill, a City banker, in whose family it remained until the 1860s. The last owner and resident from 1872 was the German import merchant Frederick William Roller. The house was demolished in 1896 for the building of Broxash and Kyrle Roads.
Some of the still-vacant land north of The Grange was sold by the Ravenhills in the early 1800s and two more villas erected there. These were later known as Broxash, to the south, and Leveson Lodge. Broxash went up first, in 1806–7, built by the artistically inclined stockbroker Benjamin Oakley (d.1844), a friend of Sir John Soane’s and a man said to be ‘fond of building’. No illustration of the house is known, but it was apparently the work of an ‘eminent’ architect and, rarely, was in ‘the Chinese style’. In addition to nine bedrooms, dressing rooms, and the usual suite of reception rooms, it boasted a ‘beautiful Gothic Music or School Room’ and a greenhouse with folding doors opening to a large billiard room. It was whilst living there that Oakley was taught painting by Turner.19 Oakley left around 1811, and later occupants of Broxash included: George Bridges, import merchant, subsequently Lord Mayor (c.1811–12); William Mercer, factor (c.1812–15); and Edward Hodges, insurance broker (1817–34). In 1835, when known as Cottage House, it was bought by a wealthy widow, Ann Thwaytes, whose descendants, the Cooke family, retained it into the 1890s.
Leveson Lodge was built by the Clapham builder John Loat around 1809, when it was leased to Charles Barclay, of the Quaker–evangelical Southwark brewing dynasty, who stayed until 1824. A later resident was John Bird Sumner, Bishop of Chester (later Archbishop of Canterbury) from c.1830 to 1836. A leading evangelical, he would on occasion minister at Holy Trinity, Clapham. The house’s name derived from Sumner’s successor, William Leveson Gower of Titsey Place, Limpsfield, and his family, relations of the Dukes of Sutherland, who were residents from the 1830s until the 1880s. Both houses were demolished along with The Grange in 1896.21 Of the origins of Broadlands, less is known. It was built c.1794 on land that had been part of the Akerman estate, and both these facts, coupled with its generous eleven acres of walled pleasure grounds, could suggest that it was another house built by Henry Thornton as part of his evangelical ‘chummery’ (see below). The gardens adjoined those of Thornton’s Battersea Rise House to the north; the private road to Wilberforce’s Broomfield ran along its southern boundary. However, the thesis becomes unlikely when one considers its first resident was John Wedderburn of Spring Garden, Jamaica, a prominent plantation owner and senior partner in the London West India house of Wedderburn, Webster & Company.22 Subsequent residents of the house, at one time known as Park House, included the Wilson family— Francis Wilson (c.1807–14), a wealthy philanthropist, followed by his son, the devout Baptist and evangelical John Broadley Wilson (d.1835). The last occupant, Captain Walter Meller, a soldier and philanthropist, was there from c.1855 until the 1880s. Broadlands was then purchased by the developer H. N. Corsellis, under whom the eastern end of Broomwood Road was built on its site.
81–84 Clapham Common West Side (with Beechwood and Maisonette, demolished)
This is the only group of late-Georgian houses to have survived on the west side of the common, and as such is an important reminder of the area’s heyday as a high-class suburb. All four were built in the 1790s on land belonging to the family of Thomas Bond (d.1776), the Lambeth timber merchant who had built himself a large residence here around 1766. He seems to have had no family connection with Benjamin Bond (d.1783), the prosperous Turkey merchant who lived in a mansion on the common’s south side at about the same time. In 1765 Bond took a lease of a house with about nine acres of ground at the common’s north-west corner, promising to spend £500 on building a new one.
This was the mansion later known as Front Hall or Maisonette, where Bond resided until December 1775, shortly before his death, when he leased it to William Vassall, newly arrived with his large family from Boston. A West Indian by birth, from an old East London family of adventurers and settlers, Vassall had been forced to flee Massachusetts on the outbreak of war with England in order to maintain communication with his Jamaican sugar plantations, his sole source of income. His new house was well-appointed, fitted up with statuary and chimneypieces of Sienna marble. Vassall thought it ‘very comfortable desent & Commodious’, and, though homesick, seemed happy with life at Clapham Common except for the high cost of food—‘it is the most expensive & excessively dear place to live in that is in the whole World’, he wrote.
In 1792 Bond’s descendants agreed with the builder-developer James Burton and William Hughes of Clapham to let the remaining ground south of Maisonette for building. Burton had recently become familiar with the area, having taken lodgings here in 1791 in the hope of improving the poor health of his daughter Emily (she died shortly afterwards), and by the next year had bought a ‘cottage’ at Wandsworth Common, which he altered for his own use at considerable expense. Hughes was also involved in property on the south side of Clapham Common. He and Burton had collaborated some four or five years earlier, building houses on the north side of Newgate Street in the City, in 1787–8, on part of the site of the old gate and prison.26 Together they were responsible for erecting the present 81–84 Clapham Common West Side between about 1792 and 1796, though Burton seems to have withdrawn from the partnership by 1794 in order to concentrate his resources on developing the Foundling Hospital estate in Bloomsbury, leaving Hughes to complete the contract. Given its close relationship to the other four, a larger, detached house at the south end of Bond’s land, first occupied c.1795–6 by George Pinder and later known as Beechwood, may also have been by Burton and Hughes.27 Though style and planning vary between the four surviving houses, it is evident that they were built as a speculative group. All are faced in the same pale golden-brown stock brick, with minimal dressings, and all have prominent double-height bows or bays at the rear, to afford views over the long gardens. Also, shared pedimented coach-houses and stableblocks were built spanning the boundary walls between Beechwood and No. 81, and between Nos 82 and 83, the latter surviving. No. 84, being the fifth house in the sequence, missed out, and so had its own neoclassical stableblock built at the end of the rear garden (which also survives), with a driveway ranged along the side of the plot. Two of the houses (Nos 81 & 82) were built as a semi-detached pair, the others as detached residences, and generally were of two storeys, with basements and dormers (though the attics at No. 82 have since been made into a third floor). No. 83, a larger, three-storey house, may once have been similar; but if its full upper storey is an addition, it cannot be much later in date, going by the roof structure above. This is also the only house to have a veranda to the rear—a picturesque addition of cast iron with a tented canopy.
A little movement was given to the otherwise plain elevations: Nos 81 & 82 share a central recess, whereas at No. 83 the centre breaks forward. Nos 81–83 seem always to have had their entrance doors and hallways ranged to one side, though the present Ionic porches are later additions, probably of the 1840s or 50s, when alterations are known to have been made to several of the West Side houses. The staircase balustrade at No. 83, though Georgian in style, is probably of similar vintage.28 No. 84 is the only one of the group always to have had a more symmetrical plan with a central entrance and hall, which retains some original decoration. Its northernmost bay and semi-circular ground-floor window are later additions, also of the mid nineteenth century. No. 83 was the first to be completed, in 1793–4, while Burton was still actively involved, and must have been the ‘neat modern built House and Offices’ at Clapham Common ‘now finishing’ that he advertised in the press in March 1793. By April 1794 it was in the occupation of James Jopp, a Lombard Street merchant with connections to the Jamaica trade through a related company there (Bagle & Jopp). Jopp remained until 1796 or 1798, and was followed, from c.1799, by George Hyde Wollaston, a merchant and banker formerly based in Genoa. He and his wife resided at No. 83 until their return to Italy in 1802, though they came back to Clapham Common shortly afterwards, to live at Beechwood.
The pair at Nos 81 & 82 was first occupied around 1796–7. No. 82 was later the London home of Sir Charles Trevelyan, the colonial administrator, in 1841–3, then recently appointed assistant secretary to the Treasury. Trevelyan was connected to the Clapham Sect milieu through his wife, Hannah More Macaulay, daughter of Zachary Macaulay. He then moved to No. 84 and was succeeded at No. 82 from c.1847 to c.1869 by Sarah and Mary Anne Hibbert, daughters of William Hibbert and nieces of George Hibbert, slave factors and West India merchants, both of whom resided at Clapham Common; George especially was an active and vocal opponent of Wilberforce’s reforms. During their stay the Misses Hibbert built the Hibbert almshouses in Wandsworth Road (1859), in memory of their father. No. 84 was the last house to be finished and occupied, in 1798.
Other residents include: Beechwood, G. H. Wollaston (c.1804–40); Field Marshal Sir George Pollock (1854–72), hero of the Khyber Pass and relief of Jalalabad; No. 81, Adelina Patti, opera singer (1875); Herbert Shelley Bevington, leather and fur merchant (1896–1926); No. 82, Charles Andreae, German cotton merchant (1869–89), who gave it the name Frankfort House; No. 83, Thomas Wood, City merchant, stockbroker and auctioneer (c.1803–33); Edward I’Anson, architect (c.1845–7); Sir William Augustus Fraser, Bart, MP, politician and author (c.1878–98), who named it Leannach Lodge; No. 84, Richard Thornton, wealthy Baltic trader (c.1815–28); Sir James Mackintosh, historian and statesman (c.1829–31); Charles Trevelyan (1843–7); Maisonette, John Peter Gaubert, merchant, director of the Ouglitch Paper Mill, Upper Volga (c.1850–8); Cam Sykes, husband of Emily Thornton, Marianne Thornton’s niece (1859–61). Beechwood was demolished c.1899 for new housing in and around Culmstock Road; Maisonette was purchased in 1858 by Henry Sykes Thornton of Battersea Rise House, with which it was demolished in 1908. Encroaching lower middle-class development robbed the surviving large houses of their allure, and after 1900 most succumbed to institutional use; doctors’ surgeries were popular in the early 1900s. In 1907 No. 83 became Carlyle College, a private preparatory music school for girls (also later at Glenelg, see below), and was subsequently converted to flats. No. 84, also known as Western Lodge, has been in use as a hostel for homeless poor men since 1931. A chapel was added in 1932, to designs by Elgood & Hastie. No. 81 was converted to a motor garage (West Side Garage) at about the same time, and until relatively recently had unsightly lock-ups strewn about its rear garden.
But since the mid 1990s the area has experienced an influx of wealth and renewed interest in such properties as single-family residences, and Nos 81–83 have been restored with some sensitivity. The re-conversion at No. 83, the biggest of the sites, was carried out in 2009–11 by the classical experts Robert Adam Architects for the multi-millionaire businessman and philanthropist Michael Hintze, and includes a new garage at the front of the house (in a style intended to complement the original stable blocks) and an indoor swimming-pool and gymnasium block in the rear grounds.
85 Clapham Common West Side
This large, detached early Victorian house, originally known as Heath View, is included here as it represents the last hurrah in the building of big private villas between the commons. While it was going up the first of the area’s lower middle-class street developments (Chatham Road) was already under way. Heath View was erected in 1858–9 by Joseph Cable, a Clapham builder, on land formerly belonging to Maisonette, William Vassall’s old residence (above).32 Cable’s opportunity came through a deal brokered by the architect Edward I’Anson, district surveyor for Clapham. In 1857 I’Anson acquired Maisonette from its owner, J. P. Gaubert, and then sold it the following year at considerable profit to Henry Sykes Thornton of Battersea Rise, who was keen to extend and secure his estate (see below). Cable had been occupying part of the Maisonette grounds, and it was agreed that land at their south end should be walled off and excluded from the sale. It was here that Heath View was built, on land then still in I’Anson’s ownership, suggesting that he may have been behind the whole enterprise. Also involved in the deal were the Rev. William Whitear of Croydon, and Fitzwilliam Comyn and David Cree, partners in a City solicitors’ firm, who provided the finance. (I’Anson later rebuilt their Bush Lane offices, in 1866.) At the time of the Heath View speculation Cable was offering freeholds in the area for ‘Gentlemen’ priced at between £2,500 and £20,000.
Whatever he was up to he must have overreached, as by November 1858 all his property was in the hands of creditors.33 I’Anson’s role in the house’s creation was central, but it is unlikely he had much to do with its design. For though imposing in its bulk, with plentiful stuccoed classical dressings to its pale brick elevation (including a Doric entrance porch), its poorly arranged façade and rudimentary internal planning do not suggest an architect of his refinement, if an architect at all. A coach-house with rooms over was later added on the south side. Heath View’s first occupant in 1860 was Arthur F. Hewitt, a solicitor, with his wife and children. Later residents of note were William Newmarch, FRS, the banker, economist and statistician (c.1866–9), and John Carr, biscuit manufacturer, of Peek Frean & Company (c.1869–82). In the 1910s and 20s the house served as a private medical institute; it was later, from 1965, a club, but by the early 2000s had fallen into disuse. Around 2010 it was bought in connection with the restoration of No. 83 near by, for which an electricity substation has been built in the front garden of No. 85 (to designs by Robert Adam Architects). The house has since been sold to a private owner for around £5 million, and at the time of writing (2012) was being modernized and heavily extended.34 Battersea Rise, Broomfield (later Broomwood) and Glenelg (all demolished) Battersea Rise—sometimes called Battersea Rise House to distinguish it from the surrounding district—is pre-eminent among the demolished houses of Clapham Common West Side. It achieved renown as the hub of the Clapham Sect and of its adherents’ efforts towards (in William Wilberforce’s phrase) ‘two great objects, the suppression of the slave trade and the reformation of manners’.
Between 1792 and 1815 the house and its spacious grounds were owned by Henry Thornton, the banker and MP who provided much of the movement’s organization and funding. Wilberforce, charismatic leader of the anti-slavery campaign, at first shared the house with Thornton, his cousin and friend. After both men married, Wilberforce moved for eleven years to Broomfield, one of two neighbouring houses built on Thornton property, the other being Glenelg, home of another ally, Charles Grant. The three houses are considered together in this account. Battersea Rise remained in Thornton hands until 1907, hallowed as the shrine of the ‘Clapham saints’. It was then sold for development along with its immediate neighbours including Glenelg (Broomfield had been demolished in 1904). Though attempts to preserve the house failed, its memory has been perpetuated in books by great-grandchildren of Henry Thornton, Dorothy Pym’s Battersea Rise (1934), and E. M. Forster’s Marianne Thornton (1956). Like all the literature on the Clapham Sect, starting with the essay by James Stephen which invented the term, these accounts are rich in ‘domestic biography’, but less forthcoming on the evolution of Battersea Rise and its satellites. Nor is the archival record generous, leaving much to be pieced together. The house taken by Henry Thornton has often been described as ‘Queen Anne’, and it is possible that its core had been built in the early eighteenth century. It is recognizable on Rocque’s map of 1746, with a projection on its north front, facing due north towards a lane (Wassingham Lane) that linked the area’s two main east–west roads. By 1751 if not before it was in the possession of John Akerman, a City glass and china merchant who was among the pioneers in promoting diamond-cut glass; his will, signed that year, refers to ‘my House on Clapham Common’.36 In 1755 Akerman may have added to it; at any rate he confirmed his possession by acquiring a lease from Lord Bolingbroke of three acres with a messuage or tenement, coach-house and stables, described as previously belonging to John King, whose predecessors had held property here since c.1719.37 Akerman died not long afterwards in 1757, leaving this small property to his wife. By then his only son, Isaac Akerman, also a City merchant, was expanding his father’s domain. In 1756 he leased from Bolingbroke a strip of eight acres running north from Clapham Common through to Lavender Hill, undertaking to build two substantial houses.38 These became the so-called Sister Houses, of which one survives as Gilmore House, 113 Clapham Common North Side. It must be mentioned here that the avenue set symmetrically between them, on the site of Wassingham Lane and offering an open view northwards ‘over Chelsea to Hampstead’, was arranged on axis with a path across the panhandle of Clapham Common leading to the front of Battersea Rise. This formality bespeaks rare architectural ambition. The Sister Houses and the staircase of Battersea Rise (see below) both strongly recall the City-based Sir Robert Taylor’s work. In the view of the Taylor scholar Richard Garnier, who endorses this attribution, Taylor’s first work at Battersea Rise, including the stair, was probably for John Akerman and dated from around 1755. The front or north range then followed on after his widow died in 1763 and Isaac Akerman moved in. This hypothesis is based on the fact that Akerman junior is recorded to have ‘enlarged a cottage to an excellent house…with plantations before and behind’, and on stylistic grounds.
Akerman next profited from the flurry of sales which followed the transfer of the Battersea manor from the Bolingbrokes to Earl Spencer, buying in 1765 the freehold of the lands he already held under lease along with some others. Eventually he held forty acres on the west side of Clapham Common, exclusive of the Sisters site.
