Build 1 (draft) — 2 October 2026
Part 3 of The Five Houses of Wandsworth Common — how the estates became the streets between the commons
Companion pages
• Roger Logan, Between the Commons: South Battersea’s Formative Years, 1851–1900 — our full transcription of the book, the main source for this part (L), with all its figures and data annexes.
• South Battersea, 1851–1900: the map sequence — Logan’s six sketch-maps on a slider, showing the streets spreading over the Five Houses estates decade by decade. An earlier map, of the area before the Five Houses were built, is in preparation.
• Timothy Walker, ’Twixt the Commons (2010) — transcribed excerpts (not yet drawn on in this draft).
In 1851 the Five Houses still stood in their grounds along the lane that ran south from Battersea Rise beside the common. Barely forty years later all but one had gone, and their gardens, paddocks and meadows had become streets of terraced and semi-detached houses running down to Northcote Road, a busy shopping street laid over the line of the Falcon Brook. This part of the book traces how that happened: who bought the land, who laid out the roads, who built the houses, and who came to live in them.
The story is told house by house, in the order in which the estates were broken up: Bolingbroke Grove House (from 1853), Bolingbroke House (from 1858), Dent's House (from 1868), The Elms (from 1880) and finally Grove House (from 1889).
In 1851 Battersea had 10,560 inhabitants, but only about 300 of them lived in South Battersea, the land between Wandsworth and Clapham Commons. Most belonged to some twenty-eight large houses, as family (161) or servants (143); the rest lived in a few cottages near Battersea Rise and St John's Road (L). The five residents of Bolingbroke Grove were all elderly, four of them “fundholders” of independent means and one a magistrate (L, Annex 1). There were three farms – Bolingbroke, Dent's and Old Park – and in the valley bottom the Falcon Brook ran past Bolingbroke Farm, near today's junction of Northcote and Shelgate Roads (L).
Within sixty years “all but a handful of the estates had been redeveloped” (S). The roughly 280 acres between the commons became the greatest concentration of Victorian suburban housing in Battersea (S).
Two of the first buyers were political land societies, created to win votes rather than profits. Under the franchise of the day a man who owned a freehold worth forty shillings a year could vote in county elections, so the societies bought estates and sold them on in small freehold plots. The National Freehold Land Society (NFLS), founded in 1849, was Liberal; it later worked through a subsidiary, the British Land Company (S, B). The Conservative Land Society (CLS) was its Tory rival, with its own subsidiary, the United Land Company (S). By the time either society was building between the commons the political motive was fading, and both became, in the Survey's words, “fundamentally speculative land agents and developers” (S).
The London and South Western Railway's “Clapham Common” station on Battersea Rise opened in 1838; the West End of London and Crystal Palace Railway came across the common in 1856–58, with a station at New Wandsworth; and Clapham Junction opened in 1863 (L). It is tempting to see the railways as the cause of development, but Logan argues otherwise. The first settlers in Chatham Road were carpenters, gardeners and labourers who had no need of a train to the City, and it was a full forty years after Clapham Junction opened before the last estate was built over (L). Commuting mattered later, for the clerks and civil servants of the 1870s and 1880s (L, S).
Development coincided with a new system of London government. Under the Metropolis Management Act of 1855 the Metropolitan Board of Works (MBW) approved new streets, normally insisting on a width of 40 feet, while the Wandsworth District Board of Works (WDBW) handled building notices, lighting, paving and drainage (L). The District Board often objected to narrow roads and cramped cottages, but the Metropolitan Board, the final authority, usually overruled it (L). Battersea gained its own Vestry in 1888 (L).
Battersea had no great landed or institutional estates. Keith Bailey counts 228 separate building estates in the parish, three-quarters of them under five acres, and finds that lawyers and surveyors were prominent among the developers (B). The Five Houses estates were typical: each was sold separately, at a different moment in the building cycle, to a different kind of buyer, and the result is the patchwork of street patterns and house types that still survives between the commons.
The first estate to go was Bolingbroke Grove House, after the death of Elizabeth Hoper in 1852 at the age of 92 (L). It was sold to the National Freehold Land Society (S, B). The house itself was let for a time; the Wandsworth District Board of Works used it as offices from July 1856 to July 1858, when the freeholders, the British Land Company, gave it notice (L).
