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What do you call it? The Lake? The Long Pond? The Dog Pond? Or just "The Pond", as in "Let's go up the pond". This is how I referred to it when I was a child. The Pond.
— Maps of the lake's development
— Rain — what happens to the water that falls on the Common?
— The lie of the land — height, slope, tilt etc . . .
— Origins in a small gravel pit — N.B. You can see a suggestion of the edges of the pit in some maps — gravel-digging employed 50 or 60 people — probably v. poorly paid — and work was hazardous.
[e.g. of man killed by collapse.]
Gravel extraction was a major source of revenue for the Earls Spencer — and the principal justification for the money they extracted annually from the people of Battersea and Wandsworth for ceding their rights over the Common.
Spencer demanded £500 annually for the loss of his "rights" to extract gravel.
The main forces in the campaign to protect the Common - The ?? — Joh Buckmaster, George Lefebvre, Robert Hunter and others — argued that no money at all should be given to the Spencers since they didn't "own" the Common anyway. And they forfeited all traditional rights when they ceased to look after it.
In the end, £250 was agreed upon - a significant amount of money to extract from the the people of Battersea and Wandsworth. But this was not all he took - AND the right to fill in the Black Sea and enclose the old Wilson estate at the North-west of the `Common to build an affluent ghetto around a private park - hence "Spencer Park".
Hence this lake is intimately connected with Spencer Park.
— Origin, type, distribution etc of gravel and sand
— John Buckmaster's two gravel diggers
— Why doesn't the water drain out? Is it puddled?
— To pond or not to pond? [1873?]
— Edward Thomas writes about the Long Pond [sandy, gravelly banks and Robinson Crusoe, Backaruffs [?]]
— Photographs of children in and around the pond — Cooling their Tootsies —
— Perambulating middle classes in their finery
— The new island in the Long Pond
— The new Stone Bridge [built by unemployed?]
— Fishing
— Stocking the pond with tiddlers, 1930
— Why the two ponds have been separated
— Grissel — hero dog
— A very favourite place to take photographs / theme for postcards — summer and winter
— Dorrett and Martin photos of lake
— Killer swans — two stories?
— My memories [water vole / stuck boat / fishing for pike / run over by a bicycle and hospitalised in St James's / revising for my A levels / Rebekah drops her new watch / trying to walk a beam by the bridge, slipping and falling in ]
— Radical woman who drowned — murdered?
— Benches [Spaniers and adjacent bench? Simon's wife? A fisherman . . . ]
— Revd Theodore Wood, Dwellers in the Pond
— Pike
— Carp
— [Eels?]]
— TITLE
LAKE & RUSTIC BRIDGE — PICS & HISTORY
I have added some images
They need tidying up, but some nice pics, though
http://www.chargeofthelightbrigade.com/wandsworth_common/images/images_lake/index_images_lake.html
http://www.chargeofthelightbrigade.com/wandsworth_common/images/images_rustic_bridge/index_images_rustic_bridge.html
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Clearly the "lake" must have been a pretty dreary place — numerous photographs/postcards show how barren and worn down the edges were . . . kids often look mournful
http://www.chargeofthelightbrigade.com/wandsworth_common/images/images_lake/pc_lake_railway_bridge_in_distance_500.jpghttp://www.chargeofthelightbrigade.com/wandsworth_common/images/images_lake/pc_lake_two_girls_paddling_500.jpg
Rustic Bridge
A "Rustic Bridge" was added [by the LCC?] — this featured in a very high proportion of all postcards of the Common around 1900
http://www.chargeofthelightbrigade.com/wandsworth_common/images/images_rustic_bridge/pc_rustic_bridge_wc_1909_1200.jpg
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A history of the lake
Lots of nice stuff on the origins of the lake in 1873, and a commentary about the conflicts over whether one should be created or not, here:
http://www.chargeofthelightbrigade.com/wandsworth_common/years/1873/1873.html
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In short:
One of the first challenges to the Conservators after the 1871 Act was whether to create a new ornamental lake, to compensate for the lovely Black Sea so recently filled in on the northern edge of the Common (and now under Earl Spencer's "Park")
There was a LOT of opposition
The Common as a whole was very very wet — covered with small ponds into which unwary people fell and drowned, many of the ponds filthy with ordure and refuse, a source of pestilential miasmas
"the pestiferous patch of malarious mud and decaying vegetable matter", "mist and miasm", "tainting the air", "the common, years ago, was famous for croup but since the ponds had been filled up . . . it had lost its fame in that respect", "The public mind is now too far advanced in its biological education . . . to tolerate the unnecessary creation of a maremma within fifteen minutes if Charing-cross, even though it be in miniature"
So why create yet another?