The younger Akerman was a figure of minor public standing, but difficult. In Battersea he quarrelled bitterly with the vicar over the use of the church vaults, where he was buried in 1792. Five years earlier he had sold his house and grounds and moved to Hampton Court. The auction notice refers to ‘an excellent spacious dwelling-house, containing an elegant suit of rooms, fitted up in the genteelest stile, with suitable bed-chambers and dressing rooms’, also a dairy, greenhouse, double coachhouse, stabling for eight horses, a ‘lofty grove’ shading the approach to the house and sheltered by plantations; also gardens ‘laid out in the present taste, with lawns, canals, serpentine gravel, and shrubbery walks of more than a mile in extent, fully cropped, and stored with choice fruit-trees’, beyond which came a 15-acre paddock and four meadows. This was the origin of the famous Battersea Rise garden.41 The purchaser from Akerman in 1787 was John Lubbock the banker, later first baronet. During his ownership Humphry Repton illustrated the front in Peacock’s Polite Repository, but there is no evidence that he altered the house or grounds. Lubbock soon sublet to Gerard (‘Single Speech’) Hamilton, MP, who remained the tenant until Henry Thornton’s purchase in 1792.
When Thornton came to view Battersea Rise (as the house was by then called) in May 1792 he brought William Wilberforce and Charles Grant with him. This was no accident. As Wilberforce explained, ‘I am to share it with him [Thornton], and pay so much per annum towards expenses’. An intimacy had grown up between the cousins earlier in Bath where, Wilberforce’s diary records, they agreed ‘to spend the day so as to afford the hope that they might live together most rationally’. The word recurs in 1791 when they lodged together in Bath, ‘leading a rational kind of life, and relishing not a little the quiet retirement it allows us, after the bustle to which we have both been so long condemned’.
The allusion is to the political and parliamentary context in which the pair were operating. After early successes the anti-slavery campaign had suffered setbacks, despite support from Wilberforce’s friend Pitt; fresh forethought was necessary. There was also the Sierra Leone Company, founded in 1791 by Thornton and others to rescue the shaky African colony for freed slaves started not long before. And with the French Revolution entering a darker phase, anxiety was growing in evangelical circles about prospects at home if morals and religion were not strengthened. So the thought of a longer experiment in cohabitation with particular ends in mind had clearly been growing in Thornton’s and Wilberforce’s minds. This became possible after John Thornton, from the second generation of the Thornton banking dynasty to reside in Clapham, died in 1790, leaving a fortune from the Russia trade. By then Henry, his youngest son, had built up his independence as a partner in the bank of Down, Free & Thornton. Along with part of his father’s money, he inherited his serious-mindedness about religion and family life, and his philanthropy. His brothers Samuel and Robert Thornton were also wealthy merchants and MPs, with villas along Clapham Common South Side. Henry Thornton now followed their lead with a twist, by creating on the forty acres a community of high-minded friends, his ‘chummery’, who would live ‘rationally’ together for portions of the year outside the parliamentary session, planning, studying, debating, praying and, sometimes, relaxing.
Thornton installed himself at Battersea Rise in September 1792, when Wilberforce presumably also arrived. Additions to the house were complete by April 1794, to judge from an insurance policy. Meanwhile plans were progressing for accommodating further friends within the compound in the shape of twin subsidiary houses: the future Glenelg just west of Battersea Rise, and the future Broomfield with a larger enclave at the south end of the property. These were austere, early neoclassical villas, five bays wide and three storeys high. The ground for Glenelg was being marked out in August 1792, and it was nearing completion in September 1794. Broomfield must have proceeded simultaneously, as both houses were occupied in 1795.
Thornton’s oversight of these satellites was limited, although they remained in his freehold ownership. Glenelg was planned and paid for by Charles Grant, who had been in on the idea from the start. Not long back from India, Grant was powerful in the East India Company’s affairs and had been drawn into the Thornton–Wilberforce circle during their summers at Bath. Broomfield was at first noticed in the press as a house built by Thornton for Wilberforce. So there was perhaps some thought for a future in which Thornton and Wilberforce might acquire families, as Grant already had. In the event Broomfield’s first tenant was the widower Edward James Eliot, MP, brother-in-law to Pitt and Wilberforce’s stout friend and supporter. Then after Eliot died young in 1797 and the cousins both married, Wilberforce moved permanently into Broomfield.46 For the authorship of the two houses and the Battersea Rise additions, only one piece of evidence survives. Broomfield was later published (as Broomfield Lodge) in New Vitruvius Britannicus as by J. T. Groves, in 1792 an up-and-coming young architect.
As this house and Glenelg were near-identical in elevation (Broomfield had a Doric order to its projecting portico, while Glenelg’s was Ionic), they obviously shared a designer. The same cool, classical language can be detected in the Battersea Rise additions, which can also be attributed to Groves. He later acquired a reputation at the Office of Works for indolence, spite and fraud, alien to the puritan ethic of his Clapham Sect employers.47 No plans survive for Battersea Rise, so its arrangement must be inferred from photographs and descriptions. In Lubbock’s time it was called ‘a large handsome house built with grey stock bricks and finished in the modern taste’.48 The front, probably by Taylor and of the 1760s, was three storeys high and five windows wide, with a gracefully simple centrepiece of stone or cement, vermiculated voussoirs, small Doric columns framing the entrance and a single pedimented window above. The rooms at its two ends with side-facing bow windows were also seemingly part of Isaac Akerman’s house. Thornton retained all this, but he enhanced the plain back, till then narrower than the front, with flanking two-storey wings and further bow windows; on the ground floor, that to the west lit the famous Battersea Rise library. Inside, many features of the Akerman house were kept. These included the two reception rooms on the ground floor facing the front, later called the dining room (to the west) and the schoolroom (to the east); the main corridor driving through the house from front to back, marked at intervals by timber Ionic columns, engaged or free-standing; and the Taylorian principal stair, cantilevered with shaped tread-ends to the stone steps, graced with S-curved iron railings, and culminating in a Venetian window offering borrowed light to the first-floor corridor. Behind the staircase came a medley of spaces which, if Dorothy Pym’s memories are credited, went back to John Akerman’s ‘cottage’.49 The Thornton house’s pièce de résistance was the library in the southwest position. Part of the 1790s additions, it was higher and longer than the front rooms. It was latterly called the Pitt Room because of the Thornton family tradition that William Pitt designed it.
The story is plausible, as Pitt was close to Wilberforce when the room was created, and interested in architecture. The room’s external profile, with the bow window corresponding to its counterpart at the other end of the garden front, must have been determined by the architect. What is always attributed to Pitt is the bowing of both ends of the library. Perhaps his contribution was to suggest that the inner as well as the outer end should take that form. A later anecdote goes that when Gladstone, no fan of Pitt, was told the latter had designed an oval library for Battersea Rise (it was, of course, not oval), he exclaimed ‘An oval library! The very worst shape for a library that the human mind could conceive’.50 Changes were made to the library’s furnishings over the years, as it became the house’s main reception room, but the original wallpaper was always proudly maintained. The next most notable interior was the schoolroom, which had a rococo frieze and ceiling and a fetching marble fireplace, probably all part of the 1760s work. Upstairs were a mythical 34 bedrooms.
As Battersea Rise evolved, it became an amalgam of cherished rooms, possessions and Thornton family memories. The one unifying factor was the garden. In his seminal essay of 1844, ‘The Clapham Sect’, Sir James Stephen recalled it as the meeting point for the community of Clapham adherents and their children in debate or play, and depicted the key members issuing forth into it from their surrounding houses. Wilberforce’s ‘fair demesne’, he wrote, ‘was conterminous with that of Mr. Thornton; nor lacked there sunny banks, or sheltered shrubberies, where, in each change of season, they revolved the captivity under which man was groaning, and projected schemes for his deliverance. And although such conclaves might scarcely be convened except in the presence of these two, yet were they rarely held without the aid of others, especially of such as could readily find their way thither from the other quarters of the sacred village’. Colquhoun’s biography of Wilberforce fills this passage out with a romantic idyll of friends and families ‘streaming from adjoining villas or crossing the common’, to join further-flung visitors like Hannah and Patty More.
The Thorntons were deeply attached to the garden. In 1801 Henry Thornton’s wife Marianne sketched for Hannah More a vignette of twenty children eating strawberries under a tulip tree, while the Rev. John Venn of Clapham ‘gave us an animated lecture on the duty of parents’. Almost the only reference to Battersea Rise’s amenities in her husband’s correspondence is to its abundant peaches and nectarines. To the women of younger generations the garden meant possession and safety. ‘How you will miss the lawns and groves where you have lived so long’, sympathized a relation when Marianne Thornton junior felt compelled to leave in 1852; and when the house later came close to being sold, another wrote: ‘I’d set my mind on once more being drawn round that garden before I died’.
In front of the house was the deep drive typical of Clapham Common villas, with stables to the west. Behind, a loosely circular path provided the main circuit for exercise, with flanking shrubs and trees, especially on the western side towards Glenelg. There was possibly a fence here between the properties during the early days, but no wall. Later, a winding path through the middle of the ‘opulent lawn’ was discontinued, and the eastern shrubbery thickened up. South of these pleasure grounds came kitchen and fruit gardens flanked by meadows and a cowshed, before the grounds of Broomfield were reached. These last ran both north and south of the house, which was reached via a drive between the villas of Clapham Common West Side. Much the fullest description of the Battersea Rise grounds comes from Dorothy Pym, who visited often in the 1890s. She names many flowers and shrubs, and underlines the high standards of horticulture and maintenance: ‘the paths at Battersea Rise were as speckless and spotless as the carpets themselves’.54 The golden age of Battersea Rise lasted about fifteen years, until Wilberforce moved away in 1808 (the year after Parliament finally voted to outlaw the slave trade). While Thornton and Wilberforce were bachelors, business kept them away for much more than the summer months. When they were in residence there was plentiful company, sometimes disturbing the planned opportunities for quiet and study. ‘I find that I must as little as is really right ask people to Battersea Rise to stay all night’, wrote Wilberforce in 1794, ‘as it robs and impoverishes the next morning … in this way I lose my time, and find indeed that less is done at Battersea Rise than elsewhere’.
The dynamic changed after Thornton married Marianne Sykes in 1796 and Wilberforce married Barbara Spooner in 1797. The community’s tone became uxorious and domestic, and its rhythm year-round. The Thornton and Grant spouses grew close, and drew in other Clapham families like those of Zachary Macaulay and James Stephen. Wilberforce’s children also participated, Barbara Wilberforce less so. The Wilberforces in fact first took Broomfield on a short tenancy during Edward Eliot’s lifetime, moving in permanently only after he died. ‘My wife’s health absolutely requires a villa’, Wilberforce wrote in 1798.
When Joseph Farington the painter stayed there in 1806, Barbara Wilberforce told him that she visited very little locally, as William’s ‘object when in the Country was privacy’. During his weekend at Broomfield, Farington records a stream of guests invited by the good-natured emancipator belying his resolutions for quiet; serious talk during mealtimes and walks in the 19-acre grounds; and the string of servants —seven women and six men—lined up for prayers twice a day. By then Wilberforce may have been tiring of suburban Broomfield. In 1807 he described the environs to a correspondent as a ‘poor mimicry of the real (live) country’. Next year the Wilberforces moved to Gore House, Kensington, closer to town.
The Grants had already left Glenelg for a London house when Charles Grant became an MP in 1802, but it was only in 1815 after Henry and Marianne Thornton died in quick succession that the community dissolved. Between the two deaths there was just time for Marianne Thornton senior to erect a Coade stone urn to her husband’s memory in the Battersea Rise shrubbery.58 Sir Robert and Lady Inglis moved in as guardians of the Thornton’s nine orphaned children, remaining there until they were advanced in adulthood. The eldest son, Henry Sykes Thornton, became titular head of the clan, and continued the family’s evangelical connections, participating in various religious initiatives in Battersea. But the guardianship of the family’s intellectual and moral traditions passed to his older sister, Marianne Thornton. In 1852 a rift occurred when Henry Sykes Thornton elected to marry his deceased wife’s sister, Emily Dealtry—technically still an illegality. It was this which led Marianne Thornton to leave Battersea Rise for Clapham village. Her brother returned to the house from Denmark with his second wife, and their children remained in possession after his death in 1881 despite ongoing family hostility. The head of the Battersea Rise household now became Percy Melville Thornton, grandson of Henry Thornton’s elder brother Samuel, who had married his cousin Florence Emily, daughter of Henry Sykes and Emily Thornton. Percy Thornton served as Conservative MP for Clapham from 1892, and was alleged to be the last member who regularly rode to Parliament on his horse. Henry Sykes Thornton spent much effort during his second marriage in extending the estate belonging to Battersea Rise, which had fallen through sales to 14 or 15 acres by the 1830s.
In 1858 he bought Maisonette, the villa immediately east of the house; then in 1870 he repurchased Glenelg to the west. Later acquisitions included part of the Broomwood property, to shield the Battersea Rise grounds from speculative development there in the 1880s. Under H. S. Thornton’s will his widow Emily retained a life-interest in Battersea Rise and its environs, which were to be sold after her death. That duly took place in 1907.
Altogether twenty-two acres were auctioned, comprising Battersea Rise, Glenelg, Maisonette and their grounds. National publicity and widespread efforts to retain the house as a memorial to the Clapham Sect and the anti-slavery campaigns, along with some portion of the frontage, to be added to Clapham Common, proved unavailing. The purchaser, Edwin Evans of the local firm of estate agents, acting on behalf of a consortium, offered to sell the house and two acres to Battersea Council at cost price. But the Progressives then in power at the town hall resented Evans, an active local Conservative, and opposed the initiative ‘on social, ethical and sentimental grounds’. Too late, a committee was formed and subscriptions were solicited. In February 1908 all three houses were demolished and their grounds subsequently covered with housing.60 Houses at the north end of Muncaster and Canford Roads now cover the site of Battersea Rise. It remains to say something of the later occupants of Glenelg and Broomfield. After the Grants left Glenelg, it was occupied by the prominent physician Dr Richard Budd, ‘a man of strong will, impetuosity, and of great social influence’, who died there in 1821, and then by the publisher Joseph Ogle Robinson of Hurst, Robinson & Co. until that firm collapsed in 1826. It was later the home of the Rev. William Arthur, Wesleyan preacher and author, and lastly part of a private school, Carlyle College (formerly at 83 West Side, above).61 Broomfield passed from Wilberforce first to William Henry Hoare of the Hoare banking family (d.1819) and then to John Deacon of Williams, Deacon & Co., the bank into which Pole, Thornton & Co. was merged after H. S. Thornton appealed for his neighbour’s help during the bank crisis of 1825.
Deacon acquired the freehold and sold it in 1834 to John Thomas Betts, a distiller, for whom J. B. Papworth did minor landscaping commissions. After Betts’s widow sold it to Charles Forbes in 1851, the name changed to Broomwood. Forbes, a retired Scots soldier, inherited a baronetcy in 1852. Supposedly, Queen Victoria visited the house after her son Albert Edward’s marriage in 1863 with a view to its becoming his home, but nothing came of it.
After Forbes died in 1877 the estate was sold and cut up for development, though the house itself hung on till 1904. Three Battersea Rise villas West of the Thornton enclave, three more detached mansions and their grounds occupied the green slopes descending to the Falcon Brook—one at the common’s panhandle, the other two fronting the main road (now Battersea Rise). Long demolished, all were built on the estate of Robert Lovelace, a partner in Child’s bank. Lovelace was one of the small early band of City merchants who had benefited from Lord Spencer’s disposal of land around Clapham Common in the 1760s. The sales coincided nicely with his inheriting £20,000 on the death of Francis Child.
The estate that Lovelace then built up on both sides of the main road amounted to some 72 acres. By November 1764 he had erected a very large mansion on the south side—the biggest in the Battersea half of the common—to the west of Isaac Akerman’s house, facing north across the fields towards the Thames. Like Akerman, Lovelace was keen to preserve this view, buying up ground on the north side to prevent anyone else from building opposite his house, and in so doing caused friction with the litigious Akerman, who thought the land had been promised to him.
In the event, as villa-building around the common took off, Lovelace allowed two large houses to be built on his land on the north side, as well as two on the south side flanking his own, discussed below. As for Lovelace’s house, later known as West Side, he lived there in splendour until his death in 1796, when his estate was sold at auction. The house was described as a ‘uniform, modern, brick-built mansion’, elegantly fitted out, and set within lawns, pleasure grounds, a canal and kitchen garden, and ten paddocks of grassland populated with horses, cattle, poultry and peacocks.
