Last modified: 13 October 2026
For a start, it's definitely not "The Manor House", which sadly I won't get round to writing about for at least another month.
This is how our prodigious local historian Dorian Gerhold described it a few years ago, after he chanced upon it in the Museum of London Picture Library:
[Porden’s drawing] depicts a seventeenth-century house between East Hill and North Side, just east of the Huguenot Cemetery. Drawn in 1813, it shows the house from North Side; whereas [the] illustration in the Wandsworth Museum collection [below] shows it from the Cemetery.
The high roof and large chimneys suggest seventeenth-century rather than eighteenth-century origins. It is first recorded in a fire insurance policy of 1718, when it belonged to John Bindon of London, citizen and haberdasher. In 1746, it had six wainscotted rooms, five marble chimneypieces and one Portland stone chimneypiece.
The house was described in 1793 as ‘a genteel red brick house’, belonging to Mr Walker. Its main approach was apparently through its garden from East Hill, since its north façade had a pediment and was more symmetrical. The yard south of the house contained a coach house and stables. The house was still standing in 1894, but must have disappeared soon afterwards.
[Dorian Gerhold, “Two Houses in Old Wandsworth”, Wandsworth Historian 77 (Autumn 2003), pp. 10–11.]
Here's the site today, a rather different house (though very 18th-century in feel):
The same view today, taken from roughly the same vantage point as Porden’s 1813 sketch.
So it once stood next to Mount Nod - the "Huguenot Burial Ground" that I featured in August's Chronicles. In this view, the house is facing south, across Wandsworth Common. But we're more used to seeing the house from the west side, as in these images:
Here's another (very similar) view, from two decades later:
We can tell it’s the same house in all the views because of the Palladian (aka Venetian) window on the side elevation (right), and the glimpses of headstones (left). This window features in all of the images I have so far come across.
Palladian or Venetian window - de rigueur on Georgian houses.
A house immediately by Mount Nod, sketched by the architect Charles Ferdinand Porden (1790–1863) on 23 August 1813. I initially thought this sketch, signed simply "Porden," was by the more famous William Porden, architect of the Brighton Pavilion’s stables and riding house. But our Porden in his nephew Charles, who trained under his uncle.
Porden’s inked caption reads “adjoining the burial ground of Wandsworth on the road to Clapham”. I can’t be certain from this reproduction but it seems to say in pencil “Parsonage or Manor House” — as if Porden wasn’t sure what the building was.
I’ll try to find out whether it was ever a parsonage (though it later became a Presbytery for Roman Catholic priests, as we shall see), but it certainly wasn’t a Manor House. True, there was a large house nearby often called “Wandsworth Manor House”, and shown as such on several maps (I showed an image of it at the bottom of last month's Chronicles). But Wandsworth’s actual historic manor house stood in Battersea.
— [Eventually, I'll write in some detail about the fascinating "Wandsworth Manor House", another of the "Lost Houses" round the Common.]
Charles Porden went on to become the architect of St Matthew’s, the great Greek-revival church in the centre of Brixton (built 1822–24). Curiously (or should I say controversially), it was later reincarnated in the 1980s/90s into a late-night restaurant/nightclub venue (home to "Mass", "Babalou" and others) before these closed in 2012. The church itself never closed — it continues today as the parish of St Matthew with St Jude, alongside a community venue-hire operation.
St Matthew’s, Brixton
— Historic England listing, St Matthew’s Church, Brixton
— urban75: Brixton nightclubs and the future of Mass, Babalou and St Matthew’s church (2010)
St Matthew's (built 1822–24) looks quite like our own St Anne's Church, built just two years earlier (1820–22) by Sir Robert Smirke (architect of the British Museum). Both are “Waterloo” or “Commissioners’” churches, built in thanksgiving for the victory over Napoleon at Waterloo. Both are built in a Greek Revival style, with massive columns supporting porticos. Though there are many differences. For example, the tower is over the portico in St Anne's and near the Chancel in St Matthew's. The pillars are Doric in Porden's church, but Ionic in Smirke's. So they're close family, but sisters rather than twins.
[For more on Wandsworth’s old houses, see Dorian Gerhold’s Wandsworth Past (1998), pp. 50–57.]
The same corner today, 2026 — North Side by Mount Nod, close to where the vanished seventeenth-century house sketched by Porden in 1813 once stood.
North Side by Mount Nod, 2026.
The same view today, taken from roughly the same vantage point across the road as Porden’s 1813 sketch.
Closer in. Uncannily, two men happen to be standing in exactly the same spot as the figures in Porden’s sketch of 1813. Explain that, if you can.
The house that now stands next to Mount Nod looks to my untutored eye relatively [old/antiquated] - about 1730 or 1740 I might have said. But it is in fact only about a century ld. . It’s in the Neo-Georgian or “Wren-naissance” style so popular in the early twentieth century, with classical symmetry, multi-paned sash windows and crisp red brickwork. It was built in the 1920s as the presbytery (the priests’ house) of the Roman Catholic church of St Mary Magdalen behind it on East Hill, a much plainer red-brick church built in 1905–06 to designs by Lawrence Butler. Its interior was painted by Father George Fayers, a Salesian priest-artist said to have been a pupil of Burne-Jones.*
* I have not been inside, but I have seen some fine photographs.
