If it hadn't been for John Buckmaster, you would not be reading this book. If you (or your friends) live near Wandsworth Common, without John Buckmaster you (they) wouldn't be here now. It's even possible that there would be nowhere called "Wandsworth Common" at all, except (just possibly) a railway station.
If you try to imagine an alternative universe where John Buckmaster had not come to live in Battersea around 1850 — if he had settled somewhere else, or chosen to live a quiet life, or had devoted himself to something else — then Wandsworth Common would not exist, or would be nothing like as lovely as it is today. (And there would certainly not be [eight] estate agents on Bellevue Road.)
This is quite a claim, but I think I can substantiate it.
This book has been put together to [explain and] celebrate a key event in our history — the passing of the Wandsworth Common Act of 1871 that "for ever protected... " [find/complete the quote from the 1871 Act, or its preamble]
I'm not saying for a moment that John Buckmaster alone is responsible for this. On the contrary, his peculiar genius was to inspire, and educate, and focus the activities of a quite enormous number of people — people of every class, [condition], and political persuasion... radicals and conservatives [improve]. He combines in one person the general, the foot soldier, the diplomat, the lawyer, the social worker, the advertising copywriter, the ultimate PR practitioner.
And, let's face it, he had prodigious powers of getting up people's noses — to annoy and irritate and frustrate the powerful (notably the lord of the local manors, Earl Spencer) and their agents — certain lawyers and local property speculators. So much so that they were eventually forced to surrender.
We could think about what we would certainly have lost. Who today rejoices in their home near "Stockwell Common", or "Garratt Little Common", or "Sydenham Common", or "Latchmere Common", or "Plough Green", or "Wimbledon Green"?
Why not? Because all of these open spaces (and many others in south London) have utterly disappeared. There is nothing left of them physically. And there is nobody left alive who recalls their beauty. Nobody can walk and play and jog on them, or exercise their dog, or admire the fine trees, or build camps, or fish the lake, or spot birds, butterflies and bats [improve/tidy up]
But it wasn't like that in Battersea and Wandsworth a hundred and fifty years ago. People could see all these beautiful areas vanishing in front of their eyes — so they fought tooth and nail for any that remained.
Without local (and national) agitation, involving demonstrations, riots, petitions, deputations, court cases, the breaking down of fences and the like — today there would be no Wimbledon Common or Putney Heath, or Hampstead Heath, or Epping Forest, or Barnes Common, or Tooting Common... The list is almost endless. And it includes Wandsworth Common.
Which brings us back to John Buckmaster./p>
Precisely because he saw the inevitable tendencies of modern development ... the population that was growing so rapidly (mainly from new arrivals to London), the new transport networks (that enabled people to work in one place but live in another many miles away), the new expectations of decent housing and more comfortable home life (no longer the filthy tenements and fever-riden courts).
Buckmaster realised that without [...action] Wandsworth Common was doomed. Why? Because it was so green and airy and had such fine views all around. It was "rus in urbe" — the Latin ideal of countryside in the city. Above all, it was healthy. The winds blew away the "miasmas" or clouds of bad smells that caused disease. The water was clean and pure, hence typhoid, cholera and dysentery were less prevalent. The trees and other vegetation... It gave the greatest opportunity for people to participate in sports and other leisure activities — opportunities they simply could not experience closer in to the overcrowded city.
It was just the sort of area any Victorian would want their children to grow up in. Just like today, in fact.
But that brought with it a [devastating contradiction]. Its very desirability as a location meant new opportunities for landowners, lawyers and speculative builders (and semi-charitable educational institutions, churches, prisons, hospitals, workhouses, cemeteries). At the rate things were changing, within a decade or so everything that had brought people here would have been destroyed.
It was an social and environmental catastrophe in the making.
So far as possible, I will let Buckmaster tell his own story, only intruding to explain certain obscure passages and fill in some gaps... One of the reasons for this is that Buckmaster was writing under a pseudonym ("John Buckley"), he gives no dates, and rarely gives actual places or people their true name (rather like Thomas Hardy in his novels — Hardy lived on the other side of Wandsworth Common from Buckmaster at the end of the 1870s).