Charles Haldimand, a Swiss merchant, bought the house and lived there until his death around 1807 when he was succeeded by his son, Anthony Francis Haldimand (d.1817), founder of the banking house of Morris, Prevost & Company, who had inherited vast wealth from his uncle, the soldier Sir Frederick Haldimand, Governer of Quebec during the American Revolution. The principal later occupant, from 1842, was Charles Webb (d.1869), a wealthy wine merchant. In his day West Side was known for its garden, with walks, lake, summerhouse, vineries, melon ground, and a fine conservatory of exotic plants, linked to the house by an arcade of roses, all looked after by a head gardener and four men.67 Webb’s widow sold the house for redevelopment in 1881; Leathwaite Road, Webb’s Road and the adjoining streets now mark the spot. To its east, next to the future site of Glenelg, was the first of Lovelace’s two speculative houses on this side of the road. It had no name, but formed with its grounds an estate later known as the Chatto estate, from a subsequent owner, William John Potts Chatto of Torquay.
Its first lessee c.1767 was William Fuller, a dealer bankrupted in 1770. He was succeeded by Samuel Marsh, merchant, who lived there until 1774, when he was elected MP for Chippenham. The Office of Works surveyor Kenton Couse and the builder John Loat of Clapham Common were involved in a subsequent sale, and so may have had a connection with the house’s construction.69 Later occupants included Thomas Astle, antiquary, archivist and collector (c.1776–1803), and Philip Cazenove, stockbroker and philanthropist (1846–80).70 Following Cazenove’s death, Chatto’s estate was sold for redevelopment. Lovelace’s other house, to the west of West Side, had been built by 1780. It was generally later known as Ashness, after its long-term owner Thomas Ashness, resident there from c.1786 till his death in 1827, followed by various members of his family. The house was sold at auction in June 1875 following a family dispute and Chancery case over its inheritance.71 Lindore and Almeric Roads now stand on its site.
Five Houses Road and Balham Lane
The Georgian mansions that once graced the west and south fringes of this area, fronting what were then known as Five Houses Road or Lane and Balham Lane (now Bolingbroke Grove and Nightingale Lane respectively), were built on land owned by Robert Dent (d.1805), senior partner in Child & Co.’s bank. Like his near neighbour and banking partner Richard Lovelace, Dent benefited hugely from his association with the Child family, being one of the trustees and main beneficiaries under the will of Robert Child of Osterley Park in 1782.
Dent had taken ground here in the 1760s, presumably on lease from Lord Spencer. Then in December 1772 he bought from Spencer the freehold to all the fields skirting the two roads, with the exception of a plot at the southeast corner (part of Christopher Baldwin’s Clapham Common take) and Bolingbroke Farm to the north-west, in the previous ownership of Samuel Hoare, merchant.
In all, Dent acquired twenty fields, totalling about 88 acres, at a cost of £5,650. In 1775 he added part of a field called Broomfield, adjoining, procured from Christopher Baldwin.73 Then in 1775–6 Dent built himself a house with spacious grounds, east of the brook (see Old Park House, below). West of the brook, on the land overlooking Wandsworth Common, he erected five more large gentlemen’s residences as a speculation. Four were finished by November 1777 when they were advertised in the London press as ‘new, substantial-built, brick houses, neatly finished’, for sale or to let; the fifth was completed a year or two later.74 And so the road skirting the common acquired the informal name Five Houses Road or Lane, though contemporary accounts of its residents often referred to them as being ‘of Battersea Rise’ or Wandsworth Common. Dent had employed the City surveyor Richard Norris to design and build his villa. This was most likely Richard Norris the younger (d.1792), rather than his father (d.1779), James ‘Athenian’ Stuart’s right-hand man, who at the time was busy building Mrs Montagu’s house in Portman Square.75 Both men held a string of important surveyorships, Norris junior’s including, inter alia, Christ’s Hospital, the Sun Fire Office, the London Assurance Incorporation and the Charterhouse.
It is likely that Norris also designed several of the Five Houses; he was the first lessee of at least two of them. At least one other house was the work of John Scott, a Holborn surveyor and associate of the Norrises, who also held a lease from Dent. Norris’s brother Philip, a Holborn builder and bricklayer trained by their father, witnessed all these deeds and probably handled the construction side; another brother and witness, Christopher, of Lincoln’s Inn, was presumably their lawyer. All four men were listed in newspaper advertisements during the winter of 1777–8 as contacts for prospective purchasers or lessees.76 Early descriptions of the Five Houses as ‘genteel’, ’modern’, and ‘brick built’ suggest equivalence with those going up around Clapham Common and Lavender Hill at the same time. All had the Falcon Brook running behind or through their gardens and grounds. A farm (Dent’s Farm) was erected at the south end, in the grounds of a house acquired from Dent by his brother William (d.1823); another stood beside Old Park House. By the 1850s Five Houses Road had become more generally known by its modern name of Bolingbroke Grove.
The Five Houses (all demolished)
The new road name derived from the grandest of the five, with the largest grounds—Bolingbroke Grove House, sometimes inconveniently referred to as Bolingbroke House—which stood towards the north end of the lane. It alone outlived the area’s late-Victorian transformation, through conversion to a local hospital, the Bolingbroke Hospital; that later history is recounted in volume 49. It is also the only one for which any views survive. The house was first leased to Richard Norris in 1778, but shortly afterwards was taken by William Willis the elder (d.1831), partner in the long-established Lombard Street banking house of Willis Percival & Company. Willis later acquired the freehold, and around 1797 purchased Bolingbroke Farm and its associated fields north of the house and on the east side of the brook from Richard Lovelace, thus creating a valuable freehold estate of some 64 acres. In 1803 he passed all this to his son, William Willis the younger (d.1828), and his wife Sarah, as part of their marriage settlement. They were succeeded in turn by another Willis, Henry (d.1879), who also took the controlling interest in the bank.
The house was a three-storey, five-bay classical affair: plain and flat-fronted facing the common, with an entrance portico; but far livelier on the east front, where a projecting pedimented central bay with tripartite upper windows and canted end bays added movement and interest to a well-composed façade by Norris.
This aspect was made all the more picturesque by being framed by clumps of trees in the well-wooded grounds, and by lawns sloping away from the house down to the brook, which broadened and curved at this point. Nineteenthcentury illustrations show wings at either side of the house, possibly added by the Willises—single-storey at first, later raised to two storeys. Henry Willis had gone by 1834 but retained ownership. The estate’s principal resident thereafter was Henry Wheeler (d.1873), a retired merchant and fundholder, who lived at Bolingbroke Grove House from 1846. He bought the house from Willis in 1859, when it was described as an 11- bedroom mansion with a suite of reception rooms, walled garden and 15 acres of meadow. Wheeler also bought the adjoining farm. He eventually sold up to the Conservative Land Society in 1868, though he and his family stayed on while new streets converged upon them.79 In Battersea terms this was a large estate and was tackled by its Victorian developers in several phases, the last houses, at the west ends of Wakehurst and Belleville Roads, beside the old mansion, not going up until 1878–80 (page ##). By then Canon Clarke, the parish vicar, had set in train its purchase for conversion to a much-needed local hospital, which opened in 1880.80 Increasingly hemmed in by additions, it survived until 1937, when it was demolished for a new administration block. South of Bolingbroke Grove House stood the second of the five houses, latterly known as Grove House, with a similar long, rectangular footprint— presumably also comprising wings either side of a central core. This house was the work of the surveyor John Scott, though it was still unfinished at the time of his lease in 1778.81 Early occupants here included Edward Fawkes (c.1789–1804), son of a prominent Guildford mercer, and Henry Barchard (c.1804–6), wine merchant. The Willis family also acquired the freehold to this house. In 1807 it became the residence of Alexander Champion, whaler, merchant, and director of the Bank of England, who died there in 1809. Through his family it descended eventually to Charlotte Ellen Blackmore, later wife of the Rev. John Pincher Faunthorpe, principal of Whitelands College, Chelsea, and Grove House was their family home from c.1870 until c.1889, when they sold up to the developer H. N. Corsellis.82 The western ends of Kelmscott and Bramfield Roads were built on its site.
The third house—confusingly also later referred to as Bolingbroke or Bolingroke Grove House—was a more compact villa, with a large rear bay commanding views over the gardens and brook; it was leased to Richard Norris in 1778. An early occupant in 1785–9 was Chamberlain Goodwin, a wealthy Moorfields dyer. Matthew Chalie, founding partner of the wine merchants Chalie, Richards & Company, was a long-term resident, from 1793 till his death in 1838.83 In 1852 the house was acquired by the National Freehold Land Society for the building of Chatham Road, the first Victorian suburban development in the area between the commons. However, the house hung on for a time while its grounds were built over. In 1855 it became the first offices of the Wandsworth District Board of Works, then from September 1858 it was the family home of James Lord, the barrister turned developer, who dabbled in the Chatham Road venture. It was finally pulled down by Lord in 1864 to make way for new speculative housing.84 Next came another, similarly sized villa, later called The Elms; today the western end of Honeywell Road runs through its site. It was built specifically for Benjamin Cole (d.1816), a very wealthy draper and government broker, and Sheriff to the City of London and County of Middlesex in 1782–3.85 In 1792 Cole invited Sir John Soane to make improvements to this house. Soane’s pupil and assistant, Thomas Chawner, prepared plans, which Soane travelled to Wandsworth Common to discuss. But nothing seems to have come of it.86 However, Chawner’s work has left us the only plans to survive of one of the Five Houses—indeed of any ‘Between the Commons’ villa in its original form.
These suggest a relatively grand entrance front, with a tetrastyle portico to the piano nobile approached by sweeping flights of steps to either side. Internally space was tight and the planning compact but not entirely satisfactory; an eating room doubled as the entrance hall, with the main stairs in a separate compartment to the side. The principal reception space was a large rear drawing room with a canted bay offering views over the grounds and Falcon Brook valley, but the two flanking reception rooms seem not to have had east-facing windows; one was built as a main-floor nursery for the Coles’ young family. A single-storey dairy wing connected the service area in the raised basement with stables to the north. Alterations were made to the house before 1838, in the form of extra rooms or extensions on the east side, either side of the bay, and a bow window in the south wall, but it is impossible to say if these related to Soane’s proposals.87 Later residents of The Elms included: Sir James Mansfield, lawyer, politician and judge (1803–21); Alexander Gordon, solicitor (1823–44); and Frederick Mangles, MP, merchant and shipowner (c.1846–55). Its last occupant was Charles Lambert, of Lambert & Butler, the cigar and cigarette merchants (c.1858–70s). As for the fifth house, occupied by William Dent, it is referred to here by a later name, Dent’s House, though predictably it was also known loosely as Bolingbroke House or Grove. It, too, had eleven bed and dressing rooms on its upper floor, approached via a ‘wide’ staircase, above a ground-floor suite of dining, drawing and breakfast rooms.88 A further land purchase from his brother gave William Dent a sizeable estate of about 36 acres, including a large field on the east side of the brook; the house and its gardens stood at the far north end of the estate, a farm to the south.
A bachelor, Dent at first intended leaving the estate to his nephew, John Dent of Temple Bar, whilst allowing an adopted daughter, Mary Dent, to stay at the house for her lifetime; but shortly before his death he added a codicil leaving all to Mary, who is generally assumed to have been an illegitimate child.89 Mary Dent died in 1867, and the following year Dent’s House and its grounds (then known as the Wandsworth Common Estate) were put up for sale at auction in several lots.90 Most failed to sell, though Sir Charles Forbes of Broomfield House, adjoining, acquired the field east of the brook to add to his estate.
Four years later the estate was offered again, and this time was bought by an auctioneer, who in 1874 sold it on at profit in two portions. Dent’s House and some five acres of gardens went to John Eldon Gorst, QC, MP and Tory party agent as his residence. The remainder (about 21 acres) was acquired by C. E. Appleby for development; Blenkarne, Morella, Granard and Estcourt Roads and the west end of Thurleigh Road were later built on this land. Gorst lived on at Dent’s House until about 1881, when he sold up to a builder and the house was demolished for Gorst and Dent’s Roads.91 Minor fragments of pre-Victorian days remain: a stable-block to Dent’s House (now 1B Gorst Road), and a length of old boundary wall between the garden of 35 Bolingbroke Grove and houses at Nos 36–38 built on the neighbouring Broomwood Park estate. Old Park House (demolished) Robert Dent’s villa was picturesquely situated on an eminence, set within well-wooded grounds at a remove from the main road (Nightingale Lane). Work began in 1774, before Dent had acquired the freehold, in preparation for the construction work, which took place in 1775–6 under Richard Norris. Generous outbuildings included a kitchen yard, coach-houses and three stables (one referred to as a ‘spare’), as well as a lodge and ‘cottage’ (possibly the farmhouse). Dent, who had a town mansion in St James’s Place, Westminster, was establishing a country house estate: in addition to garden walls and gates there was an obelisk and a ha-ha. John Scott was also involved, being required to put up ‘a new Gate & put to rights the Hen Coop & what else is amiss’.92 Later views of the garden front show a simple but elegant two-storey edifice, with a dormer attic storey, a bow to one side and a veranda. Inside were a stuccoed entrance hall with a groined ceiling and portico, ground-floor reception rooms with marble chimneypieces, and some thirteen or fourteen bedrooms.
Dent died in 1805, leaving the estate to his son John (d.1826), another partner in Child’s Bank. Later an MP for Lancaster, he spent little time there.94 Old Park’s first tenant in 1805 was (Sir) Francis Freeling, Secretary to the Post Office, at the time a highly lucrative office. Around 1812 Freeling seems to have been succeeded by the expectant Hon. Mrs Louisa Cavendish, whose husband, the Hon. William Cavendish of Piccadilly, had died in a riding accident at Holker Hall, Lancashire, one of the family seats. Their third son, Richard (later Lord Richard Cavendish, d.1873), was born and baptized at her house ‘in Clapham’ later that year.95 Subsequent residents include: William Henry Cooper of Stockwell (1819–23); James Coles, silk merchant (c.1830–51); James Horatio Booty, oil merchant (1876–88). The estate was sold at auction in 1866, heralding much new development, but the house and some 4 or 5 acres of its immediate gardens and grounds survived until the early 1890s, when it was demolished for the building of Old Park Avenue.
Victorian suburban housing is one of the defining elements of Battersea’s character and nowhere is it found in a greater concentration than in the 280 acres covered by this chapter.
From Bolingbroke Grove on the edge of Wandsworth Common, row after row of terraced houses, with a few detached and semi-detached neighbours, advance downhill to Northcote Road and then climb again towards Clapham Common where they are joined by reinforcements from the early years of the twentieth century. Occasionally a church or board school, or shopfronts break the ranks, sometimes small pockets of post-war rebuilding; but nonetheless this vast area is overwhelmingly residential, and overwhelmingly Victorian–Edwardian. This dramatic and intensive growth began in the 1850s and 60s, the regular terraces supplanting an older, gentler landscape of gentlemen’s estates and villas that had prospered here for a hundred years (described in the previous chapter). Within barely sixty years all but a handful of the estates had been redeveloped, until by the 1920s the district was almost entirely built over. None of this post-1850s reconstruction was the work of indigenous landowners. Rather, the early stages were dominated by two Victorian freehold land companies, later phases by individual builder-developers and speculators, buying up the old villas as their residents died or left. Further sales brought greater subdivision to an already fragmented pattern of landownership, and so development was often bitty and disjointed.
What emerged was a large new dormitory of middle-class housing— the biggest in Battersea—but within its apparent homogeneity was much diversity in fabric and social character. The only discernible pattern was for bigger detached and semi-detached houses to be built early on, to the south and west, particularly along Bolingbroke Grove and in and around Nightingale Lane, which for a time held on to the area’s upper middle-class elite. Successful merchants and stockbrokers took to these houses that were still only a carriage or coach-ride from their place of work. Civil servants, bank clerks, legal clerks—clerks of every kind—brought their families and domestic servants to the more modest streets of housing laid out further into the hinterland in the 1880s and 90s. And as the century closed, the grids of tighter-packed terraces that sprang up towards Clapham Common added more tradespeople and others of the lower middle-classes to the mix. As elsewhere in South London, decline set in either side of the Second World War, when the population contained a large proportion of poor but decent working-class tenants. Take for example Fred and Nellie Taylor, a plumber and factory girl living at 138 Bennerley Road, who during the war were offered the freehold to their house by their landlord for £220, a price well beyond their means.
Being far removed from Battersea’s industrial zone, the area survived the war and its aftermath fairly intact, and by the 1970s the manageable size and affordability of its houses was tempting young married middle-class couples away from their flats in other parts of south-west London. Since then the trickle has become a flood and the area has undergone comprehensive gentrification. Its resident population today is visibly white, youthful and affluent, and consumption is conspicuous in the many cafés, bars and restaurants. This chapter considers the Victorian and later speculative housing in topographical sections; the few estates of post-war public housing are grouped together and dealt with separately at the end.