The NFLS laid out Chatham Road, probably before 1855, since neither its name nor its route was approved by the new authorities (L, S). Its plots were long and narrow, about 12 feet wide and 130–210 feet deep, to make as many voters as possible (B). The first building notices date from late 1857 and early 1858 (L). By 1861 there were about thirty-seven houses and by 1871 about seventy (S). Many were built one or two at a time by their owners: the rate book of March 1860 lists the Godfrey family, John Collyer, Francis Newman and the Clapham grocer Charles Dungate among the first owners (L, Annex 2). Owner-occupation was “unusually high for this period and class of housing” (S).
The origin of the name is unknown. Logan suggests several possibilities, the most attractive being that the Liberal NFLS was commemorating William Pitt, Earl of Chatham (L).
This was a village of artisans, not of commuters. In 1861 the residents were carpenters, gardeners, labourers, a lamp-lighter, a wood-carver and a pianoforte master, with a cab proprietor, a German teacher and a clerk to the Duchy of Cornwall as the most elevated (L). There were beer-houses from the late 1850s: Thomas Stapleton's, later “The Bolingbroke”, then the Eagle, the Gardener's Arms, the George and Dragon and the Carpenter's Arms (L). Cow-keepers and piggeries persisted into the 1870s; in 1878 nine residents complained about one piggery, which was cleared the day before the inspector called and restocked with thirty pigs the day after (L).
Side roads followed. Charles Dungate was allowed in 1864 to build cottages in a 20-foot way off Chatham Road, despite the District Board's objection that they would stand too close to the Falcon Brook sewer; this became Sydney Court, later absorbed into Northcote Road where the library now stands (L, S). Charles Stonell, a coal contractor, built Stonell's Place and the narrow cul-de-sac of Stonell's Road in 1866–67 (L, S). In 1864 George Stiff built a printing works for The London Reader in a narrow road off Chatham Road, the first of several printing firms in the district (L). Chatham Road was adopted and paved as a parish road in 1866 (L).
Meanwhile the old house had found a new occupant. James Lord (1814–1906), a barrister, author of a textbook on conveyancing and an ardent Protestant and Conservative, lived there from about 1858 with his family and six or seven servants (B, 2.3). In 1864 he demolished it to develop the site himself, and in January 1866 bought a further 3½ acres from the British Land Company for £2,400 (B). His surveyor was George Todd junior (1832–99), a bankrupt Chelsea builder turned auctioneer and estate agent, who sold the materials of the house for four times what Lord expected (B).
Todd's plans for Darley Road, Swaby Road and Skeldon Road were approved on 15 June 1866 (L, B). Skeldon Road was never built. Swaby Road is now the stretch of Northcote Road at Nos 157–173, where a terrace of nine red-brick houses built by Hiscox and Williams in 1868 still stands (B, S). Darley Road ran parallel to Chatham Road until it was swept away in the redevelopment of 1971–74 (L). Lord's houses were mostly three-storey terraces with canted bays, two rooms to a floor, looking “distinctly ‘urban’” beside the cottages of Chatham Road (B).
The scheme was a failure. All Lord's builders went bankrupt, leaving carcasses unfinished; by mid-1870 two-thirds of his houses stood empty; tenants “ran away to Calcutta” or “vacated in great distress”; and in 1871 Lord sued Todd in Chancery and went into liquidation (B, S). Erskine Clarke, the vicar of Battersea, remarked that Lord had built “before the district was ripe for it”; Todd blamed Lord's high ground rents and interest charges (S). Lord died in 1906 in lodgings in Brixton, leaving £333 (B). His estate took until 1902 to fill up, by which time it had 121 houses (B).
The Church moved into the vacuum. St Michael's began as an iron church and school near the west end of Chatham Road in 1872; the permanent church, designed by William White, was approved in 1880 as a memorial to its first curate, the Rev. Henry Boutflower Verdon, and the benefactor Philip Cazenove (L). By the 1890s Charles Booth's investigators found Chatham Road to be “the only ‘poor’ road in an ‘otherwise well-to-do district’” (S). A fire station replaced some of its cottages in 1906 (S).