And who would pay for it? The Earl's cut of �250 p.a. from the halfpenny rate left very little money over for any substantial work to be done
But some local people were prepared to fund the pond / lake for general benefit — a lake would be beautiful, nice to perambulate round, nearby Battersea Park had a large ornamental lake ,
And of course lakes (and swans swimming serenely on lakes) were compulsory features in any Capability Brown-inspired English romantic landscape
But what if boys should go skinny dipping?
in summer it would be a sort of bathing place, where children and grown lads — not very choice of water or of place — would be seen undressed or partially attired, to the disgust and annoyance of the residents around, and of every lady who passed by"
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The pond may have been the remains of a gravel working but it doesn't appear at all on early maps,
It's NOT there on the Stanford map of 1862
http://www.chargeofthelightbrigade.com/wandsworth_common/maps/stanford_1862/wc_stanford_1862_web_1200.jpg
There's a rudiment on the OS of 1868 — probably a gravel working — notice also how many ponds there are, particularly opposite Bolingbroke Grove
http://www.chargeofthelightbrigade.com/wandsworth_common/maps/OS_1868/OS_WC_1869-1874_blue_water_yellow_pits_1200.jpg
http://www.chargeofthelightbrigade.com/wandsworth_common/maps/OS_1868/OS_WC_1869-1874_blue_water_yellow_pits_1200.jpg
It grows but doesn't achieve its current shape until the C20 [date?] — most obviously, there was no island in the stretch nearest to the railway line in the 1890s
http://www.chargeofthelightbrigade.com/wandsworth_common/maps/OS_1893-4/OS_1893-4_wc_blue_1200.jpg
This explains why Edward Thomas calls it "the long pond"
SUCH a fantastic, evocative picture of the pond(s) in his autobiography:
The Common, for example, offered many temptations to more irregular games and aimless rovings. For it was an uneven piece of never cultivated gravelly land. Several ponds of irregular shape and size, varying with the rainfall, had been hollowed out, perhaps by old gravel diggings. It was marshy in other places. Hawthorn and gorse clustered tall and dense in great and in little thickets. Tall elms and poplars stood about irregularly. And the level spaces suitable for cricket, football and tennis were not many.
With this variety the Common, even though the railway ran through it parallel to Bolingbroke Grove and only two or three hundred yards away from it, was large enough to provide us with many surprises and discoveries for years. We could spend a day on it without thinking it small or having to retrace our steps. We wandered about it with or without our hoops. For any kind of hiding and hunting games the thickets were excellent. We played the other games in the open spaces.
The ponds were for paddling in. One of them, a shallow irregular one, weedy and rushy-margined, lying then in some broken ground between the Three Island and the railway, was full of effets [eft, newt] and frogs. Bigger boys would torture the frogs, by cuffing, skinning or crushing them alive. The sharp penknives sank through the skin and the soft bone into the wood of the seat which was the operating table. The seat and the earth under and about it would be strewn with fragments, pale bellies slit up, and complete frogs seeming to be munching their own insides. At that time I could not have done it myself, but my horror lacked pity and turned into a kind of half-shrinking, half-gloating curiosity. I fished
[21]
for sticklebacks and gudgeon in the long pond on the far side of the railway, which owed its name of "Backaruffs" or "Pack of Roughs", so I always thought, to the poor ill-dressed boys who used to swarm to it from Battersea on Saturdays and bank holidays. I fished with a worm either tied on the cotton line or impaled on a bent pin, and put my stickleback or my rare lovely spotted gudgeon in a glass jam-jar. Once at least I did as I had seen others do, hauling a heavy fruit basket out into the pond and dragging it in full of weed and mud and the little 'blood worms' that breed in mud, and sticklebacks, even a red-throated one, but never a gudgeon. The gudgeon was so attractive, partly for its looks, perhaps chiefly for its comparative size, that many times I willingly paid a halfpenny for one and let it be believed that I had caught it. Even when dead it was hard to part with, so smooth and pure was it. I liked even its smell, yet never dreamed of eating it. There were carp, too, in this pond and in the roundish Box Pond that lay half-way between the top of our street and the railway.
By the longer pond I once saw a carp many times as big as a gudgeon in the possession of a rough: he had torn its head off to make it fit his jar. Much larger ones were talked about, caught in the Box Pond by the elder brothers of one boy. I saw them fishing there once or twice without a motion of the float in the motionless water. Once I tried there myself all alone. My expectations were huge: that I failed completely only increased my respect for the sacred pond.
http://www.chargeofthelightbrigade.com/wandsworth_common/maps/stanford_1905/stanford_1905_wc_1200.jpg
But here it is in 1913!
http://www.chargeofthelightbrigade.com/wandsworth_common/maps/os_1913/os_1913_wc_combined_blue.jpg
lake_os_1913.jpg
All best
Philip
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