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Ivy House

Ordnance Survey 60-inch to the mile, c.1893. [ref/link]

(Click on image to enlarge)

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Where on earth was Ivy House?

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Finding Ivy House turned out to be quite a challenge, which surprised me. After all, Geoffrey Bevington's photographs showed it was a large house, with substantial grounds, that had been inhabited almost to the end of the nineteenth century. However, it was not quite big enough to be routinely named on most maps (even 6-inch maps, such as Stanford's). OS?

Although Ivy House was listed in several Censuses, its location (and that of its neighbouring houses) was unusually vague - partly because roads in the area were often not named, or names changed throughout the century. Moreover the modern pattern of streets was not laid out until the end of the century, when most of the terraced houses now present were built. It was only then that street names were more permanently established.

But a key problem turned out to be, of all things, a simple transcription error - the transposition of a couple of numbers in the online records.

I reasoned that Ivy House, or at least James Bevington, should feature on the Tithe Apportionment map of c.1841. It was a good guess, and very pleasing indeed when I found the Bevington family's home listed as on plot 237 but ???. But when I inspected the map, plot ??? looked much to small.

This led me up the garden path for more than a week.

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I knew from the ? Census that it was close to East Hill, but not on the Hill itself because it was described as "Wandsworth Common".

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Booth: All the large houses are gone"

I then went to Booth . . . date

The phrase " All the large houses are gone" was in itself quite hopeful.

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OS 5 feet to the mile

Finally I checked the highest resolution map that I knew of, the OS . . . .. I was fearful that Ivy House would already have disappeared by 1893, but no . . .