Around Northcote Road Chatham Road
Chatham Road was where Victorian development between the commons began in the mid 1850s. It was in many respects an anomaly, an isolated venture by a land company before the railways had fully exerted their grip on Battersea and pulled lower middle-class London this far south-west. Its houses were small in size and low in cost. The opportunity arose in 1852 with the death of Elizabeth Hoper, owner of the middle of the Five Houses of Bolingbroke Grove, and its sale by her relatives the following year. The new owner was the National Freehold Land Society (NFLS), the most active of such societies south of the Thames, whose purpose was to buy land for resale in small freeholds which would guarantee purchasers the right to vote. By the late 1850s its landdealings were in the hands of a specially formed subsidiary, the British Land Company, with the NFLS supplying loans. As the laws changed and the franchise widened, so the two organizations reverted to straightforward property investment and finance.3 It is likely that the road was laid out by the NFLS before 1855 as neither its name nor route was approved by the post-1855 authorities. Building began in 1857 and continued at a slow but steady pace throughout the late 1850s and 60s, with some thirty-seven houses completed by 1861, most of them on the north side, rising to about seventy by 1871.
To a large degree Chatham Road followed the freehold land movement’s preferred model. Many early inhabitants bought small individual plots and built single houses (or engaged tradesmen to do so for them). As a result, owner-occupation was unusually high for this period and class of housing. But speculation was not lacking, some developers acquiring several plots and erecting houses for sale or to let. Charles Dungate, a Clapham grocer, for example, built several houses on the north side of Chatham Road and around the corner in a narrow side-street called Sydney Court or Place (later widened to become part of Northcote Road); and similarly Charles Stonell, a coal contractor, in 1866–7 built Stonell’s Place: five houses on the south side, now 116–124 Chatham Road, and a further ten round the corner in a narrow cul-de-sac, now 6–15 Stonell’s Road.
Miss Hoper’s villa survived for a time beside the emerging new street, latterly in the occupation and ownership of James Lord, barrister. By 1864 Lord, with the help of the auctioneer and surveyor George Todd, had demolished it and engaged a builder to erect new houses. In 1866 Lord bought another 3½ acres at this west end of the estate from the NFLS, for which Todd prepared plans of new streets and began letting plots, but all Lord’s builders went bankrupt, leaving house-carcasses unfinished, and by 1871 Lord himself had gone into liquidation. Some of his houses were completed by others, but much of his land was acquired by the Rev. J. Erskine Clarke for St Michael’s Church and Schools (1880–1), replacing a temporary iron structure of 1872.
Clarke said that Lord had mistakenly embarked on speculative building ‘before the district was ripe for it’, whilst Todd thought his habit of charging large ground rents and high interest rates for advances had contributed to his builders’ bankruptcies. Both were probably correct, though Lord undoubtedly also suffered from the dramatic decline in the building cycle at the time. A terrace of plain red-brick houses at 157–173 Northcote Road, date from this period of Lord’s involvement.
There was very little that was metropolitan about Chatham Road in its early days. Rather it was a proto-suburban hamlet of mostly two-storey, simple brick cottages on narrow plots, set amid empty fields. It was also a working community, with shops, bakeries, smithies, laundries, beer-houses, carpenters’ and builders’ yards. Several houses had side-passages or cartways under their first-floor rooms leading to rear yards and outhouses; two of the latter type survive at Nos 84 & 86, of c.1863–4. Others followed another characteristic freehold land movement model in being set well back from the road towards the rear of the plots, behind long gardens. Early residents suggest a bucolic existence, with carpenters, agricultural labourers, gardeners, even cow-keepers—precisely the type of semi-rural working people among whom the NFLS hoped to spread the franchise.
More houses came in the 1870s–80s, including two new streets as intended and possibly partly begun by Lord and Todd in the 1860s: Swaby Road (later incorporated as part of Northcote Road), running south to the estate boundary; and Darley Road (since obliterated), another east–west route linking Swaby Road with Bolingbroke Grove. Henry B. Mitchell, surveyor to the British Land Company, supervised the laying out of roads and sewers, and several builders then went to work on the housing. Lord returned to build more houses in Chatham Road and Bolingbroke Grove (e.g. Nos 50–55) in the 1870s, and was also involved in the later stages of Darley Road’s development in the 1880s.
By that time the area had its own factory (built c.1864 at the corner of what became Webb’s Road by George Stiff as the printing works for his magazine, The London Reader); an Anglican church (St Michael’s); an independent chapel (built by the Rev. Spurgeon); several small shops; and half-a-dozen public houses and beer-shops. The Bolingbroke Arms at 17 Chatham Road (later 2 Cobham Close, demolished) was the first, built in 1855 by John Stapleton, a Bedfordshire carpenter, and later extended by him into three adjoining cottages. Today the only old pub left is the Eagle Tavern at 104–106 Chatham Road, rebuilt in 1890 by Holloway Brothers to designs by Karslake & Mortimer.
Residents by then were firmly rooted in the capital’s low-grade service sector, with labourers, laundresses and charwomen to the fore. Charles Booth’s investigators found Chatham Road to be the only ‘poor’ road in an ‘otherwise well-to-do district’. Many houses were already in a bad condition and readily dispensable. Several were demolished in the 1890s when Sydney Place was widened to become part of Northcote Road, which was being extended south through the adjoining estate; others on the north-west side of the road came down for a new LCC fire station, erected in 1906.
Although there was bomb damage in Chatham Road it was not this but general decline that made it the focus of the only substantial tranche of postwar slum clearance between the commons. Cottages on its north-east side and virtually all of Chatham and Darley Roads west of Northcote Road were swept away for new housing developments; these are discussed on page ##. Auckland and Buckmaster Roads After Chatham Road, the next area of house-building was on Battersea Rise, on land formerly belonging to the Bolingbroke Grove House estate, broken up and sold at auction in 1858.12 Battersea Vestry acquired 8¼ acres at the corner with Bolingbroke Grove for a parochial burial ground, which came into use in 1860 as St Mary’s Cemetery.
By 1863 land to its east had been purchased by Christopher William Todd for development with three short rows of shops and houses on Battersea Rise, and three residential streets to their south: Middleton (now Buckmaster) and Auckland Roads, both running north–south, and Pelling Road running east–west at their base, along the cemetery boundary. Todd later abandoned this last road, leaving only a 20ftwide passage in its place as a link between the two other streets, which were extended.13 Work began in 1865, and then only on the main-road houses and shops (Hopefield Terrace and Villas): of these, nine survive at 133–143 & 145–149 Battersea Rise. It was not until c.1867, after the change of plan, that houses began to go up in the new streets. Middleton Road was completed c.1871, Auckland Road by c.1873. Most prominent of several builders at work was John Lane of Peckham, who also built The Invitation, Auckland Road’s oldfashioned brick and stucco pub, of c.1868–70.14 These were simple, cheaply built terraces, of two storeys in Middleton Road, with double-height canted bays, generally without basements. The addition of basements and attics gave some Auckland Road houses four stories, but otherwise they were similar. Auckland Road’s west side has the greatest visual impact, with regular two-bay frontages and a roofline punctuated by a long row of gabled attic storeys. Middleton Road was renamed in 1937 after J. C. Buckmaster, the prominent local resident who campaigned tirelessly for the preservation of Wandsworth Common, and ironically was highly critical of Todd’s development at Chivalry Road. Of early residents, about half could afford a live-in domestic servant. Thomas Crapper, the sanitary engineer, and his wife Maria were the first occupants of 1 Middleton (Buckmaster) Road c.1867–74.
His family owned most of the houses on the east side and were responsible for the construction in 1873–4 of the superior-looking Italianate villas at Nos 8–10 (St Mark’s Villas), with bowed ground-floor windows. John Cazenove, the political economist and elder brother of the stockbroker and philanthropist Philip Cazenove, lived at 13 Middleton Road, where he died in 1879.
Chivalry Road area
Although not strictly located between the commons, this area is included here as it forms part of the same story. C. W. Todd was again the chief developer, acquiring the land at auction sales in 1863 and 1867 from the London Brighton & South Coast Railway Company, whose New Wandsworth railway station and coal depot stood at the north end of Wandsworth Common. Within a month or two the builder Robert Hewitt had agreed to take land facing Battersea Rise and had begun excavations.16 But local inhabitants, led by J. C. Buckmaster, balked at the idea of common land being let for building. Meetings were held, Buckmaster on one occasion addressing a crowd estimated at 4–5,000. Handbills and posters decried the ‘filching’ and reselling of the common ‘at enormous profit’, proclaiming ‘Cursed is he who removeth his neighbour’s Landmark’, before urging local men to tear down Todd’s fences. In the end violence was avoided, though Buckmaster himself was summoned to court in 1869 for damaging Todd’s property; the case was dismissed. Hewitt seems to have worked on regardless, finishing his plain three-storey houses and shops, now 153–167 Battersea Rise, around 1868–9.
The protests may have delayed Todd’s development. Most of the houses on Chivalry Road and the west side of Bolingbroke Grove date from the 1870s, 1880s or later, the row at 1–4 Chivalry Road being the first built, in 1872–4. The biggest builders were Robert Dootson of Middleton Road, who erected the fourteen two-storey houses with attics and basements at 5–18 Chivalry Road (Dootson’s Terrace, 1877–8); and Stephen Martin of Hackney, with the nineteen smaller terraced cottages at 107–116 Bolingbroke Grove and 20–28 Chivalry Road (1882–4).
Coal merchants and railway workers naturally found this a convenient spot to live. Late nineteenth-century residents also included foremen, bricklayers, shop assistants and junior clerks; servants were rare but not unknown, and boarders popular. A few bigger and better houses went up at the bottom end of Chivalry Road, facing the common, and round the corner in Bolingbroke Grove, where Nos 103–106, of the late 1870s and 80s, enjoyed long gardens reaching back to Chivalry Road.
In 1901–2 two blocks of red-brick flats were built at 116 & 117 Bolingroke Grove by Boynton, Pegram & Buckmaster, valuers and estate agents of Waltham Green. Quaintly eclectic and naively proportioned, these stunted versions of West End mansion flats were the work of the locally based architect Herbert Bignold.
There were four apartments per block, each with three rooms, kitchen, scullery, bathroom and WC.20 A synagogue, later the South West London Synagogue, was founded in 1915 at 104 Bolingbroke Grove, and greatly extended in 1927 when a purposebuilt synagogue was erected on the vacant plot to its rear, facing Chivalry Road (designed by Charles Living junior of Stratford). The house then became a small hall. The synagogue closed in 1997 and has since been converted to flats. Several new buildings have been erected in the area in recent years, but the biggest change has been the development by Fairview Homes in the 1980s of the Arundel Close estate on the site of the defunct railway goods station, on the west side of Chivalry Road.
Northcote Road and vicinity
The area south of Battersea Rise centred on Northcote Road lies at the core of modern, upwardly mobile, child-rearing south Battersea. This is ‘Nappy Valley’, where the plentiful boutiques, restaurants and cafés cater as much for the booming infant population as for their affluent parents. Once part of an estate attached to Bolingbroke Grove House, on the site of the former Bolingbroke Hospital, it comprises about thirty-five acres bordering Wandsworth Common and is almost a suburb in itself. It was developed in phases, mostly in the 1870s–90s, under one of the freehold land societies with nigh on 600 houses, as well as shops, churches and schools. It was the Conservative Land Society (CLS) which in 1868 acquired the undeveloped remnant of the Bolingbroke Grove House estate from Henry Wheeler, its last private owner.
The CLS had been active in north Battersea since the 1850s, buying estates to increase Tory support among the workingclasses by selling small freehold plots for house-building that gave owners the right to vote. However, by the time the society offered the first 113 plots for sale on its Bolingbroke Park estate, as it became known, this political incentive had receded. Thenceforth the CLS and its subsidiary the United Land Company were fundamentally speculative land agents and developers, and it was in that spirit that they went about their business here.
The street layout for the first phase was the work of the society’s Glaswegian surveyor James Wylson.
He devised a simple rectilinear grid of mostly east–west streets (Abyssinia, Cairns, Shelgate, Mallinson, Bennerley and Salcott Roads), many of them running uphill either side of a central north–south spine road (Northcote Road) built over the Falcon brook. (This put Northcote Road in a similar line to the two side-streets, Sydney Place and Swaby Road, then being built on the Chatham Road estate to the south, which enabled them to be joined together later as a single main road.)
Mallinson, Bennerley and Salcott were the longest, running all the way from Wandsworth Common to the estate’s eastern boundary at Mud or Pope’s Lane, now Webb’s Road. (These three roads, as well as Shelgate Road and the later Wakehurst Road, were to be extended beyond Webbs Road as part of the development of the adjoining West Side estate in the 1880s.) Construction began in 1868 and continued piecemeal throughout the 1870s and into the 1880s. Most of the houses west of Northcote Road went up c.1869–75, any gaps being filled during the late 1870s—though a few plots, such as 2–4 Shelgate Road, remained undeveloped till the 1890s.
A second batch of freeholds came on sale in 1872, a third in 1875, this last group relating to houses east of Northcote Road, which by and large were built in the later 1870s and early 80s. By then the population here was making good use of the rail link at Clapham Junction (opened 1863), as well as two new churches—St Mark’s, Battersea Rise, and St Michael’s, Chatham Road. With the exception of the Northcote Hotel (c.1870) and a few shops, much of the earlier fabric built in Northcote Road in the late 1860s and 70s was, as in the side-streets, residential (e.g. the runs on the west side at Nos 32–40 and 70–86). But as building picked up here and on neighbouring estates, so this road, with its central position in the declivity of the Falcon brook, evolved into the district’s main shopping street. Many houses were converted to shops in the late 1870s and 1880s, and new commercial terraces erected (e.g. Nos 23–31 and 87–99).
Most shops were small, catering for local domestic needs, especially food and clothing. Costermongers’ stalls also appeared and eventually blossomed into a full-blown street market. The arrival of banks in the late 1920s added to the high street character: the Midland at No. 10, and the Westminster at Nos 35 & 37, the latter with a classical stone façade.
There is much variety to be found among the first houses built in these streets between 1869 and the mid-1870s. Wylson died in January 1870, when only a few had been begun, and neither he nor his successor, John Ashdown, exercised much control in terms of house size or elevational uniformity. Some of the first houses were tall and urban-looking, usually in an old-fashioned late-Georgian style; others were smaller, in two-storey terraces. Most were built in short runs, few builders taking on more than a handful of houses at a time, and on the whole decoration was limited. Alfred Heaver’s first Battersea houses, built in 1869–70 at 2–12 Bennerley Road, in partnership with Edward Coates, were of this type, and it is instructive to compare them with those he built seven years later at Nos 58–72, by which time he was acting also as a developer.
For by then a distinctive ‘villa’ style had evolved under Ashdown’s surveyorship that was to become the hallmark of the estate and of much of Heaver’s later work from the mid 1870s. This consisted of terraced or semi-detached houses tricked out in a livery of gault brick with banding and arches in a contrasting stock (or sometimes red) brick, interleaved with generous string-course ornaments—studs, nailheads and rosettes. Liberal over-painting has since exaggerated this gingerbread-house effect. (Heaver himself lived for a time at No. 72, which he dubbed ‘The Homeland’, the biggest and most finely detailed house in the row.) The Bolingbroke Grove frontage, overlooking the common, attracted bigger, more valuable properties, generally similar in style, though there were some individualistic exceptions, of which the double-fronted, detached houses at Nos 92 & 93 stand out. The latter was erected in 1874 as Holly Lodge, extended in 1883 and 1894, and again in 1901 when it became the vicarage to St Michael’s Church. Its more heavily decorated neighbour dates from 1882–3. Both were built for Harry Nelson Bowman Spink, a chemist based in Westminster, who lived at No. 9.
Land at the southern end of the estate had remained vacant. In September 1875 Ashdown drew up plans for a continuation of Northcote Road and two further east–west streets leading off it (Wakehurst and Belleville Roads).30 Just over an acre facing Webbs Road was taken by the London School Board as the site for a school, and work then began on houses in the adjoining parts of the new streets, between Northcote Road and Webbs Road. These were semi-detached villas, on more generous plots than usual, of about 20–24ft frontage. The final phase of house-building—the laying out of the western ends of Belleville and Wakehurst Roads—took place in 1878–80 under Heaver, who cut his teeth as a developer here, buying all four acres from the CLS and leasing plots to investors or builders. Plans were provided by the architect William Clinch Poole (a resident of one of his ‘own’ houses in Belleville Road, the present No. 62), who following John Ashdown’s death in August 1878 became surveyor to the CLS and United Land Company, and thereafter was a regular associate of Heaver’s.
