The History of Wandsworth Common

IN PROGRESS — NOT FOR PUBLICATION

The Keith Bailey Archive
Building Histories

Build 6 — 21 September 2026

About Keith Bailey

Starting in the 1960s as a schoolboy living in Putney, Keith has researched and written numerous studies of the historical geography of Wandsworth, Battersea and the surrounding parishes of south-west London — from Anglo-Saxon land tenure, place-names and medieval manorial records through to the Victorian and Edwardian building trade that shaped the area's suburbs.

His magisterial 1995 study, The Metamorphosis of Battersea, 1800–1914: A Building History, was widely referenced in Survey of London: Battersea (vols. 49–50, ed. Andrew Saint & Colin Thom, Yale University Press, 2013).

The thesis is a comprehensive empirical study of how Battersea — in 1800 a rural parish of market gardens, farmland and scattered riverside industry — became, by the outbreak of the First World War, a densely built Victorian and Edwardian suburb of working- and middle-class housing. It traces that transformation through the piecemeal break-up of the area's old manorial estates, including land held by the Spencer family, as they were sold and leased off in stages for development, and examines how the railways — above all the growth of Clapham Junction — drove and shaped the pace of suburban growth.

It also gives detailed profiles of the speculative builders responsible for that development, from small local craftsmen to substantial developers such as Alfred Heaver, looking at how they raised capital, laid out their estates into street grids and financed construction. Alongside this, the thesis charts the changing character of Battersea's housing stock itself, from the larger villas of the mid-Victorian decades to the higher-density terraces, maisonettes and board schools built to house its rapidly growing population by the late-Victorian and Edwardian period.

Keith has been a longtime contributor to the Wandsworth Historical Society, writing for its journal The Wandsworth Historian on subjects from Anglo-Saxon and Domesday-era Wandsworth — including The Abbey, the Monk and Domesday Wandsworth — to Victorian suburban building, and publishing studies and research guides such as Battersea New Town: A Study of Local Building Development, 1790–1870 (1980), Building & Architectural History: A Guide to Sources, and The Building of the Southfields Grid. His article Putney in the Dark Ages appeared in London Archaeologist.

The essays gathered below — on Wandsworth's Victorian and Edwardian builders, estates and streets — are drawn from his wider research and are published here with his agreement.

The Metamorphosis of Battersea, 1840-1914 (1995)

The appendices below, which are fully searchable, are drawn from Keith’s PhD thesis, The Metamorphosis of Battersea, 1800–1914: A Building History (The Open University, 1995). The full thesis can be downloaded from Open Research Online.

— Appendix 3A: Battersea Builders Master List, 1840–1914 [searchable database of 1,409 builders]

— Appendix 3B: Battersea Builders’ Biographies [60 selected builders]

— Appendix 4: Battersea Estate Development Directory, 1780–1908 [searchable register of 209 building estates]