← OS map, 1918
Today →
I’ve researched and written this account partly because I simply don’t remember anything about it. I recall what things were like before it existed, and of course I know about it now. But I simply cannot recall the years in between, while the .... was being constructed. For a while, I couldn’t think why not. Surely at the very least I would have remembered the great holes in the ground, the army of workers, the great diggers, the endless flow of lorries carting the gravel and clay away (where did it all go to?). If nothing else, I would have been maddeningly inconvenienced by the detours forced on the number 19 bus.
But I can’t remember a thing about any of this. In my mind, there’s just before, and there’s after.
Then I suddenly realised why — because these were exactly the years I was away from home, at university or travelling. So this Chronicle is in part an attempt at a kind of retrieval.
The construction of the widened Trinity Road, the Wandsworth roundabout and underpass between 1968 and 1972 involved the demolition of a substantial number of Victorian streets. The OS map of 1918 shows the dense terraced housing that once occupied the area now taken up by the dual carriageway and roundabout. Use the slider on the map to dissolve between the two views.
The widening and extension of Trinity Road, the digging of the canyon-like underpass, and the construction of an enormous “Squareabout” near Wandsworth Bridge were begun in 1968 and completed in 1972. The cost was what might seem to us today to be an astonishingly cheap £4 million (less than the price of some houses in the area today).
A vicarage and other buildings disappeared on North Side, and a pub (the French Horn) and a Unitarian church were lost on East Hill. Between there and the Thames, whole roads and terraces vanished or were greatly changed. South of the railway line, one side of Birdhurst Road, and all of Elmsleigh Terrace and Elmsleigh, Flavell, Huntsmoor and Geddes Roads. North of the line, York Road, Bridgefield Grove, Marl Street, Coligny and Cotman Streets, and part of Eltringham Street.
The Squareabout at the bottom of the road deserves its own special study, so we’ll leave that for another time.
Ditto the East Hill Estate, built 1926–28 on the site of the St Peter’s Hospital/Fishmongers Almshouses (see the 1918 map above). The Estate survived bombing in World War Two, and remained intact during the construction of the Trinity Road Extension, but was demolished in stages in the 1970s and gone by 1981.
The late-Victorian Eltringham School was stranded on the very edge of the Squareabout. Part of it lingered for a while afterwards, but now that too has gone. There are photographs of the school buildings in 1971 in the London Picture Archive, here and here.
Curiously, the French Horn pub had been demolished once before, but was rebuilt a few yards away to make way for Woodwell Street — named after the then-landlord, H.A. Woodwell. Before then, there was no direct way through between Trinity Road and East Hill.
The physical demolition, when it finally came, was the culmination of a much longer period of uncertainty and decay. From the late 1930s onwards, when the first Act was passed, through the war years and into the 1950s and 1960s, the streets in the path of the proposed road gradually deteriorated. Landlords stopped maintaining properties. Families moved away.
But all the while, an increasing volume of traffic was percolating through, on its way to and from Wandsworth Bridge. A few weeks ago, Fred Pearce wrote to say:
“When we first moved to Wandsworth, it was to Bramford Rd, in 1979. The old guy who ran the Royal Standard pub close by said he remembered before the Trinity Road extension to the bridge. He said the main route to the bridge then was along Bramford Rd, and such was the traffic trying to get to and from the bridge that you would sometimes have to wait several minutes to cross that road.”
As we saw last month, lifting the threat of a motorway cutting across the Common gave a huge boost to the area south of the County Arms. But what happened beyond North Side was very different.
The road scheme required the demolition of a large number of streets between East Hill and the Thames. This was not a secret: a Wandsworth Council paper of November 1967 recorded the clearance of “400 dwellings and seventy shops.” Local historian Nigel Black, whose authoritative article “The curious tale of Wandsworth’s motorways” (Wandsworth Historian, no. 106, 2018) is the essential account of the wider motorway schemes, confirmed this figure independently by comparing maps at Wandsworth Heritage Service and counting the missing houses road by road. His detailed findings are set out below.
The scale of the demolition is worth reflecting on. As Nigel points out, it was broadly comparable to the proposed Battersea section of Ringway 1, where some 1,750 homes were at risk — and which provoked fierce, sustained, nationally-reported opposition. The Trinity Road demolitions produced barely a murmur by comparison. Why? Perhaps because the scheme had been anticipated for so long that it had ceased to feel remarkable. Perhaps because the area between East Hill and the river was not, in the 1960s, regarded as fashionable or “worth saving” in the way that parts of Battersea were. Or perhaps simply because nobody was keeping count.