The new roads just missed Bolingbroke Grove House, which was bought by the Rev. Erskine Clarke before it could be demolished and converted to a pay hospital and dispensary (later the Bolingbroke Hospital,). Unlike the roomier plots east of Northcote Road, overlooking Belleville Road School, the two-storey houses here were smaller, and built as long terraces, though designed with recesses (where the servants’ doors were located) to give the impression of semi-detached pairs. All were clothed in the by-now ubiquitous bay-windowed white-brick villa style. Similar though larger houses marked the ends of terraces, facing Bolingbroke Grove (e.g. Nos 80–81) and Northcote Road (Nos 108–118, originally Orlando Villas). In these later streets the presence of clerks and their families was more solid, as was the employment of resident servants.
Kelmscott and Bramfield Roads
In 1889 Henry Nicholas Corsellis, the Wandsworth solicitor and developer, bought Grove House, the last of the Five Houses in private use. Confronted with a rectangular plot sandwiched between the gridded streets of the Conservative Land Society’s estate and the Liberals’ Chatham Road development, Corsellis’s surveyor and builder William Stanbury followed suit, laying out two more east–west streets, with return frontages to Webb’s Road and Bolingbroke Grove, both of which were widened at this point. At the same time Stanbury took the opportunity to extend Northcote Road further south.
Around 300 houses went up in 1890–5. Other than some flats at the east end of Kelmscott Road (Nos 104–110 and 113), built in 1894–5 by J. B. R. Meyring of Earlsfield, nearly all were in standard two-storey red-brick terraces, with double canted bays, and rather plain. Those built by the Stanbury family (e.g. 1–23 Bramfield Road and 2–24 & 19–33 Kelmscott Road), were lifted above the norm by foliage decoration to the window surrounds and iron cresting above the doors. William Stanbury himself lived for a time at 2 Kelmscott Road, a rare double-fronted house at the end of the terrace. Similar features reappeared in the two pairs they contributed (at Nos 72–75) to the rows of big, gabled three-storey houses built in 1890 facing the common, at 64–79 Bolingbroke Grove. (Those at Nos 76–79 were built by James George & Son of Clapham.)
With retailing now firmly established on Northcote Road, the frontages there were lined with parades of shops and flats, their tall, canted corner bays crowned by little gables offering a contrast to the shop conversions further north. The shorter parades at either end share the same simple stock-and-redbrick livery; the longer central stretches, at Nos 133–145 and 128–140, have a regular rhythm of tripartite first-floor windows crowned by stone-framed pediments, infilled with brick panels.
All date from 1896 and were the work of the same builder, E. J. Golds. A similar process had already taken place on the Webb’s Road frontage, where in 1893–5 Meyring had erected plainer ranges of two- and three-storey shops with rooms above, at Nos 26– 56.35 Broomwood Road area Broomwood (originally Broomfield) House, celebrated as William Wilberforce’s residence at the height of his anti-slavery campaign, occupied a central position between the commons, standing amid ‘charming wooded meadows and shrubberies’.
It was approached by a carriage-drive from Clapham Common that was eventually widened to become the eastern end of Broomwood Road and part of Kyrle Road. House-building on this large and important estate began in 1880 but was neither rapid nor immediately successful, occupying several developers for more than two decades. Yet it was a turning point. It heralded the spread eastwards towards Clapham Common in the late 1880s and 90s of yet more streets of housing on the sites of old villas.
Often more densely packed and homogeneous than hitherto, the later streets were increasingly the work of larger-scale builders, and brought to an end the golden era of detached mansions for wealthy residents strung out along the common’s west side. The process began in 1877 with the death of Sir Charles Forbes of Broomwood House. Within three years his executors had sold his estate, then known as Broomwood Park, along with part of the Dent’s House estate and an adjoining house, The Elms, on Bolingbroke Grove, which Forbes had also acquired, to John Cobeldick, a Cornish land agent and builder living in Stockwell.
This was a big transaction for the time, Cobeldick paying £43,000 for around 41 acres. Layout plans had already been prepared by the architects Hammack & Lambert of Bishopsgate (Henry Hammack was one of Cobeldick’s mortgagees). By 1881 builders were at work at the west ends of Broomwood and Honeywell Roads, and also in Wroughton Road, a north– south road linking up with Thurleigh Road on the Old Park estate. Small frontages to Bolingbroke Grove and Webb’s Road were also included. Other new streets—Kyrle, Hillier, Devereux, Gayville and Montholme Roads—were laid out preparatory to building.
The earliest houses—e.g. those of c.1881–3 in Broomwood Road built by W. H. Steer at Nos 1–57 and Samuel Rashleigh at Nos 2–46, and in Wroughton Road at Nos 1–11—illustrate well Cobeldick’s original vision. These were good-sized two-storey houses on plots of over 20ft frontage, faced in white and stock brick (or very occasionally in red), with double-height canted bays, many of them arranged in semi-detached pairs and obviously aimed at a solid middle-class market.
Bigger still were the early houses of Honeywell Road, where among the semis were some large detached, double-fronted residences of a more advanced architectural design, with corbelled eaves, Gothic-style bargeboards, and carved heads to the doorsurround pilasters. To begin with the families of clerks, government officials and civil servants predominated here, about half of them keeping a resident servant or two.
In all about 130 houses had risen by 1883, but only another forty or so materialized over the next three years, Cobeldick’s plans having run into the sand. In 1886 he sold most of his undeveloped land for £45,000 to Thomas Ingram, Henry Bragg and James John Brown, three men well-versed in speculative development locally.
Ingram and Bragg brought in new capital and building had resumed by 1887, most of the work concentrating at first in plugging the gaps in Broomwood, Honeywell and Wroughton Roads. The housing constructed there to around 1889 followed the existing patterns—being mostly terraces (as at 74–98 Broomwood Road and 2–28 Wroughton Road), or a mix of semidetached and double-fronted (as at 77–95 Broomwood Road)—and much of it may have been partly built before Cobeldick sold up, as many leases were backdated to 1880.
The architect William Newton Dunn, a frequent collaborator with Ingram and Bragg, took over the surveyorship of the estate, though his influence was probably minimal at first. With these roads finally filling up, the new owners and their builders turned their attention to those parts of the estate left unattended by Cobeldick. Between 1889 and 1892 part of Kyrle Road and most of Hillier Road were lined with terraces, John Smith being the prominent builder. Devereux and Montholme Roads came next, in 1891–2, with Smith again much in evidence, followed finally in 1893–4 by Gayville Road. Elevationally there was little variety, the pale brick houses there resembling those already built. Only Devereux Road stands out, the unusually wide double-fronted houses on its west side, with frontages of 29–32ft, being generously decorated around their doors and windows, many with large moulded terracotta panels. Gayville Road, the last to be built, was faced entirely in red brick. By the close of 1894 the tally of houses had risen beyond 500, the only undeveloped plot left being the site of Broomwood House and its garden, which survived until 1904. In 1889 Cobeldick offloaded another five acres of vacant ground to Ingram, now apparently acting alone, for £7,520. This was at the eastern end of the estate, and here more houses went up in 1892–4 on the south side of Kyrle Road (Nos 2–20) and in a new north–south street called Ballingdon Road.
All were built by Abel Playle of Clapham, and brought to an end this prolonged first phase of development in the Broomwood Road area.42 There was little pause for breath before more housing followed. By 1888 Broadlands, a villa facing Clapham Common with grounds bordering the carriage-drive to Broomwood House, had come into the hands of H. N. Corsellis.
As early as March 1888 the Stanbury family had prepared for him a scheme for rows of houses along the north side of the drive, which was to be widened, but no real progress was made until revised plans were accepted by the LCC in 1895. In 1896–8 the Stanburys erected thirty-six terraced houses (Nos 152–222, originally Broadlands Terrace) in an eastern addition to Broomwood Road, which thus became the first of the area’s new streets to extend fully from common to common. Most were similar to those built a few years earlier in Bramfield and Kelmscott Roads (above). But the row at the far east end (Nos 196–222, of 1896–7) was designed in an unusually exuberant Gothic Revival style.
This was probably the work of the builder William Stanbury’s son, William Henry Stanbury, architect and surveyor, who at the time had just been made an Associate of the RIBA. He was then serving as a surveyor on the civil staff of the Royal Engineers, designing buildings at home and abroad for the War Department, and eventually rose to become an Inspector of Works and Lieutenant-Colonel. There are some vague similarities to his only known major work, the garrison church of St George in Tanglin, Singapore (1911).
Broadlands being the first of the old West Side villas to come down, the Stanburys exploited its fine outlook with a range of larger, three-storey houses near the corner with Broomwood Road, facing the common (now 61– 67 consec. Clapham Common West Side, 1895–6). Three acres of ground north of Broomwood Road, formerly a meadow attached to Broadlands, appears to have been part of Corsellis’s purchase but was left undeveloped until he returned to the area later in the 1890s to buy up more land.
By advancing Broomwood Road eastwards to Clapham Common, Corsellis cleaved open the fields and gardens to either side for further development. Those to the south went first. In 1896 Thomas Ingram returned to augment his earlier work, buying the four villas and sixteen acres of grounds facing the common south of Broomwood Road—The Grange, Leveson Lodge, Broxash and a fourth unnamed house, formerly the residence of a Captain Percy Brown (old 31 West Side). W. N. Dunn once more served as planner, extending Kyrle Road to the common, accompanied by two more long east–west roads to its south (Broxash and Manchuria), and a short north– south stub (Amner Road) that took a 90-degree turn westwards to join up with Ingram’s Broomwood Park estate at Ballingdon and Wroughton Roads. (This return leg was later renamed as the western arm of Roseneath Road.) Also, the vacant south-eastern stretch of Broomwood Road was completed with the construction in 1898–1900 of more terraces (Nos 155–223); and, under some pressure from the LCC, Ingram and Dunn extended the improved roadway at Clapham Common West Side a little further south than originally intended, to their estate’s southern boundary, erecting further ranges of threestorey houses (Nos 46–60). The biggest builders were John Smith and Henry Bragg & Son.
The reduced scale of the housing built in this phase in 1897–1904 suggests that change had come between the commons, both architecturally and demographically. Though well-built, there was little to inspire in the long, monotonous red-brick terraces of Kyrle (c.1897–1901), Broxash (c.1900–2) and Manchuria (c.1902–4) Roads. Ingram and Dunn seem now to have been bent on maximizing the income from ground-rents, the housing density here—at twenty-four per acre—being by far the highest in the area at the time.47 It was only in some of the shorter rows of bigger houses overlooking the common—such as 54–60 Clapham Common West Side, designed and built by the Stanburys—that any variety of style crept in. Charles Booth’s investigators in 1899 found the houses at this end of Broomwood Road ‘not so good as the old’, judging the new district’s inhabitants to range from the moderately poor to the fairly comfortable. Tradesmen and shopkeepers came here in greater numbers, heads of household of the early 1900s including joiners and carpenters, grocers and tailors, even a dairyman and fruit salesman.48 Ingram died in 1901, before completing the estate, and later leases were issued by his wife Matilda and son Thomas. Another son, William, trained as an architect and surveyor, and may have been responsible for the ground plans and possibly elevations to some of the houses.
Building on the estate was essentially finished by 1904, though the eastern arm of Roseneath Road, beyond Amner Road, was not built up with housing until the eve of war in 1913–14.
Though the houses of the north side (Nos 3–41) were designed by different architects (Chapple & Utting) to those on the south (Nos 52–88, by J. J. Freeland), all share similar features, such as shaped door panels, good-quality stained-glass and pretty Art Nouveau wooden porches.
Meanwhile, by 1898 Corsellis had reappeared, with the Stanburys again in tow, when he acquired Beechwood, the former residence of Sir George Pollock. In development terms this was a small plot, of about 1½ acres, allowing room for no more than half-a-dozen three-storey houses facing the common (75–76 & 77–80 Clapham Common West Side) framing the entrance to a short stub of a side street, where twenty-one terraced houses were built in 1900–1 by William Henry George, another of Corsellis’s favourite builders, as Culmstock Road (now Nos 1–19 and 2–22). At the same time Corsellis laid out a second, longer road (Winsham Grove) on the threeacre field to the south, where George in 1898–1900 erected a further sixty or so houses, as well as more at 68–70 & 71–74 Clapham Common West Side. Two more occupied the east side of a short link road (1 & 3 Adderley Grove). Most were red-brick terraces which, though monotonous in such large numbers, were of George’s usual good quality, redeemed by foliage decoration to the door and window surrounds, and stained-glass door panels.51 Finally, in 1904, Broomwood House was demolished and a lease of its ground agreed with John Smith for thirty of his trademark red-brick houses— nine on the south side of Broomwood Road (Nos 97–111), and eleven each at 61–81 Hillier Road and 62–82 Wroughton Road. By and large his work was completed during 1905.
These had a standard Victorian plan of two rooms per floor, with a two-storey back addition containing a kitchen, scullery and WC on the ground floor, a third bedroom, bathroom and second WC above. No. 111 Broomwood Road was the only exception, having a slightly wider frontage than the rest, a larger than usual kitchen and a tiled scullery, having been built by Smith ‘specially’ for its owner, Miss Florence G. E. Higgins, professor of music at Trinity College. It was whilst Smith was building these houses that the LCC decided to honour Wilberforce with a commemorative plaque in the flank wall of No. 111.
Thurleigh Road–Nightingale Lane area
Until the late 1860s the area north of Nightingale Lane today bounded by Thurleigh Avenue and Rusham Road was an estate of fields attached to the mansion known as Old Park. In contrast to the closely packed streets of terraced houses that grew up to its north, this area’s Victorian development was characterised by substantial houses in generous grounds—a direct result of the estate owners’ strict leasing and selling policy, which prescribed only detached or semi-detached houses and stables.
Despite later infill and rebuilding, the area is still distinguished from its close neighbours by some unusually large properties. In February 1866 the Old Park estate was purchased by J. J. Welch and H. P. Hughes, a City warehouse manager and wool-broker respectively, who within a month had mortgaged it to the auctioneers Debenham, Tewson & Farmer, and commissioned a simple street layout from the architects Wimble & Taylor. This comprised four new roads—Thurleigh, Sudbrooke, Westerdale (now Ramsden) and Winchelsea (now Rusham)—and a widened Nightingale Lane. That April, Welch and Hughes tried but failed to sell at auction the only real plum—the old house and its grounds—and so in 1868 agreed instead to its purchase by Edward Tewson, one of their mortgagees. Thereafter the mansion remained in separate ownership and was let to tenants for the remaining twenty-five years of its life.
Welch and Hughes then began auctioning off freehold plots for housebuilding. This began in two phases in 1867 and 1869 with the sale of ground fronting Nightingale Lane—a main route where large mansions were already in existence on the opposite (Balham) side, where more were going up: such as Ferndale, of 1865–6, home of the sanitary-ware manufacturer George Jennings; and Helensburgh, built around 1864 by William Higgs for the Baptist preacher Charles Spurgeon, replacing an earlier house of the same name. Spurgeon had been drawn by the area’s ‘secludedness’, but this was fast disappearing as builders continued to make inroads; adverts for the Old Park estate sales stressed the ‘great demand’ now for high-class housing ‘in this favourite neighbourhood’.
The first houses built on the Battersea side c.1868–72 were big detached or semi-detached villas, in the pale brick and stucco neo-Italianate style that had populated so much of London’s environs in recent years. Nos 42–44, 46– 48 and 50, built and developed by Higgs, and No. 74, designed by Rowland Plumbe for a wealthy jeweller, are the best survivors from this first phase.
Also of note was Dudley House at No. 56, the first of several speculative houses built in the area for John King Farlow, a City solicitor (also discussed below). One other large house of the period, now long gone, was Beecholme, set well back from the road (on the site of the present Holmside Road), built around 1870 for the banker and economist William Newmarch.
Further development was steady but slow, confidence having been knocked by the recession of the late 1860s. More good-sized Italianate semis went up in the mid-to-late 1870s, at Nos 78–84 and 90–96. Active in the area at this time was the Kingsland builder Stephen Hayworth, who in 1875–7 erected two more large detached houses on Nightingale Lane (Nos 86 & 88, now demolished), and several big semis round the corner in Rusham Road, at Nos 11–19, 23 & 25 (demolished), and 22 & 24. All were built for J. K. Farlow.
These houses were popular with merchants, for whom large families and two or three domestic servants were the norm.58 All were probably the work of the architect Robert Pledge Notley, to whom Farlow was related, or his younger brother Frederick Charles Notley; the latter designed another pair of similar houses in Rusham Road for Farlow in 1878 (Nos 12 & 14). Their father John H. Notley, a builder, also erected several of Farlow’s houses.