The Willis family had long since left Bolingbroke House, though they still owned it. After the death of Sara Willis, Henry Willis's mother, in 1857, the whole Willis property, including Grove House, came up for auction in fourteen lots in July 1858 (L, 2.2). Henry Wheeler, the occupier, bought the house and part of the land; most of the rest did not sell (L).
The unsold land attracted the Battersea Burial Board, which was looking for a site for a new parish cemetery. In April 1859 it approached Henry Willis and agreed a price of £500 an acre for 8 acres 35 perches at the corner of Battersea Rise and Bolingbroke Grove (L). The Vestry refused to sanction the £8,000 required at a meeting whose proceedings were “of the most tumultuous character”, with “gesticulations, groans, hisses and personalities”, but the Home Secretary overruled it, and the cemetery opened in November 1860 (L). The Board assured the Home Office that the area was one “where the population can never become dense” (L). By 1874 it held 10,595 burials (L).
East of the cemetery, Christopher William Todd bought land and in October 1863 obtained approval for three roads: Auckland, Middleton and Pelling (L, S). Pelling Road was abandoned, leaving only a 20-foot passage; Middleton Road was renamed Buckmaster Road in 1937 after J. C. Buckmaster, the campaigner for Wandsworth Common (L, S). Shops and houses on Battersea Rise came first, from 1865 (Hopefield Terrace and Villas), with a parade that by 1870 included two grocers, a butcher, a tailor, a chemist, a draper and a coffee house (L, S). The side streets were built c.1867–73, mostly in cheap two-storey terraces with double-height bays; John Lane of Peckham was the main builder, and built the Invitation pub (S). Among the first residents was the sanitary engineer Thomas Crapper, at 1 Middleton Road c.1867–74 (S).
In 1868 Henry Wheeler sold the rest of his land, “the undeveloped remnant” of the Bolingbroke House estate, to the Conservative Land Society (S). Its Glaswegian surveyor, James Wylson, laid out “a simple rectilinear grid of mostly east–west streets … many of them running uphill either side of a central north–south spine road (Northcote Road) built over the Falcon brook” (S). The names – Salcott, Bennerley, Mallinson, Shelgate, Cairns, Abyssinia and Northcote – were settled in 1869; Wylson and Manners, after men of the CLS, were considered and dropped (L). The longest streets ran from Wandsworth Common to the estate's eastern boundary at Mud or Pope's Lane, now Webb's Road (S). Northcote Road was laid out as a broad 50-foot “carriage road” (L).
The first 113 plots were offered in 1868 (S). Most houses west of Northcote Road went up c.1869–75 and those to the east in the later 1870s (S). Wylson died in January 1870 and his successor John Ashdown kept little control over house sizes, so the early houses vary: some tall and urban, some in modest two-storey terraces (S). By the mid-1870s a house type had emerged that became “the hallmark of the estate”: terraced or semi-detached villas in pale gault brick, with bands and arches of contrasting stock or red brick and string-courses of “studs, nailheads and rosettes” (S).
Here Alfred Heaver, later one of the largest builder-developers in south London, began his career, building 2–12 Bennerley Road with Edward Coates in 1869–70 and, by 1877, 58–72 Bennerley Road, where he lived at No. 72, “The Homeland” (S). Other prominent builders were George Collis of Pimlico, Charles Cooper (many of the early shops in Northcote Road) and Joseph Stapleton (L).
The estate was extended southwards in two stages. In September 1875 Ashdown planned the continuation of Northcote Road and the eastern parts of Belleville and Wakehurst Roads, with an acre reserved for a School Board school (S, L). The Belleville Road board school was built in 1876–77 (L). In April 1878 the CLS's new surveyor, the architect William Clinch Poole, who lived at 62 Belleville Road, planned the western parts of Belleville and Wakehurst Roads; Heaver bought the whole four acres and built long two-storey terraces disguised as semi-detached pairs (S, L).
