[Notes to the Alan Godfrey edition of 2011?]
London Sheet 124
After the initial shock of so many fields and farms and so few landmarks, the most striking thing about this map is its linearity. The River Wandle, Garratt Lane, Wandsworth Lane and its northern continuations are all running south-north, with Burntwood Lane-Bellevue Road-Nightingale Lane providing the solitary west-east link.
The Wandle, which flows into the Thames on the next map north, has defined Wandsworth's history and is the obvious place to start. The river is unusually fast-flowing and was famed for its noise, clarity and power. Its OE name Hlidaburna, or noisy brook, had become Lodeburn by the 13th century and Lutbourne by 1469 but in the 16th century it was renamed Wandle, in a back-formation from Wandsworth (also OE, Wendel's enclosed settlement).
Fish and fishermen were happy here: Izaak Walton described the Wandle's fishful qualities and marbled trout, but the river was also ideally but incompatibly suited to mills. An 1852 report stated that the trout had disappeared earlier in the century because a fire at an oil mill had killed them and replacements were unable to return past the mill weirs.
The Wandle's speed had always coped with most of the mills' by-products but from the mid-century increasing water abstraction and sewage pollution from upstream Croydon not only destroyed the river's charm but also began to threaten the mills.
Most of the local mills were round the river mouth in Wandsworth Town but several of the best known and, not coincidentally, least socially desirable were at a distance. The Garratt Mill started in the 1650s or '60s as James Lloyd's gunpowder mill and by 1687 had become the second largest source of gunpowder in England, but from the 1730s until at least 1853 it was the (linseed) oil mill that did for the fish. The process was shockingly noisy but highly profitable, not least because graziers paid enough for the 'refuse of the seed' to cover all the production costs. In the early 1860s it briefly became the more pleasant paper mill shown here, but by 1873 it was a bone mill. It had been rebuilt on a smaller scale by 1893 and was demolished c.1899.
The Dunts Hill mill was producing parchment in 1832 but by the mid-1860s the complex was housing both a flock mill and the last in Wandsworth's distinguished but otherwise defunct list of Calico, Print and Dye Works. In the flock mill all types of woollen rags, from carpets to washing clouts, were put through revolving many-toothed breakers and then through carding machines. Kapok, the seed of the Javanese silk- cotton tree, was also carded to produce stuffing, 'its lightness, immunity from moth, softness and elasticity render[ing] it superior to all but the very best qualities of feathers, wool and hair'. The factory had abandoned water power by 1919 but lasted until 1940.
The mills also encouraged other industries to the area. The Manure Factory shown here would soon be joined by Bendon Vale on the north and the Riversdale Works to the south, where from c.1880 to 1908 fireworks were produced in scattered sheds to limit the fire risk. Three women workers died in an explosion there in 1888.
The mills needed transport for heavy goods but the Wandle's speed and many weirs made it unnavigable and Garratt Lane and, just west of the river and map, Merton Road/Durnsford Road were narrow. The canal proposed in 1799 would have taken too much water-power from the river, so instead in 1801-3 the Surrey Iron Railway was built just to the east, along an 8-mile track from Croydon to the river mouth and with a spur for the Garratt oil mill. This was the world's first public railway, horse-drawn and purely for goods, with tolls per ton-mile set at 2d for dung, 3d for other manures and building materials, 4d for metals, coal, corn, seeds, flour and malt, and 6d for other categories. It was revolutionary but never profitable; in 1844 plans to sell the section from Carshalton to Allfarthing Lane to the Brighton railway foundered, in 1845 rails from one track were being used to repair the other and in 1846 the line closed and almost every trace quickly vanished.
Industry made Garratt Lane busy but distinctly non-elite. Despite Upper Wandle House (1792 and extant) almost all the domestic buildings shown here were workers' cottages. The hamlet at Garratt, which predated the first mill, grew during the 18th century but not thereafter and the 1851 census confirms that virtually all its inhabitants were labourers. There are 1890s photos of weatherboarded houses, all now swept away, which leaves the Leather Bottle the hamlet's sole survivor and only enjoyable building on a particularly bleak stretch of road. It existed by 1721 and at least from 1786 to 1830 was the only outlier of Wandsworth's 22 permitted pubs; it has also, truly remarkably, escaped a post-18th-century rebuild.