Roomy gardens allowed for later additions, such as billiard rooms, which were a popular lateVictorian embellishment in the area, and indicative of its social composition. Building continued throughout the 1880s and 90s. James Holloway erected a fine white-brick double-fronted cottage in 1881 on the east side of Rusham Road (Ivy Dene, No. 16), designed by the architect Edward Witts for James H. Bartlett, a lamp and lustre maker. A few years later some 1,000ft of frontage on the north side of Thurleigh Road was taken by Charles Edward Smith, a Pimlico land agent, who in 1885–7 embarked upon a series of large detached houses in spacious plots (of which Nos 87, 89 and 117 survive), as well as semi-detached houses on narrower plots (Nos 95–103).60 Generally these were of good-quality red brick, if rather plain except for hood-moulded lancet doorway arches. His biggest house, The Priory, was demolished in the 1930s for 105–115 Thurleigh Road.
Other houses of this period include the pair of red brick and stone semis at 68 & 70 Nightingale Lane, built in 1885 by William Smith, each with a first-floor billiard room; and Parkhurst, at 25 Sudbrooke Road, an attractive design of 1888–9 in red-brick and tile by the architect Frederick Wheeler for William Henry Cressy Hammond, a lithographer. Also in the area in the 1890s were the Stanbury family, who in 1896 erected one of their characteristically stylish rows of tall houses at 67–77 Thurleigh Road.
But the major development in the area at this time was the creation of Old Park Avenue. Old Park Avenue. Increasingly hemmed in by new building, Old Park House and its grounds finally fell in the early 1890s, to be replaced by a new sidestreet of good-class houses linking Nightingale Lane with Ramsden Road. In this case the developers were the solicitor-partners William White Palmer and Reuben Winder. They bought the house in December 1889 from Edward H. Thompson, a Clapham land agent who had been submitting plans for a new road here since March 1888. About thirty tall and generously accommodated three-storey houses were jammed into a relatively narrow curving road.
A few were detached, but most were terraced, though planned to look from the street like semi-detached villas. This layout, and the liberal use of red brick and hung tiles, gave Old Park Avenue a whiff of Bedford Park, which blossomed into a more full-blown Queen Anne Revival in the five freer stock-brick houses built at its southern end, facing Nightingale Lane (Nos 32–40, Ill. 18.17). Detailed layout designs were provided by the architects N. S. Joseph & Smithem (later involved with Winder at Winders Road), and the good-quality elevations here are probably their handiwork.63 The builders of Old Park Avenue were Robert Francis Saker of Kennington, who began first, building Nos 1–7 and 2–12 at its south end in 1889–93; and David Kettle, of Vardens Road, Battersea, who between c.1894 and 1900 put up Nos 14–36 and 9–23 (17 & 19 have since been demolished). Early residents followed the usual pattern, with the families of stockbrokers, bank mangers, civil servants and engineers to the fore, all with one or two domestic servants. A Blue Plaque at 40 Nightingale Lane commemorates the humourist and cartoonist H. M. Bateman, who moved here from Clapham with his parents in 1910, at the age of 23. The area provided rich pickings for his satirical exposés of middle-class suburban manners.
Later developments, from the 1890s. While Old Park Avenue was going up there were still large gaps on the estate. The swathe of land between Sudbrooke and Thurleigh Roads, for instance, though it had houses at its west end, facing Rusham Road, was still mostly open ground, turned over to allotments.65 But from about 1900 local house-builders gradually filled the gaps, and in so doing brought a variety of neo-Tudor architecture to the area more usually associated with the capital’s outer suburbs. Some of the Metroland-style semis of the late 1920s and 30s still look a little out of place; but the better-quality houses of twenty years earlier sit well with their Victorian neighbours, and with the generous gardens and planting lend the district much of its agreeable character.
Firstly, houses were built on virgin sites, such as the allotments, which began to fill up from the early 1900s. Then ‘garden-building’ took off, particularly on the south side of Sudbrooke Road, which hitherto had been taken up mostly by grounds belonging to the detached mansions of Nightingale Lane. Later, as the out-of-fashion Victorian properties came on the market, second-generation development also became a factor. Houses from the turn of the century include the well-proportioned redbrick and tile vicarage for St Luke’s Church at 192 Ramsden Road, designed by John S. Quilter and built in 1901 by Lathey Brothers; and 57–61 Thurleigh Road, a nice trio in red brick and white stucco with cast-iron balconettes, designed by the local architect Henry Branch and built in 1902 by John Nicks, who was also responsible for the adjoining semis at Nos 63 & 65, as well as a rare block of flats at Nos 31–33 (Thurleigh Mansions), of 1899, where Nicks himself lived.
Thurleigh Road is also rich in some quirky late-Victorian and Edwardian houses designed by the Norfolk-born architect Herbert Bignold, who was based in Battersea in the 1890s and early 1900s. These range from rows of lively semis built in 1903–4 at 11–24 Sudbrooke Road and 40–66 Thurleigh Road, to the big, detached neo-Tudor houses at 86 and 123 Thurleigh Road, of 1897–8. Of red brick, with large half-timbered gables projecting on corbels, the latter recall the vernacular architecture of Bignold’s native East Anglia.
Each also has its own date or name plaque. These and other characteristic features recur on a reduced scale at 76 Thurleigh Road, of 1902, which therefore must also be by Bignold, as probably is the adjoining pair of semis at 78 & 80, built at the same time and by the same builder. But Bignold’s major work here is the large red-brick and stucco Art Nouveau house at No. 68 (originally Kenmara), built in 1901–2 for Sidney Joe Tavener, of the family who ran the Falcon Tavern at Clapham Junction. The prominent corner tower is apparently a later addition, of 1906. Bignold also designed two smaller houses in a similar style in 1906 for plots on the north side of the road, at Nos 87A & 89A.
By 1911 Edwin Evans & Sons had bought up six acres on Sudbrooke Road, where in 1912 three pairs of large semis were erected at Nos 1–6, followed in 1915 by Sudbrooke Lodge (now 185 Ramsden Road), a large detached house, of red and brown brick in a neo-Georgian manner, designed by Edgar J. George.
After the First World War infill and redevelopment continued. Houses of the 1920s include semis at 7–10A Sudbrooke Road (1923), and 32 & 33 (1925), the latter pair designed by the Balham architect Albert G. Hastilow. On the south side of the road, Nos 29–30 and No. 27 were added in 1926 and 1929 respectively in the former back gardens of mansions in Nightingale Lane.69 Perhaps the best example of second-generation development is the small group of houses at the south end of Rusham Road. Those on the west side, at 1–7 Rusham Road, were built in 1934–6 for Glassner & Glassner to designs by Cecil Codrington in an imaginative Arts & Crafts neo-Tudor style, with plentiful half-timbering.
Though they have the appearance of small, intimate dwellings, these were four-bedroom houses, with the fourth bedroom tucked away in a rear attic, facing the garden, and rear drawingrooms with French doors. The similar pairs on the east side (Nos 2–10A) and the adjoining house at 88 Nightingale Lane were built slightly later, in 1936–7, by Fawcett & Co. Ltd of Spencer Park, Wandsworth, on the site of one of J. K. Farlow’s big houses of the 1870s. Fawcett & Co. were also responsible for the similar-looking houses at 60–61 Sudbrooke Road, of 1937, and a year later converted Wheeler’s house at 25 Sudbrooke Road to flats, at the same time building a small three-bedroom house adjoining in its grounds, at No. 25A, complete with a maid’s room and integral garage.
Mention should also be made of the moderne semis of 1934–6 at 105–115 Thurleigh Road, with curving brick-and-render façades and Crittall windows; and also of the fine red-brick house at 59 Sudbrooke Road, designed by Ley, Colbeck & Partners on part of the rear garden of Dudley House, 56 Nightingale Lane. This combines an old-fashioned neo-Georgian style with modern Crittall type windows, and included a roomy lounge, dining room and entrance hall on the ground floor, as well as a built-in garage.71 Infill and redevelopment has continued in Sudbrooke Road since the war, more than on the other streets of the former Old Park estate, bringing a rare variety in date, size and style to its housing.
56 Nightingale Lane and the Coach House
Originally known as Dudley House, 56 Nightingale Lane is a good-sized three-storey and basement villa of 1869–70, of pale gault brick with stock and red brick dressings, designed for the developer John King Farlow, probably by Robert Pledge Notley, a relation. The name was popular with the Notley family. Robert’s father, the builder J. H. Notley, lived and worked in what appears to have been one of his own speculations called Dudley Place and Villas on the Clapham Road, Stockwell, so it seems likely that he also built Dudley House. Its first owner, Henry Clifford Green, a wine merchant, added to it immediately, commissioning Notley to design detached stables and coach-house wings in a similar style for vacant land next to the house, with a covered yard between them.
Though long converted to other uses, the stable block retains several of its original fittings: tongue-and-groove panelled and honeycomb-tiled walls, patterned cast-iron columns and a tiled floor with cast-iron drainage channels.
Around 1886 the house was purchased by James O’Connor, a well-off Irish commission agent and horse-trainer with a business in Blackfriars (later at Piccadilly) as well as a racing stables, The Commons, near Cashel in County Tipperary. O’Connor renamed Dudley House as Mount Cashel and lived there with his wife and an orphaned nephew, James Ryan, also from the Cashel district of Tipperary, where the O’Connor and Ryan families were closely linked. Ryan followed his uncle into the bookmaking business and by 1891 had taken his surname, becoming James Ryan O’Connor.
James O’Connor died at Nightingale Lane in 1897, leaving a personal fortune of over £120,000 in addition to his London and Irish properties, which were inherited by James Ryan O’Connor, who by then had married and moved to Putney. He took control of his uncle’s betting and stables empire, and with his new-found wealth in 1898 commissioned a marble altar for the recently built chapel at Rockwell College in Cashel in memory of his parents.
He also moved into Mount Cashel at Nightingale Lane and immediately set about improvements there. Between 1898 and 1900 several additions were made to the house, including extensions to the side and rear, the latter originally including a private dynamo house to furnish electric light. But it is the top-lit billiard room he added above the stable-block, formerly linked to the dining room in the main house, that stands out; the high quality and exceptional lavishness of its interior has recently earned it listed building status. The identities of J. R. O’Connor’s architect and decorators are not known, though it is evident that the billiard room was built in 1898–9 by the well-known contractor (Sir) James Carmichael (d.1934), then based nearby in Trinity Road.
The stable block’s modified exterior was embellished with soft redbrick dressings and a terracotta frieze incorporating swag motifs above the billiard room’s south-facing windows.
But these give little indication of the opulent Baroque decor within. Ionic pilasters support a cornice, above which sits a high coved ceiling rising to a central lantern light, set with stained glass depicting, among other things, saddles, horses’ heads, and putti playing billiards. All is a riot of heavy rococo fibrous plasterwork, including, in the ceiling, painted relief roundels of what appears to be O’Connor himself in various sporting guises. An arched inglenook at the north end contains a fireplace (with a replacement surround). This was more than just a private billiard room, and presumably was intended by O’Connor for entertaining and impressing his wealthy clientele. Some of the spaces between the pilasters are filled with large, well-executed wall-paintings of hunting, equestrian and coaching scenes, most of them again featuring O’Connor and his family, in settings reminiscent of the flat landscape around the village of Rosegreen, outside Cashel, where he kept a holiday home, near to The Commons stables. This was also the new name he gave to his improved house (sometimes Roes-green) in 1899. The paintings may have been added at a later date: one has a carriage with young girls, possibly O’Connor’s daughters, but if so must have been painted nearer to the family’s departure from Nightingale Lane in 1908. In that year O’Connor sold up to John Scott, secretary to a railway contracting company, whose family remained at the house until the 1930s. Later in life O’Connor returned to Cashel, where he died in 1929 worth only around £300, after a lifetime of gambling.
The house later became a day nursery and remained so until 1982 when it was converted to flats, and four new dwellings were erected to its rear (Earlthorpe Mews). The coachman’s house became a separate dwelling and the stable-block and billiard room were made into a private home, now known as the Coach House.
Broomwood Hall School for Girls, 74 Nightingale Lane.
Broomwood Hall is one of several institutions to have made a home among the large private mansions of the 1860s that constituted the earliest phase of building development on Nightingale Lane. Still recognizable within its greatly extended frontage is the original house, a rare survival of the private domestic work of the architect Rowland Plumbe, better known today for his commercial and public buildings, and blocks of philanthropic housing. Plumbe designed the house in 1869 for Joseph Lindner, a Viennese jeweller and goldsmith based in Berwick Street, Soho. Far from the first rank of his profession, Lindner could only have afforded such a commission through the inheritance of his wife Ann, a daughter of John Inderwick, the wealthy tobacco merchant, importer, and developer of (among other things) the Inderwick Estate in Kensington New Town. The chronology itself is suggestive: John Inderwick died in 1867 with an estate valued at nearly £100,000; Lindner married Ann the following year; in 1869 he applied for naturalization, a prerequisite to owning freehold property in England; and the house was built for him by J. J. Wilson c.1870–3. The construction costs alone were over £3,000.
The style employed by Plumbe was a pale, gault-brick Italian Gothic, with a prominent eye-catcher of a tower, entirely in keeping with the big houses already going up on Nightingale Lane. There is much fine-quality High Victorian decoration, notably in the carved stone window and door arches, and also the polished granite columns and piers incorporated into the porch and window-surrounds. The style is also reminiscent of East Coast America, where Plumbe had been assistant to Frederick C. Withers, an English émigré architect in New York, before returning to England and private practice in 1860.79
Known from the first as Fairseat, the house was comfortable but not excessive, with four reception rooms, two of which opened on to a rear garden terrace, four family and guest bedrooms, and a top-lit billiard room and servants’ rooms in an attic storey. Joseph and Ann Lindner were the sole occupants, generally with no more than two resident servants; and this impression of a quiet, withdrawn lifestyle is emphasized by the extraordinary sham medieval boundary walls that Lindner built around the house to thwart prying eyes, and which must have severely impaired the light to the house built next door (at No. 78) in 1879–80. Lindner died in 1889, and his widow stayed on at Fairseat until her death in 1902. The house then passed to her nephew, Edward Inderwick, who resided there from 1905 until 1918, when it was sold at auction.80 Empty by about 1930, it has been in institutional use ever since. In 1932–6 it was home to the BBC’s Research Department, then, from 1940, to the National Union of Printers, who made the first of many additions, erecting a two-storey and basement extension at the east end of the house.81 Subsequent alterations when in office use in the 1970s included an unsympathetic third storey (which destroyed the original roof line), a further eastern extension wing, and the removal of nearly all the internal walls—though none of this was considered destructive enough to prevent the building being listed in 1983.
Conversion to a private girls’ school came in 1987–8, and since then building work has been more sensitive, and confined mostly to the rear and basement. In 2008–10 a large theatre and assembly hall was constructed across the upper floor to designs by James Dinwiddie, of Dinwiddie MacLaren Architects. Its principal feature is a curved timber and stainless steel roof, largely hidden from street view behind the existing parapet.82 The school’s success has seen it expand into other neighbouring former houses, at 68–70 and 50 Nightingale Lane, and St Luke’s Vicarage on Ramsden Road.
Today four large, detached Queen Anne Revival houses overlook Wandsworth Common at 23–26 Bolingbroke Grove, complemented by two more stock-and-red-brick mansions round the corner at 5 & 7 Blenkarne Road. All were part of a rare sortie into the planning of superior estate housing by the architect E. R. Robson at a time in the mid 1870s when he was busy in his role as architect to the School Board for London. Robson’s work here was formerly greater in extent.
He was responsible for two other large houses south of Blenkarne Road, both since demolished; and further down Bolingbroke Grove at No. 8 is a detached house set well back from the roadway which, despite standing so far apart, belongs to the same group. Built at the same time and in the same materials, it shows clear signs of Robson’s handiwork. Robson’s involvement at what seems an inopportune time is explained by his relationship with the developer, Charles Edward Appleby.