The new roads “just missed” Bolingbroke House itself (S). The Henry Wheeler family had stayed on while streets were built around them (2.1A). In 1876 the house was bought for £4,500 through the efforts of the vicar, Canon John Erskine Clarke, and converted into a voluntary pay hospital and provident dispensary, which opened in 1879–80 (2.1A, L, S). Its later history belongs to chapter 2.1B.
Mary Dent died in December 1867, and in 1868 her 36-acre estate was offered in nineteen lots, including “eight building plots fronting the Common of one to two acres each”. Most did not sell (2.5). Eventually it was divided. The house and five acres of garden went to John Eldon Gorst QC, MP, the Conservatives' party agent, who lived there until about 1881 (2.5). The remaining twenty-one acres, between the Falcon Brook and the common, were bought in August 1875 for nearly £18,000 by Charles E. Appleby (S).
Appleby's architect, E. R. Robson, produced a generous plan: by November 1875 it showed sixteen detached residences on Bolingbroke Grove and thirty-six pairs of semi-detached houses on the other frontages, “all on generous plots” (S). Blenkarne Road was to run through to Nightingale Lane (L). Only six big houses were built: the four Queen Anne Revival houses at 23–26 Bolingbroke Grove and two stock-and-red-brick mansions at 5 and 7 Blenkarne Road, which still stand (S). With four of the six still empty in May 1881, Appleby “cut his losses” (S).
In June 1882 Appleby sold the remaining thirteen acres or so for £19,710 to Thomas Ingram, Henry Bragg and Frederick Snelling (S). Their architect, Charles Bentley, replanned the estate for smaller houses in larger numbers: Blenkarne Road's southern arm was cut to a stump, a new north–south road, Estcourt Road (Hendrick Avenue since 1912), was set further east, and three new roads ran to Bolingbroke Grove: Granard, Morella and Roy (S, L). Erskine Clarke paid £100 for plots so that Roy Road could run straight on into Thurleigh Road, giving the west of his parish easier access to the new St Luke's church; Roy Road is now 1–29 and 2–30 Thurleigh Road (S, L). Morella Road commemorates Marianne Richards, Matthew Chalie's granddaughter, who in 1850 married the Carlist general Ramón Cabrera, Count of Morella (S, B, 2.3).
The houses are among the most decorative between the commons. Thomas Robertson of Upper Tooting built all of Granard Road from 1882, with “iron cresting, urns, decorative bargeboards, and verandas of zinc supported on slender cast-iron columns” at its west end (S). David Kettle built seven large detached Queen Anne houses at 1–13 Thurleigh Road in 1886–87 and Domestic Revival houses at 14–18 Bolingbroke Grove (S). James Robertson built the semicircle of Nightingale Park Crescent in 1885–86 (S). The first residents were “company directors, wine merchants, clerks and lecturers”, nearly all with one or two servants (S).
After Gorst left, Dent's House and its five-acre garden were bought in 1881 by James Walker Everidge, a Kennington builder (S, 2.5). With the architect Charles Bentley he laid out a single U-shaped road, all to be called Dent's Road, until in 1883 the MBW insisted that part of it be named Gorst Road after the last resident (S, L). The houses, built 1882–84 by Everidge, John Smith of Stockwell and James King of Plough Lane, are good-sized semi-detached villas, often with a gabled third storey over the bays, and carved-leaf decoration and Gothic bargeboards (S). The old stable block survives as 1b Gorst Road, with a length of old boundary wall between 35 and 36 Bolingbroke Grove (2.5).
The Elms had been bought by Sir Charles Forbes of Broomwood House, Wilberforce's old home across the valley, and was occupied from 1858 by the tobacco manufacturer Charles Lambert (2.4). After Forbes's death in 1877 his executors sold the whole Broomwood Park estate, together with The Elms and part of the Dent land, to John Cobeldick, a Cornish land agent and builder of Stockwell: “a big transaction for the time, Cobeldick paying £43,000 for around 41 acres” (S). The Elms was demolished at once, and its building materials were advertised in November 1880 (2.4, L). Honeywell Road runs across its site (L).