It has quite a curious history, particularly given how closely this corner was associated with Protestantism. The parish was founded in 1902 by the Salesians – the order founded in Turin by Don Bosco and named after St Francis de Sales – who had come to Battersea in 1887 to work with its “wild boys”. That’s a story for another time. At first the priests lived in an older house on the site – but which house, and how old, is a puzzle I’m still working on. I’ve started a page on the church and its presbytery to gather what I find.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, once the Catholic church had been built, someone protested that Huguenot bones had been disturbed. In August 1906 the Daily News printed this from “a correspondent, who writes from East-hill, Wandsworth”:
The majority of the inhabitants of Wandsworth are expressing great surprise and indignation at the occupation of that particular part of the borough known as ‘The Huguenots,’ by ecclesiastics of the Roman Catholic Church, and justly so. A rumour is current also that in the process of excavation for the purpose of laying the foundation of their new church, bones of the honoured Huguenots have been disturbed! Who is responsible for this state of affairs?
A week later came a crisp reply from a Mr Jas. A. Rochford. The digging had been done twelve months before, he said, in the garden of a private house, separated from the “disused cemetery” by a thick party wall:
I watched the work in operation almost daily. During its progress no encroachment whatever was made on the cemetery, and no “bones of honoured Huguenots,” or of any other dead, were disturbed. Had there been any such disturbance our numerous keen-eyed friends around us would quickly have raised the cry by which it is now sought to bring odium on the Catholics.
Daily News, 11 August 1906.
And that, so far as I know, was the end of it. But notice that both letters speak of “The Huguenots” as a place. Rochford says it was “a fine old property”, then empty, and not owned by the Church. Could that have been the house Porden drew? Another puzzle for the new page.
I’ve transcribed both letters in full, with two earlier cuttings about the burial ground from the 1890s, on a new page: Huguenots in the Newspapers.
But now back to Mount Nod. Last month, I said that I had found Elizabeth Vanderhoven's will, and asked (since I was away from London at the time) whether anybody would go looking for the Grolleau-Vanderhoven headstone. Well James Buchanan swiftly obliged, and here are his fine photographs of the stone today. Not easy to read, is it? I wonder if the stone can be cleaned up, or whether deep cleaning would further damage its surface?
Photos by James Buchanan, September 2026 – thanks, James!
Compare Hedley Fitton’s drawing of 1896, when the inscription could still be read. It shows the same stone in the foreground:
As for Elizabeth Vanderhoven’s will, I promised last month to reveal all. In truth I haven’t yet had time to explore it properly, but I have transcribed it, and you can read the full text on its own page. In brief: she made it on 25 September 1749, as a widow of St Luke’s, Chelsea, and asked to be buried “in Wandsworth Burial Ground commonly called Mount Nod near the Grave of my late Friend Mrs Mary Grolleau”. Judith Grolleau, “now living with me”, was left all her household goods, pictures, plate, jewels, linen and clothes. More on all this when I’ve had a chance to dig deeper.
The thing that's obsessing me at the moment is Peter Paggen and his so-called “Wandsworth Manor House”. But that too is in progress, so I'll pick it up properly next month.
I would also have liked to write something excruciatingly detailed about how, fifty years ago this year, Emanuel School decided to go “independent”, which is to say fee-paying. Since the 1944 Education Act it had been a voluntary-aided grammar school, charging no fees and taking children chiefly from local state primary schools who had passed the 11-plus. On 3 February 1976 the Education Secretary, Fred Mulley, allowed ILEA to stop maintaining it; on 11 February the governors chose independence rather than closure; and in September 1977 the first fee-paying boys arrived. That story will have to wait. Meanwhile I’ve started a list of what became of all our local secondary schools when London went comprehensive.
But I can't resist giving you just one quote from the vigorous debates held at the time. On 26 March 1975, during a House of Lords debate on the Government’s plans to abolish the direct grant schools, the Countess of Loudoun rose to defend one school by name – ours:
I would mention one direct grant school, Emanuel School at Wandsworth Common. … Today Emanuel is purely a day school, assisted in drawing boys from considerable distances by its sometimes uncomfortable proximity to Clapham Junction … Last week Emanuel beat Eton to win the Head of the River boat race.
A boy at Emanuel, or some such direct grant school – a school with traditions founded on discipline, order and the pursuit of excellence; a boy possibly from a suburban semi-detached or high rise block of flats – may experience for the first time in his life a sense of identification through the school and its corridors of history with the larger community outside. This boy will emerge like a house built on a rock, above the tumult of our turbulent society with its threatening waves of recurring crisis.
The Countess of Loudoun, House of Lords, 26 March 1975 (Hansard, vol 358, cols 1227–29).
Strictly speaking, Emanuel wasn’t a direct grant school at all, as the Countess’s own account of it makes clear: “Under the Education Act 1944 it became a voluntary-aided school and fees were abolished.” But in 1975 both kinds of selective school were under the same pressure, and many people, like the Countess, used the terms loosely.
Why did she single out Emanuel? I don’t know. She was a cross-bencher, a Scottish countess in her own right, who lived in Leicestershire, and I know of no family connection with the school. (Though she is said to have sat near Lady Dacre, whose family founded the school in the 16th century.) If you know, please tell me.
Send me an email if you enjoyed this post / want to comment on something you’ve seen on the site / would like to know more — or just want to be kept in touch.
If you would like to receive notifications of new Chronicles, let me know . . .
Philip Boys (“History Boys”)
September 2026
— Friends of Wandsworth Common
— Wandsworth Historical Society
It's also well worth signing up to the Clapham Junction Insider: Community News for Clapham Junction, Battersea, Wandsworth and beyond. Newsletters are very well-written and illustrated, and chock full of important local stories, mostly about "development".