Whatever the reason, the people who lost their homes deserve to be remembered. Here, street by street, is what went:
| Street | Numbers demolished | Count |
|---|---|---|
| East Hill | N 28–54, S 27–37 — and a Unitarian Church | 20 |
| Birdhurst Road | E 2–68 | 34 |
| Elmsleigh Terrace | 1–5 | 5 |
| Elmsleigh Road | W 1–33, E 4–116 | 74 |
| Woodwell Street | About 12 properties | 12 |
| Wandsworth Common North Side | 82–90 | 10 |
| Flavell Road | E 1–39, W 2–42 | 41 |
| Coligny Street | E 2–20, W 1–17 | 19 |
| Eltringham Street | N 34–76, S 19–31 | 29 |
| Bridgend Road | W 2–42 | 21 |
| Cotman Street | 1–26 | 26 |
| Bramford Road | E 1–23, W 2–18 | 21 |
| York Road | N 264–294, S 383–491 | 68 |
| Total | 380 |
Source: Nigel Black, compiled from Wandsworth Council papers (council minutes, 15 November 1967) and comparison of pre- and post-construction maps at Wandsworth Heritage Service. Huntsmoor Road is not included, as it was still shown on the 1971 map, presumably awaiting a separate redevelopment scheme.
Among the larger buildings lost was part of Eltringham School and the Unitarian Church on the corner of East Hill and Elmsleigh Road — a reminder that it was not only homes and shops that were swept away, but the whole fabric of a neighbourhood.
If you know anything more about these homes and roads, or the school, or this church, please get in touch.
I must admit, I knew very little about Unitarianism, other than ....
The poet Edward Thomas has left us a remarkable account of his experience of regularly visiting there with his parents and brothers.
Edward Thomas — the poet and essayist who grew up in Wandsworth in the 1880s and 1890s — left a remarkable account of attending a Unitarian chapel with his father as a boy. The chapel in question was almost certainly the one on East Hill. His memoir The Childhood of Edward Thomas, written around 1912, describes it with the vividness of someone who had not forgotten a moment of it:
School was not an affliction, but church or chapel or Sunday school was. At an early age I did not go regularly, nor I think did my parents. They were sober reverent people without a creed, though their disbelief in Hell and the Devil almost amounted to a creed.
He used to try different chapels or different preachers, sometimes taking me with him, more especially when he had become an almost weekly attendant at a Unitarian Chapel. Here from the prickly silence of two hundred or three hundred people I gradually came to feel a mild poison steadily creeping into me on all sides. I never made a friend of any of the boys who attended there. A deathly solemnity filled the chapel.
After the service couples walked to and fro or gathered into knots on the pavement outside. The deathly solemnity was strong enough to cling about the people even there in the sunlight: some of them it accompanied to their one o’clock roast beef or mutton. But at first the Sunday-school was my particular allowance. I liked singing and liked the melodies of “Jerusalem the Golden” and “Fair waved the golden corn”, and I liked going with all the rest for the annual treat somewhere in Surrey, where I could run about in a wood, become fond of another girl or two, eat bread and butter, watercress and slices of cake and drink tea.
But Sunday was a bad day and this was the worst part of it. That deathly solemnity, whether we respected it or not, was equally thick in the schoolroom. I became accustomed to making a sort of drug of boredom. I did not rebel, but taking this poison became fairly oblivious to the good or evil that befell Jesus Christ, or Servetus, or myself.
Moreover, I did positively loathe with continuous loathing the trailing with one or more of my brothers along the Sunday streets, in our stiff Sunday clothes and our Sunday hats. I hated these clothes and hats and I felt also that they made me ridiculous in the eyes of others. If the hat was blown off by the wind it was some relief: and I could then stamp on the thing and put it down to the wind and mud. What wonder that I made no friends under this Upas-tree.
Chapel and Sunday-school were to me cruel ceremonious punishments for the freedom of Monday to Saturday. I have still a profound quiet detestation of Sunday in whatever part of England or Wales it overtakes me, but most of all in London.
There was, however, always one good thing about Sunday, and that was the biscuits, two large oval ones or one of these and two small round ones, which I found on a bedside chair upon awaking.
Edward Thomas, The Childhood of Edward Thomas (written c.1912, published posthumously 1938), chapters 31–33.
Thomas refers to “Servetus” — Michael Servetus, the Spanish theologian burned at the stake in Calvin’s Geneva for rejecting the Trinity. The reference is ironic: Thomas is noting that he was equally unmoved by the fate of a Unitarian martyr as by the orthodox hell-fire he had been spared.
So on this account, there was little to commend Edward to Sundays spent at the Unitarian chapel, other than a girl with a / voice, the singing of hymns, and of course the biscuits. But there was something there that had a profound effect on the rest of his life. It was through these visits that he was introduced to the man who would become his mentor, James Ashcroft Noble, and Edward’s future wife Helen. (I described his meeting with them at 6 Patten Road here.)
The introduction was made by the Chapel’s minister, the hymnologist W. G. Tarrant, who clearly recognised something in Edward.
William George Tarrant (1853–1928) served for decades at the Wandsworth Unitarian Church and was long-time editor of the Unitarian magazine The Inquirer. He authored several notable books, including the influential Unitarianism (1912). A hymnologist, he knew a thing or two about words — and he was also very keen on the Huguenots, and regularly preached about their ...