The layout, by Hammack and Lambert of Bishopsgate, was approved in July 1880: Honeywell, Broomwood, Montholme, Gayville, Devereux, Hillier and Wroughton Roads, with extensions to Northcote and Webb's Roads (L, S). This was the largest single estate between the commons (L). Cobeldick aimed at “a solid middle-class market” with good-sized two-storey houses on plots of over 20 feet, many semi-detached; in Honeywell Road there were larger double-fronted houses with “corbelled eaves, Gothic-style bargeboards, and carved heads” (S). The first residents were clerks, government officials and civil servants, about half with a resident servant (S).
About 130 houses went up by 1883, then building stalled, and in 1886 Cobeldick sold the undeveloped land for £45,000 to Thomas Ingram, Henry Bragg and James John Brown (S). Under their surveyor W. N. Dunn, and with John Smith as the leading builder, the streets filled up between 1889 and 1894, by which time there were more than 500 houses (S). Broomwood House itself survived until 1904, when John Smith built thirty red-brick houses on its site (S, L).
In the mid-1880s a proposal to carry Northcote Road straight through to Nightingale Lane was rejected by the District Board, which is why Montholme Road is offset from it today (L).
Grove House was the last to go. The Champion sisters lived there until 1870, and then their cousin Charlotte Ellen Blackmore and her husband the Rev. John Pincher Faunthorpe, principal of Whitelands College, until 1889 (2.2). By then their grounds were an island between the CLS streets to the north and the Chatham Road estate to the south. In 1889 they sold to Henry Nicholas Corsellis, the Wandsworth solicitor and developer (2.2, S).
The layout was approved in March 1890 (L). Corsellis's surveyor and builder, William Stanbury, laid out Kelmscott and Bramfield Roads, widened Webb's Road and Bolingbroke Grove at their ends, and carried Northcote Road through to complete its line (S, L). The southern part of Northcote Road was opened to the public in 1891 (L). Around 300 houses went up in 1890–95, nearly all “standard two-storey red-brick terraces, with double canted bays, and rather plain”, though the Stanburys' own houses had foliage decoration and iron cresting, and there are some early flats at the east end of Kelmscott Road by J. B. R. Meyring (S). The Stanburys and James George & Son built the tall gabled houses facing the common at 64–79 Bolingbroke Grove in 1890 (S). The shops on this stretch of Northcote Road, with their pedimented first-floor windows at Nos 128–145, were built by E. J. Golds in 1896 (S).
With this, the built-up area ran continuously from Battersea Rise to Nightingale Lane (L). Of the Five Houses, only Bolingbroke House, now the hospital, was still standing; it lasted until 1937 (2.1A).
The Falcon Brook, which had given the Five Houses their view across the valley, became the spine of the new district. Wylson's grid of 1868 put Northcote Road directly over its course (S), and the brook disappeared into a sewer: the District Board was already speaking of the “Falcon Brook Sewer” in 1864 (L). It did not go quietly. In the 1890s residents of Nightingale Park Crescent, whose gardens backed onto the culverted brook, suffered flooding; and in 1895 a plan for underground public conveniences in Northcote Road was dropped when the LCC warned that the sewer water could rise above their drains (L).
Northcote Road was not planned as a shopping street. Most of its early buildings were houses, but with the success of the Battersea Rise parade, retailers moved in during the 1870s: many houses were converted to shops in the late 1870s and 1880s, and new parades built (L, S). The number of occupied premises in Northcote Road rose from 41 in 1878 to 87 in 1880 (L, Annex 3). Early traders included Fred Richmond, plumber, and J. W. Frost, “oil and Italian warehouseman” (L). In 1879 the Bolingbroke Tradesmen's and Ratepayers' Association was formed to resist the charges for making up the roads (L). Costermongers' stalls led to “bitter scenes” with shopkeepers through the 1890s, until after 1900 the street traders were given a permanent home there (L, S); the Northcote Road market survives. In 1895 the Vestry bought land behind 19–31 Northcote Road for a depot, still in use (L).
Each estate drew a different population. Chatham Road began as a village of artisans and labourers. The Bolingbroke Park and Broomwood Park estates attracted “clerks of every kind” with their families, about half of them keeping a live-in servant (S). The detached and semi-detached houses on Bolingbroke Grove, Nightingale Park and Nightingale Lane were for wealthier merchants and professionals (S). Later, as houses got smaller, tradesmen and shopkeepers came in greater numbers (S). Battersea's population grew from 54,016 in 1871 to 107,199 in 1881 and 150,048 in 1891 (L).