Described variously as a coal-master or mining engineer, Appleby came from the Yorkshire family of coalmen and ironfounders who owned Renishaw Colliery in Derbyshire, where he himself worked for a time. His immediate family hailed from the same district of Sheffield as another big iron-and-coal dynasty, the Longdens, to whom they were connected by marriage. Robson, himself a Yorkshireman, became part of this extended family in 1861 when he married Mary Ann Longden (thereafter Marian or Marianne). The ties must have run deep: Marianne Robson’s sister Amelia had the middle name Appleby, as did Robson’s own son, the architect Philip A. Robson. By 1872 Appleby had come south to London and set up in business as a civil engineer, apparently sharing Robson’s office at 20 Great George Street, Westminster. In August 1875 he launched himself into speculative development with the purchase at nearly £18,000 of twenty-one acres of the former Dent estate, between the Falcon Brook and Wandsworth Common. The land was mostly empty fields, with a farm (Dent’s Farm) in its south-west corner, and had good frontages to both Nightingale Lane and Bolingbroke Grove, the latter running for about a quarter of a mile alongside the common.84 Shortly before the sale, Robson produced a basic street-plan with a single new road leading eastwards off Bolingbroke Grove then taking a curve in the form of a small crescent before heading south to join Nightingale Lane. There were no subsidiary roads. The MBW approved of this, but changed Robson’s suggested name for the new road, Nightingale Grove, to Blenkarne Road.
By November 1875 Robson had populated the plan with sixteen detached residences on Bolingbroke Grove, and thirty-six pairs of semidetached houses along the other frontages, all on generous plots.85 Before building got under way, Appleby sold a large plot on Bolingbroke Grove of 100ft frontage to Marjory Jane Peddie, a wealthy spinster and retired headmistress, for whom Robson designed the biggest of all his houses here (now No. 26). Appleby offset the £900 purchase price against his mortgage debts of £10,000, and Robson had a perspective view and a puff published in the Building News, which the two men must have hoped would excite interest. Miss Peddie’s house was described as the ‘first of a series of houses in the old English Style, somewhat incorrectly called “Queen Anne”’.
Christened Linden Lodge by Miss Peddie, the house was set back elegantly some 120ft from the roadway behind a carriage drive, and enjoyed over an acre and a half of garden and grounds.
Inside, her accommodation included, on the ground floor, a library, dining-room and large L-shaped drawing-room with a bay window; upstairs were four bedrooms, a dressing-room and bathroom, with further rooms on a smaller second floor. Kitchen facilities and servants’ quarters were provided by Robson in what was essentially a separate two-storey cottage attached to the west wall of the main three-storey house. With this plot gone, Robson revised his street plan, moving the entrance to Blenkarne Road 100ft further south, and, perhaps encouraged by the sale of Miss Peddie’s house, increased the size of the nearby plots to accommodate similarly large properties. Three were planned between Blenkarne Road and Miss Peddie’s (now 23–25 Bolingbroke Grove), with frontages of about 65–70ft, and two more tucked behind them in Blenkarne Road itself (now Nos 5 & 7). A sixth and seventh stood south of Blenkarne Road: Haresfield, in a contrasting half-timbered ‘Early English’ style, and Elmhurst (both are now demolished).88 Another site, south of Elmhurst, seems also to have been reserved for sale to a private owner, but was to remain vacant throughout the time that Appleby and Robson were connected with the estate. (It was later sold to Edmund John Spiers, who built a very large house here called Westwood Tower, 19 Bolingbroke Grove, in 1883–4, by which time Roy Road, now part of Thurleigh Road, had been planned to run along its southern flank.) At this stage only a single house, a double-fronted one called The Cottage (the present 8 Bolingbroke Grove), had been designed by Robson for the estate’s southern reaches.
All of Robson’s houses were built in 1876–8, mostly by Samuel J. Jerrard of Lewisham, a contractor with whom Robson had established a good relationship in his work for the School Board. Only 23 Bolingbroke Grove, the last of the houses to be constructed, was by another builder, Joseph Thompson of Camberwell Green. While the houses were going up, Appleby took the opportunity to borrow more money, extending his mortgage debts to £14,000.
Such houses were well suited for the era’s upper middle classes but perhaps Wandsworth Common was a step too far. For other than Miss Peddie’s, none seems to have taken immediately. And when she died in 1879 her house was bought not by a private owner but by a school for the blind (later Linden Lodge School); it has been in educational use ever since. Its first neighbours in 1880 were the Misses Cazenove at Elmhurst, Archibald Stuart Wortley (presumably the painter of that name, d.1905) at Haresfield, who was keen to sell his lease; and Horace Mann in Blenkarne Road.91 With four of these six big properties still vacant in May 1881, Appleby cut his losses and tried to dispose of everything in two auction sales: one for the existing houses, a second for the remaining vacant land. But only one house took—24 Bolingbroke Grove, for £2,000—and so more sales were required.92 Eventually, in June 1882, Appleby sold the remaining undeveloped thirteen acres or so for £19,710 to Thomas Ingram, Henry Bragg and Frederick Snelling. About half of the purchase money was used to pay off Appleby’s mortgage debts. Ingram and Bragg went on to finish Blenkarne Road and develop the rest of the estate in the later 1880s with new streets of smaller houses. Appleby stayed on in London as a civil engineer for a while, but also became the owner of the Tamar Firebrick & Clay Company, in Calstock, Cornwall, where he died in 1890, aged 55.
As for the later history of the Robson houses, by and large they eventually achieved their intended status as single family residences, and held on to it for a time. No. 8 Bolingbroke Grove (by then known as Rockfield) was bought in 1885 by the architect J. T. Wimperis, who divided his home life between this house and another in Sackville Street, Westminster. Residents of the bigger houses at 23–25 Bolingbroke Grove in the 1890s and early 1900s included Thomas Berry, a land agent, and Albert Puckle, a stockbroker’s agent; those in Blenkarne Road were in the occupation of a drug merchant and a wealthy South Australian.
Since then such extensive properties have lent themselves to institutional use or subdivision as flats. Westwood Tower at No. 19 and Elmhurst at No. 20 were used for a time in the 1910s as retreats for alcoholics. Both were purchased in 1920 by Battersea Borough Council and converted to a maternity home, the Battersea Maternity Home or Hospital. Having suffered blast damage during the war, they were demolished around 1948 and the flats of Lane Court built on their sites.
Today only 5 Blenkarne Road and 26 Bolingbroke Grove remain undivided, the latter as Northcote Lodge Preparatory School for Boys. Both still convey a sense of the high quality of housing that Appleby and Robson intended to bring to the area. Since 1966 the pair at 23 & 24 Bolingbroke Grove have been maintained as flats for Christian Scientists by the Bow Housing Society; Nos 8 and 25 are now also split into flats. Robson’s influence is still felt also in Nightingale Park Crescent, for although he built no houses here, the feature of the crescent itself—the only real piece of what might be termed town planning in the area between the commons—was central to his first plans of July 1875.96 The present 1 & 3 Blenkarne Road, two large detached houses of c.1925 in a colonial neo-Georgian idiom, were developed as a piece of infill on part of the long rear garden of 23 Bolingbroke Grove. The plans were provided by Robins & Hine, a firm of Westminster auctioneers.97 Gorst and Morella Roads area In the early 1880s more land with frontages overlooking Wandsworth Common, once part of the Dent family’s holdings, was covered with housing.
Firstly Dent’s House and its five-acre garden, south of Broomwood Road, was acquired in 1881 by James Walker Everidge, a Kennington builder, who with the help of the architect Charles Bentley laid out on its site a single, U-shaped side-road, doubling back on itself to re-emerge further down Bolingbroke Grove. All was to have been called Dent’s Road, but in 1883 the MBW insisted that the northern stretch and eastern curve be separately named Gorst Road (after the house’s last resident, John Eldon Gorst). Construction took place in 1882–4, Everidge building several houses himself, including 1–10 Dent’s Road and nine more facing the common at 27–35 Bolingbroke Grove. The biggest builders, however, were John Smith of Stockwell and James King of Plough Lane.98 The characteristic house-type here was the good-sized two-storey semidetached ‘villa’, usually with a third storey in a gable above the double canted bays.
Most had carved-leaf decoration to their door and window surrounds, ornamental Gothick bargeboards and other touches, though with enough variation to suggest that the builders, or their architects, had some freedom under Bentley’s overall control. In addition, at the east end of Gorst Road are some standard two-storey terraced and semi-detached houses (Nos 29–59). The Nightingale Park estate was the name given to the fourteen acres left vacant from C. E. Appleby’s unfinished development in and around Bolingbroke Grove. It was acquired in 1882 by Thomas Ingram and Henry Bragg, on this occasion acting, at least initially, in partnership with another South London builder, Frederick Snelling. As in Dent’s Road, designs were supplied by Bentley, and there are similarities between the estates. Bentley modified the layout plan devised by E. R. Robson for Appleby, making room for smaller houses in greater numbers by reducing Blenkarne Road’s southern arm to a stump, off-setting a new north–south link road (Estcourt Road, since 1912 known as Hendrick Avenue) further east, closer to the estate boundary, and introducing three new east–west roads connecting with Bolingbroke Grove—Granard, Morella and Roy Roads (see Ill. 18.25). The last was in line with Thurleigh Road (on the Old Park estate), but was originally planned to curve south into Hendrick Avenue, with houses cutting across the west end of Thurleigh Road.
At the last minute the vicar of Battersea, J. Erskine Clarke, paid £100 for these house-plots, enabling Roy and Thurleigh Roads to run in continuation as one and so allow easier access to the new St Luke’s Church from the western parts of its district. (The houses built as Roy Road are now 1–29 and 2–30 Thurleigh Road.) The derivation of the street-names, suggested by Henry Bragg, is unknown other than for Morella Road, which commemorates Marianne Richards, a descendant of an owner of one of the Five Houses, who in 1850 married a controversial Carlist general, Field-Marshal Don Ramón Cabrera, Count de Morella.99 Construction began in 1882 in Granard Road, where all the houses were built by Thomas Robertson of Upper Tooting; these were mostly terraced on the north side but semi-detached on the south, where they resemble those built under Bentley in Gorst Road and Dent’s Road. Those at the west end (Nos 2–20), of white brick faced with stocks or red brick faced with gaults, have fine features—iron cresting, urns, decorative bargeboards, and verandas of zinc supported on slender cast-iron columns. Similar houses started going up in Morella and Estcourt Roads by 1883, but eventually more builders brought greater variety. Most were big, three-storey houses with a smattering of Queen Anne Revival detailing. Robertson was also responsible in 1883–5 for the red-brick semis with stock brick dressings and decorative date swags on Nightingale Lane, of which Nos 118–130 survive today. And contemporary with these is the generously decorated terrace around the corner at 1–7 Bolingbroke Grove built by John Miller of Clapham, with hung tiles to the attic gables, panels of moulded brick, coloured glass, and little gables to the door porches.
For once Ingram and Bragg may have overstretched, for in 1885 they sold off some land to their own builders. David Kettle acquired a strip on the north side of Roy Road, where in 1886–7 he built seven large detached houses (now 1–13 Thurleigh Road), in a stock-and-red brick Queen Anne style, with very fine quality red-brick porches. Early plans for these were provided by James Andrew, architect. Kettle also took the remaining frontage on Bolingbroke Grove, where he was already erecting some of the area’s best houses, in two groups of detached and semi-detached villas at Nos 9–13 & 14– 18.
The double-fronted example at 9 Bolingbroke Grove (Elstree), with a large terracotta date-plaque to its return front, was designed for the solicitor Reuben Winder, who had lent money to Ingram and Bragg, and who was later involved with Kettle at Old Park Avenue (above). It was built first, in 1882–3, when, as Winder later recalled, no other houses were in ‘close proximity’.102 Kettle hung fire till he could ‘ascertain which class of property is most desirable’—i.e., detached or semi-detached houses. For this was all the choice he had. When Appleby sold the estate he inserted a covenant to prevent anything else being built on Bolingbroke Grove in the gap between his Robson-designed houses at Nos 8 and 23–26 (above). Hence the unusually large size and fine quality of Kettle’s houses, of 1883–7; their spirited Domestic Revival idiom, with tall chimneys, stepped gables, and plentiful terracotta decoration, blends well with Robson’s architecture of the preceding decade, and recalls the work of N. S. Joseph & Smithem, who were engaged by Winder at Old Park Avenue and Winders Road. Land adjoining, on the south side of Roy (now Thurleigh) Road, was bought by John Miller, who built the terrace of gabled houses at Nos 2–30 in 1885–7.
Other plots around Blenkarne Road went to James Robertson, who in 1885–6 built all the houses in the semi-circle of Nightingale Park Crescent (now Nos 9–31).
The curve in the road gave the present No. 21, a semi-detached house near the centre, an unusually wide and deep garden. Nos 33– 39 (Harefield Villas), erected in 1886 immediately south of the crescent in a similar style, were the work of Walter Harmer, a builder of Salcott Road. Company directors, wine merchants, clerks and lecturers featured among the early residents, nearly all having one or two domestic servants.104 Around Clapham Common and Battersea Rise Almeric and Lindore Roads These two streets and the adjoining parts of Battersea Rise constitute the first foray into building development in the parish by Thomas Ingram, the most prolific of all Battersea’s Victorian developers.
The site was that of the former mansion of the Ashness family, set amid 3½ acres of pleasure grounds, acquired at auction in 1875 by Ingram with two partners—James John Brown, a timber merchant (Brixton-based, like Ingram), and George Powell, a City lawyer. Among several plans for two new roads leading off Battersea Rise to join with the Conservative Land Society’s estate at Shelgate Road was one by W. H. Rawlings, a Lambeth architect, who may also have designed the generally uniform house-fronts.105 These were big three-storey residences of about eleven rooms each, built in terraces, and faced in grey-white gault bricks, with some courses of red brick and canted bays of stone with incised decoration. Despite the apparent uniformity, several builders were at work in 1876–9: John Miller of Clapham built most of Almeric Road; Alexander Bryce, John Price, and David Kettle were all active in Lindore Road. Seventeen taller houses, made up to four storeys by the addition of basements, also went up in three ranges at 39– 71 Battersea Rise (known originally as 1–17 Clapham Common Gardens), the builder on this occasion being James Duncanson, another Brixtonite.
A little more decoration went into these ‘high street’ rows, in the form of additional string-courses and door and window-heads in contrasting red brick. Leathwaite Road and vicinity While John Cobeldick’s builders were getting under way in Broomwood Road in the early 1880s (above), two other big estates further north were being snapped up and primed for housing. These were West Side (or Webb’s) estate and Chatto’s, adjoining properties at the junction of Clapham Common with Battersea Rise, each with its own villa, gardens and meadows, together amounting to some thirty-two acres. Construction here was overseen by Thomas Ingram and Henry Bragg, and was carried out expeditiously, most of the 720-odd houses reaching completion by 1886, allowing the pair to move south to Broomwood Road where Cobeldick had come unstuck. West Side was acquired in 1881. W. N. Dunn, recently the provider of designs for the same partnership at Lavender Sweep, again took charge of planning. This being a long, narrow plot, Dunn simply extended the east– west streets of the neighbouring Conservative Land Society estate—Shelgate, Mallinson, Bennerley, Salcott and Wakehurst Roads—east of Webb’s Road to run for a final short stretch as far as Leathwaite Road, a new north–south road ranged along the estate’s eastern boundary. By 1884, with building going well, Dunn had decided to add two more short streets at either end of the estate—now Keildon and Berber Roads.
In the side-streets, the two-storey terrace-house with canted bays again reigned supreme; nearly all date from the years c.1884–7. White and stock brick still predominated, though one of the more pleasing rows, built by Peter Duplock at 140–154 Bennerley Road, with decorated window piers and male and female heads, was faced in red brick. Parts of Webb’s Road were made use of as shopping parades.108 There were variants, notably some large three-storey houses in a Queen Anne Revival style at 53–65 Shelgate Road and, immediately behind, at 31–35 Keildon Road, erected in 1884–5 by Alfred Wing & Company. Sideentrances for servants suggest they hoped to draw a slightly better class of resident than the neighbouring houses, which they did, but only initially.109 Leathwaite Road followed suit, with long two-storey terraces, but also some taller, three-storey Queen Anne-style rows at its north end, such as Nos 1–7, built in 1883 by John B. Gerrans of Lee in Kent.
These may have been the work of the south London architect Frederick Lea, who designed 94–100 Shelgate Road for Gerrans in 1885. Elsewhere, Dunn probably designed the long symmetrical parade built in 1886–7 as the public face of the estate on the ‘high street’ frontage at 1–37 Battersea Rise.110 With West Side filling up by the mid-1880s, Ingram and Bragg moved on to Chatto’s estate. Unusually, this had been acquired for development in 1881 by Alfred Heaver, but then quickly dropped by him and sold on; perhaps like others he suffered from the glut in the suburban housing market. Plans had been prepared for Heaver by W. C. Poole; and essentially it was Poole’s layout that re-appeared under the pen of Dunn, acting for Ingram and Bragg, bringing into being Burland, Chatto, Dulka and Grandison Roads, as well as extensions to Leathwaite and Wakehurst Roads.