HUGUENOT BURIAL GROUND
MOUNT NODHERE REST MANY HUGUENOTS
WHO ON THE REVOCATION
OF THE EDICT OF NANTES
IN 1685 LEFT THEIR NATIVE
LAND FOR CONSCIENCE SAKE
AND FOUND IN WANDSWORTH
FREEDOM TO WORSHIP GOD
AFTER THEIR OWN MANNER.
THEY ESTABLISHED IMPORTANT
INDUSTRIES AND ADDED TO THE
CREDIT AND PROSPERITY OF
THE TOWN OF THEIR ADOPTION.
1911
Check the names around the base, illegible in this photograph. Presumably they’re the surnames of Huguenots who fled to Wandsworth?
Notice the phrase, “freedom to worship God after their own manner” — clearly a central tenet of Unitarianism.
Incidentally, it is to Tarrant that we owe this memorial in the Mount Nod graveyard, usually referred to as the “Huguenot Cemetery”, though it was set up (on land enclosed from the Common) without ...
I mention it also because there were fears that Mount Nod itself would have to be swept away under a slip road to speed access for traffic on the new Trinity Road extension.
It would be good to know more about this discussion ...
Helen and Edward’s first kiss, on the Common
W. G. Tarrant, the hymnologist, writer and minister of the Wandsworth Unitarian Chapel, had asked James Ashcroft Noble — one of his congregation — to take the shy young Edward Thomas under his wing and help him prepare his early writings for possible publication.
The arrangement proved a happy one. Helen Thomas recalled that her future husband, constrained and diffident by nature, responded warmly to her father’s encouragement, and they became close.
From 1895, several of the teenage Edward’s articles were accepted by a weekly paper of which Noble was co-editor, and others appeared in the Globe. Under Noble’s guidance, The Woodland Life was prepared for publication — but Noble died in 1896, before the book appeared. When it was published in 1897, Thomas inscribed it to Noble’s memory.
Here’s another story about lives changed by the new road.
My school-friend Hugh Betterton has featured a number of times already in these Chronicles. When he was in his mid-teens, he and his family had been moved out of their home on West Side, not because it stood in the way but because sufficient land was needed for a works office … in 1967? they were moved to a flat in the Fitzhugh Estate:
The location today:
As I promised last month, this is the concluding chapter in the Trinity Road story — the one about what actually happened, rather than what was planned and then quietly abandoned.
The story of the previous two months has been, in the main, a story of relief. The motorway schemes that would have driven multi-lane highways across Wandsworth Common, through Clapham Junction and along the Wandle Valley were all, one by one, dropped. Much of our area escaped remarkably lightly. But this is only the view from the south of the Common. For those living in the streets between East Hill and the Thames, the road that was built — the Wandsworth Bridge Southern Approach Road, as it was officially known — swept away their homes, their shops and their streets. Around 400 dwellings and seventy shops were demolished. Yet the protests, such as they were, barely registered.
That disproportion — the scale of demolition on the one hand, the near-silence on the other — is what strikes me most about this chapter of the story, and it is why I think it deserves to be properly recorded.
The 1871 Wandsworth Common Act had protected the Common as a whole “in perpetuity” — but it always allowed for exchange: land taken for a public purpose could be compensated by land added elsewhere. The road scheme required a strip of Common for the additional road width. In return, four areas were added to the Common:
— A long strip of the Prison Banks land in front of the prison, released by the Home Office — land the LCC had been attempting to secure since 1890.
— The rear portions of the gardens of Heathfield Gardens, whose cottages had originally been earmarked for full demolition. A public campaign and national press coverage saved the terrace itself; only the rear gardens were taken.
— The section of Marcilly Road (also known as St Ann’s Road) that crossed the Common from North Side, now grassed over and marked by an avenue of trees. (This meant that the small triangular area previously detached from the main body of the Common was now reunited with it.)
— A patch of an acre or so in front of the Royal Victoria Patriotic Building was also coopted, even though it was entirely detached from the rest of the Common.
This account is necessarily based on maps, council minutes and newspaper archives — the official record. What it lacks is the human record: the memories of the people who actually lived in Elmsleigh Road or Flavell Road or Coligny Street, or who watched their neighbourhood change around them during those long years of uncertainty.
If you — or your parents or grandparents — lived in any of the streets listed in the table above, or remember the area before and after the demolitions, I would very much like to hear from you. These are the stories that do not get into the official record, and they matter.
My warmest thanks to Nigel Black, whose research and generosity in sharing it have made this piece possible.
As I may have said before, I’d love eventually to write a history of Trinity Road as a whole. In the meantime, here’s a nice aerial view for you to scroll up and down:
So many more stories still to tell. But that’s all for now, folks.
Send me an email if you enjoyed this post / want to comment on something you’ve seen on the site / would like to know more — or just want to be kept in touch.
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— Friends of Wandsworth Common