Churches, schools and halls followed the houses. St Mark's, Battersea Rise, began as an iron church in 1868 and was consecrated in its permanent form, designed by William White, in 1874; St Michael's grew from an iron church of 1872 to the permanent church of 1880–81; St Luke's, Nightingale Lane, began with St Mark's old iron church in 1874 (L). There were a United Methodist church in Mallinson Road (1878), a Strict Baptist chapel in Chatham Road (1877), the Baptist church at the corner of Northcote and Wakehurst Roads by E. W. Mountford (1887–89), and Broomwood Road Methodist church (1899) (L). Board schools opened in Belleville Road in 1877 and in Honeywell Road in the 1890s (L). Much of this owed its existence to one man, Canon John Erskine Clarke, vicar of Battersea from 1872, who also saved Bolingbroke House for a hospital (L, S).
The district has kept its Victorian character remarkably well. The main losses have been around Chatham Road, where Darley Road disappeared in the redevelopment of 1971–74 and Abyssinia Road was closed in 1977 (L). In the 20th century the area became “a large new dormitory of middle-class housing”, and more recently it has undergone “comprehensive gentrification” (S). The Five Houses themselves are remembered in a few street names – Dent's Road, Gorst Road, Morella Road – in the stable block at 1b Gorst Road and a stretch of old wall, and in the line of Bolingbroke Grove itself.
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| 1852 | Death of Elizabeth Hoper; Bolingbroke Grove House estate sold (1853 or 1855) to the National Freehold Land Society |
| 1855 | Metropolis Management Act: Metropolitan and Wandsworth District Boards of Works |
| 1857–58 | First houses in Chatham Road |
| 1858 | Willis estate (Bolingbroke House and Grove House) offered in fourteen lots; Henry Wheeler buys Bolingbroke House |
| 1860 | St Mary's Cemetery opens |
| 1863 | Clapham Junction opens; Auckland and Middleton Roads approved |
| 1864 | James Lord demolishes Bolingbroke Grove House |
| 1866 | Darley and Swaby Roads approved; Chatham Road adopted |
| 1867 | Death of Mary Dent |
| 1868 | Conservative Land Society buys Wheeler's land; Bolingbroke Park estate laid out; Dent estate fails to sell |
| 1870–71 | Lord v. Todd in Chancery; Lord in liquidation |
| 1874 | John Gorst buys Dent's House |
| 1875 | Appleby buys 21 acres of the Dent estate; Bolingbroke Park extended south |
| 1876–80 | Bolingbroke House bought by Erskine Clarke and opened as a pay hospital |
| 1878–80 | Last phase of Bolingbroke Park (Belleville and Wakehurst Roads) |
| 1880 | Broomwood Park estate sold to John Cobeldick; The Elms demolished |
| 1881–84 | Dent's House demolished; Dent's and Gorst Roads built |
| 1882 | Nightingale Park estate (Granard, Morella, Roy Roads) |
| 1889–95 | Grove House sold to Corsellis and demolished; Kelmscott and Bramfield Roads; Northcote Road completed (opened 1891) |
| 1904 | Broomwood House demolished |
| 1937 | Bolingbroke House demolished |
Roger Logan, Between the Commons: South Battersea's Formative Years, 1851–1900 (Wandsworth Historical Society, Wandsworth Paper 15; first published as South Battersea). Our transcription; its sketch-maps as a sequence.
Survey of London, vol. 50, Battersea, Part 2: Houses and Housing, ed. Colin Thom (Yale University Press, 2013), chapter 18, “Between the Commons”; draft text at UCL Bartlett.
Keith Bailey, “Developing Victorian Battersea: The Story of James Lord and George Todd, Junior”, The London Journal, 40:1 (2015), pp. 56–79.
Timothy Walker, Twixt the Commons: The Development of a Victorian Suburb (2010). Transcribed excerpts on this site; not yet drawn on in this draft.