Between 1885 and 1888, another 270-odd houses were added in these streets to the 450 or so already going up on West Side, to which it was connected, most of them two-storey terraces in gault brick.112 Only 1–19 Burland Road, with their bargeboarded gables, and 116–122 Grandison Road, tricked out with red-brick window arches and corbelled porches, broke the mould to any degree. West of Clapham Common The final burst of house-building between the commons began in 1905 with the development of the garden of Heathfield (now 21 Clapham Common West Side), a house of the early 1800s. In 1902 John Cobeldick bought Heathfield, where he was based for a time. Though he spared the house, he agreed with John Smith for the erection of forty-four houses in a new road called Sumburgh Road and continuations of Thurleigh Road (Nos 127–149 & 130–140) and Clapham Common West Side (Nos 14–20 & 22–24) on its garden. All were built in 1905–8.
A mix of red-brick terraces and semis, these represent the acme of the suburban style Smith had been honing for twenty years between the commons, with double-height bays, terrazzo forecourts, stained-glass doors, and Smith’s trademark terracotta panels of swag decoration beneath the first-floor windows. Immediately to the north of these houses stands Walsingham Place and 25–32 Clapham Common West Side, a late 1990s estate by Rialto Homes on the site of Walsingham (formerly Marianne Thornton) School. In places its four-storey houses with integral garages mimic their Victorian neighbours with some unconvincing canted bays and moulded decorations.
Battersea Rise House estate.
In 1907 the famous old house and its neighbours (Maisonette and Glenelg) were acquired by (Sir) Edwin Evans, of Evans & Sons, the Lavender Hill auctioneers, estate agents, surveyors and developers. In this instance Evans was not acting alone, but as the active member of a consortium of local businessmen, alongside H. N. Corsellis, his partner George Francis Berney, and Percival A. Watney, of the Wandsworth distillery.115 Evans’s plan, approved in 1908, was to build around 475 houses in five new north–south roads—Alfriston, Muncaster, Canford, Bowood and Wisley—as well as in extensions to Wakehurst and Culmstock Roads and Clapham Common West Side. A handful more were planned for the estate’s fringes, in Chatto, Broomwood and Grandison Roads. A plot at the corner of Alfriston and Culmstock Roads was reserved for a church, to have been designed by John S. Quilter & Son, but this never materialised; another small portion of the estate, at its south end, facing Broomwood Road, had already been reserved for the LCC’s Clapham County Secondary School for Girls (1908–9).116 House-construction began in 1908 near the common, mostly north of Wakehurst Road, and progressed well, the whole corner block bounded by Wakehurst and Muncaster Roads, including the houses at 86–122 Clapham Common West Side, being erected in 1908–11, as were the north-west section of Alfriston and other parts of Canford and Culmstock Roads. W. H. George and Samuel Rashleigh were the biggest builders here. Muncaster Road and most of the rest of the estate south of Wakehurst Road followed in the next few years, leaving only about sixty or so plots unfilled when war brought work to a halt in 1915.117 Most of the pre-war houses were in typical two-storey Edwardian terraces, and largely designed in-house, perhaps by the young E. Dudley
46 Evans, one of Edwin Evans’s sons and partners, who by this date was increasingly involved with the firm’s work. However, the somewhat finer houses at the north end of Muncaster Road (at Nos 1–27 & 2–30, of 1911–14), built by W. H. George, were the work of another emerging young architect, his son Edgar J. George . He was responsible too for other livelier than usual rows built at this time by his father, as at 69–83 Muncaster Road, and 37–67 & 62–88 Alfriston Road, as well as the exceptional house at 90 Alfriston Road.
This house was, and still is, despite later alterations, unlike any other in Battersea. Its rakish sloping gable, deeply overhanging eaves, quasi-rustic window-shutters, pale-painted roughcast and thin, contrasting stringcourses of red tile—all express an interest in C. F. A. Voysey’s oeuvre of the 1890s and early 1900s. The Cottage, as it was called, was designed as a family home for George and his new wife, Maggie Miriam George, the freehold possibly a wedding gift from his father. Several welldesigned fittings illustrate E. J. George’s eye for style and detail, which continued inside the house in the entrance hall, staircase and fireplace surrounds. Sadly, he had little time to enjoy his new home—he was killed in action on the Somme in September 1916. His widow lived on there, latterly remarried, till c.1930.
Work on the estate resumed in the early 1920s, most of the gaps in Clapham Common West Side (at Nos 123–125, 128–134), Alfriston (69–87, 92– 120), Muncaster (73–81), and Culmstock Roads (30–36), as well as the east side of Wisley Road, being completed in 1922–3. The last row to go up was 42–52 Culmstock Road, erected by Bessard Brown Ltd in 1929. Also, a gap left by the builders of Grandison Road nearly forty years earlier for a possible future extension of Burland Road was plugged with two new houses, numbered 103A and 105A.120 Once again Evans & Sons supplied most of the designs, offering three or four types of four-bedroom semi, usually in a repetitive cut-price Arts & Crafts style, with roughcast upper stories, bowed windows and a little coloured glazing. Occasionally a more streamlined garden suburb look crept in, as at 73–81 Muncaster Road. One row, at 79–87 Alfriston Road, of 1922, was designed by John S. Quilter & Son; here the central pair of houses break forward in brick-fronted gables, in a distinctive cottage estate style. Nos 92– 120, opposite, in the same style, are doubtless by the same architects.
Other than a few pockets of bomb-damage replacement, the estate remains much as when first laid out. Holmside Road area. A short coda to the story of redevelopment on the sites of older, larger houses is provided by Holmside Road and parts of the adjoining streets, developed with suburban semis in the 1920s and 30s. Firstly Courtlands, an 11-bedroom Victorian residence at the junction of Nightingale Lane and Ramsden Road, was acquired by Edwin Evans & Sons. In 1924–5 twelve houses were built there for Evans by H. & E. Wooding, comprising two pairs of semis each in Nightingale Lane (52–54A), Ramsden Road (177–183) and Sudbrooke Road (62–65). All were standard two-storey units, in stock and red brick and roughcast, with tiny garages, their outersuburban look accentuated by oak boundary lych gates, a late addition to the design by Evans & Sons.
The redevelopment of Beecholme a few years later was a bigger enterprise. One of the largest Victorian mansions hereabouts, its extensive wooded grounds would have been coveted by early twentieth-century speculators, when precious little building land remained. Three other houses to its east, either side of present-day Thurleigh Avenue, were acquired at the same time, allowing the developers a little more elbow room.
The developers in question were F. T. Wooding & Sons, a Streatham building firm. They acquired the Beecholme estate by 1926, when plans for 70- odd new houses were prepared for them by John S. Quilter & Son. Twelve were built in Nightingale Lane (Nos 8–30, of 1927–31), eighteen in Thurleigh Avenue (7–21 & 2–20, of c.1931), and sixteen in Thurleigh Road (88–118, of 1927–30), as well as a further twenty-eight in a new road. Intended to be known as Beecholme Road, its name was later changed to Holmside, and its houses were among the last to be built, in 1929–31.
All were of two storeys, mostly semi-detached, and dressed in a similar humble suburban style to those by Evans & Son, but of slightly better quality.
123 Hightrees House
The only progressive design among inter-war developments on the west side of Clapham Common is this smart apartment block, at the corner with Nightingale Lane. It was erected in 1938 for the Central London Property Trust Ltd, and was the last big private building project in the area, partly occupying the site of an old mansion of the same name. It was also a rare London commission for the architect Richard William Herbert Jones (d.1965), better known for his hotels and other Decostyle seaside commissions at Saltdean and Rottingdean for the Saltdean Estate, in particular the streamlined Saltdean Lido (1937–8).124 In plan the block comprised a double ‘E’ shape, with the shorter arms turned to face Nightingale Lane, the longer ones at the rear, running alongside Clapham Common. The main decorative elements to the brick façades are the whitepainted cement or concrete curved balconies that occupy the centre and ends of the blocks, and which taper as they rise towards the upper storeys. Inside were 110 flats, arranged off central corridors. Some had only one bedsitting room, with a separate bathroom and kitchen, others had four rooms and the same facilites; but the majority were three-room apartments. In keeping with the modernizing spirit of the age every sitting-room had an eye-catching central ‘feature’ of electric heater, radio and clock as a substitute for the more traditional fireplace surround. Communal basement facilities included a restaurant, bar and swimming pool, and storage units for deckchairs were provided on the large open flat roof. But so close to the outbreak of war, residents at first did not come in large numbers. As a result, the head lessees, a specially formed subsidiary (High Trees House Ltd), asked for and received a reduction in ground rent.
After the war, when the block was fully occupied, the landlords took legal action to retrieve lost rent. The resultant court case, presided over by Judge (later Lord) Denning, proved to be a landmark in contract law, Denning arguing that the wartime agreement made the landlords’ legal rights unenforceable, and in so doing introduced the modern legal principle of promissory estoppel.
Post-war public housing Of the various public housing developments in the area, the larger Auckland Road and Chatham Road estates are noticed separately below. These paragraphs deal with medium-sized projects, chiefly along Bolingbroke Grove and in and close to Nightingale Lane. Smaller or individual instances of post-war replacement or infill have not been noted. Perhaps the first postwar housing built by Battersea Council was on a badly bombed site between Honeywell and Broomwood Roads, where the formally arranged Honeywell Road Estate arose in 1946–8. It consists of five blocks of flats, three facing Broomwood Road and two Honeywell Road. They are of three storeys with hipped roofs; balcony access is from the rear, where a bare open court is centred on an old-fashioned drying ground.
Bolingbroke Grove attracted two developments of balcony-access flats in the immediate post-war years, both designed by in-house architects under Battersea’s Borough Engineer, and both planned in L-shaped format with open gardens to their south and west next to road junctions. The threestoreyed Lane Court at Nos 19–20, built by the Council’s Works Department, replaced two lightly damaged villas next to the corner of Thurleigh Road in 1948–9. Its original brick access balconies along the backs have been replaced by metal and glass ones. More ambitious is Stephen Sanders Court overlooking Wakehurst Road, built in 1949–51 by Gorham Ltd.
Here, on a severely bombed site, the development rises to five storeys in one wing and four in the other. The architectural treatment is firmer; the individual concrete balconies towards the garden bear the imprint of the Festival Hall, while the access balconies at the back, visible along Salcott Road, have a horizontal severity. The development is named after a Battersea socialist and MP.128 Nightingale Lane likewise has two early post-war blocks of flats, some distance apart. First-built was Holmside Court at No. 6 (1948–50), yet again an L-shaped, three-storeyed development, though here the two wings are separated, the access is from stairs, and the tight villa site entailed a narrower garden.129 Abbott House followed in 1949–51, further west on a bomb site at the corner of Hendrick Avenue. It was started by H. T. Jones & Co., but taken over by Wates Ltd.130 Once again its architecture, rising in parts to four storeys, is strong. The main road front has an almost monumental brick character, articulated by long staircase windows and framing devices enclosing deeply recessed balconies. Later council housing in this area is rare. An exception is Malins Court, a four-storey maisonette building at 58 Nightingale Lane, backing on to a three-storey block at 38–43 Sudbrooke Road. These were erected by Battersea’s Works Department to designs supplied by the Borough Engineer in 1962–4.
They have stylish external concrete stairs for access to the upper floors. Further east, the Council’s attempt to demolish and build on the sites of 1–3 Thurleigh Avenue having failed, it had to be content with building on the back garden of No. 1 the four houses now numbered 120–128 Thurleigh Road (c.1957–8), possibly designed by Sir Guy Dawber, Fox & Robinson.132 Also in Thurleigh Road and certainly these architects’ work is Elizabeth Cooper House, built in about 1965–7 by Allan Fairhead Ltd for Battersea Old People’s Housing Ltd, sponsored by Battersea (succeeded by Wandsworth) Council.133 Its lower-rise neighbour at No. 93 is Ivor Mayor Lodge. Chatham Road Chatham Road is the only area between the commons to have a conspicuous presence of public housing, reflecting its different—and anterior—history to its wider environs.
Built between 1966 and 1973, it falls into two distinct linear entities, east and west of Northcote Road. Chatham Road East goes back to 1964, when Battersea Council considered plans for redeveloping the north side of the road on either side of the Gardener’s Arms, which was probably rebuilt at the same time. The architects chosen were Emberton, Tardrew & Partners, already working for Battersea at Southlands, while Joseph Capo-Bianco was named as structural consultant. That pairing was to become notorious as designers of the Doddington Estate, but no hint of trouble is recorded at Chatham Road. Building took place in 1966–7 after the change to Wandsworth Council, the contractors being Joseph Cartwright Ltd.
The development divides into two blocks east of the public house, Nos 121–133, arranged in an L with open ground in front, and the tougher-looking Chatham Court at Nos 83–117, to the pub’s west and also L-shaped, but this time with the open space behind. The blocks take cognizance of the slope in the road and are built in load-bearing brick with brown facers. At the bottom is the Northcote Road Library, designed by Wandsworth’s in-house architects. The larger Chatham Road West scheme followed on from 1967, when Wandsworth Council proposed to buy up around seven acres all the way from Northcote Road to Bolingbroke Grove, including the whole of Darley Road and much of Chatham Road. The immediate environs of St Michael’s Church were excluded, as was the nearby Bolingbroke pub. By the time the worked-up scheme reached the Housing Committee in 1969, Wandsworth’s approach to public housing had changed. It was the Borough Architect who brought forward the low-key scheme. This consisted of 89 houses and 52 flats, mostly arranged round intimate U-shaped courts, with vehicle access, Radburn-fashion, from the rear. There was still some thought of using an industrialized system for the development, as elsewhere in Wandsworth (at Bedford Hill and Merton Road). That option did not prevail, and the design was duly built in load-bearing brickwork by E. Clarke & Sons in 1971–3.
The focus of the estate is a formal path along the old line of Chatham Road, renamed Halston Close (all new names were taken from places in Kent). This leads westwards up the slope from Northcote Road, with two narrow courts on its south side and a third to its north. Taller monopitch roofs and boxy wooden porches give pep to the pale-brick, two-storey houses. This scale works well along the pathway, but the back roads (Darley Road and Rainham Close) feel empty. Cobham Close, the westernmost portion of the development stretching up to Bolingbroke Grove, includes a wide-open space behind St Michael’s that aggrandizes the look of this low-rise church. The Bolingbroke pub survived here till 2008, but has since been replaced.
Auckland Road Estate
This close-packed council estate was shoehorned into a two-acre back area between Northcote Road and Battersea Rise in the years after 1976. It covered properties on the east side of Auckland Road and the north side of Cairns Road. Abyssinia Road behind them was wiped out by the scheme, but its line is partly retained in the new access road christened Abyssinia Close. Wandsworth Council’s Housing Committee suggested this area for compulsory purchase in 1973, claiming that the old houses were substandard, though by no means slums. The Director of Development hoped to build fiftyfive replacement dwellings, a figure later raised to fifty-nine. Work was due to start in 1975 but postponed for a year.
The buildings, presumably designed in-house, are quiet, two- and three-storey affairs of brick with pitched roofs. The only touch of adventure is along Auckland Road, where the sloping ground is dug out and bridges reach across to the front doors of the upper units. A pathway through the estate leads to an open space, north of which is an old people’s home in the same brick idiom, 14 Abyssinia Close.
Some Residents
Notable residents of the streets and houses discussed above, not already mentioned in the text, include: Jabez Balfour (1843–1916), disgraced speculator, 100 Nightingale Lane, c.1908–1916 Jonathan Dimbleby (b.1944), journalist and broadcaster, Edith Villa, 3 Thurleigh Avenue, 1970s Matthew Robinson Elden (1839–85), artist, friend of Whistler, 69 Mallinson Road, c.1879–85 Gus Elen (1862–1940), music hall artiste, Edith Villa, 3 Thurleigh Avenue, c.1934–40 Pamela Hansford Johnson, author and playwright, 53 Battersea Rise (formerly Clapham Common Gardens), 1912–34 James Hobbs, draper, co-founder of Arding & Hobbs, 1 Thurleigh Road, c.1891 Fred Knee, trade unionist, politician and housing reformer, 24 Sugden Road, dates?? Mark Rogers (junior), wood carver and sculptor (d.1933), 74 Grandson Road, c.1891– 1933 George Albert Shearing (1919–2011), jazz pianist and bandleader, pupil at Linden Lodge school for blind children, 26 Bolingbroke Grove, dates? Edward Thomas (1878–1917), poet and writer, 61 Shelgate Road , 1888–c.1900 Susanna York (1939–2011), actress, 21 Blenkarne Road