The Leather Bottle played a central role in the once-famous elections of the Mayor of Garratt. These had probably started in the 1740s but achieved national prominence after Samuel Foote's farce, The Mayor of Garret, was published in 1764. By 1768 candidates were also coming from London and its environs and by the 1780s they walked or rode from Southwark to Wandsworth Town before parading in lavish costumes down Garratt Lane accompanied by the Clerk, the Recorder and the Master of Horse at the head of the Garratt Cavalry, a troop of 40 boys mounted on ponies. Pub landlords helped fund the costumes and crowds estimated at 20,000 did their reciprocal best to drink the pubs dry.
The candidates who mounted the rickety hustings on Garratt Green were always poor tradesmen with quick wits and often with distinctive physical deformities and/or their own problems with drink. As soon as the event grew beyond the purely local it was associated with radical politics and John Wilkes and his supporters wrote some of the addresses, all of which routinely stressed patriotism and loyalty to the king but protested against the labouring classes' economic hardship and lack of liberty. The last mayor was Sir Harry Dimsdale, in reality Henry Dinsdale, "a deformed dwarf...who used to cry muffins in the streets about St Anne's Soho", who was elected in 1796 and 1804, this second time as the Emperor Anti-Napoleon and Emperor of Garratt. But even by 1796 the after-shocks of the French Revolution meant that the whole event had become associated with the mindless mob and lost both its general popularity and patrician and radical support. An attempt at a revival failed in 1826.
The labouring classes' hardships of course continued. Just north of the Manure Factory, between plots 453-4, the map shows the first few houses in Lydden Road, which would soon be joined on the west and north by Lydden Grove and Wardley Road. When Charles Booth produced his poverty map in 1898-9 he was graphically damning about these streets, which were slum-cleared for industry in the 1950s. Both banks of the Wandle now contain industrial estates and parks, among the latter King George's Park, Garratt Park and, within the corner of Wimbledon shown here, Durnsford Recreation Ground.
Wandsworth's boundaries both external and internal have always been difficult to explain, as have those of its neighbours. It became a separate parish in the 12th or 13th century and parts of three adjacent parishes are also shown: Wimbledon, Battersea and Streatham. The boundary with Battersea is marked as Undefined because when it was surveyed there were no landmark features, but this and the ruler- straightness are indications that this was not actually a survey but a relatively late apportionment of the common whose grazing and other benefits had previously been shared. Such sharing was frequent across commons but particularly likely when both sides belonged to the same lord of the manor. Wandsworth was actually part of Battersea manor (which also at one stage, incidentally, included parts of Streatham and Tooting).
Battersea & Wandsworth was given to Westminster Abbey shortly after 1066 and remained a single manor when it passed to lay owners after the abbey's dissolution in 1540. Even by 1066, though, it included several estates which soon coalesced into sub-manors, among them Allfarthing and Dunsford.
A map of Allfarthing made in 1640 shows a solid block from Burntwood Lane northward to Allfarthing Lane (just north of this map) and from the Wandle east to the common. The fields were already enclosed but some of Burnt Wood remained, albeit reduced by (at the very least) Burntwood Closes and Fursey Closes. Burntwood Farm, taken out of Allfarthing, first appears in the early 18th century.
Dunsford's lands were west of the river and its owner also usually held the Garratt estate which comprised Springfield (earlier Garratt) Farm, the fields below Burntwood Lane and meadows along the Wandle. Tenants of all the manors had defined pasture and wood rights in the commons and the sub-manors had a few of the strips in Wandsworth's two large open fields, of which South Field survives in the place-name shown in the map's NW margin. By 1868 Earlsfield was still uninvented.
In 1828 the lord of the manor, George, 2nd Earl Spencer (1758-1834), tried to enclose the remaining strips in South and North Fields. People living in this map's area were scarcely affected but probably joined the vigorous opposition which suspected that this was a prelude to trying to enclose the commons. There had already been small-scale enclosures, notably Allfarthing Piece, enclosed in 1802 and still in 1868 containing orchards (the block east of Burntwood House, developed by 1893 as Routh Road and its neighbours). But the threat of total enclosure increased as the century progressed and in asserting their absolute rights the Spencers had serious form. John, the 1st Earl (1734-83), who inherited Wimbledon manor in 1744, managed in 1758 to buy a large part of Dunsford and add both it and part of Wandsworth West Common into his extended Wimbledon Park. He then bought the manor of Battersea & Wandsworth in 1763 and took more of West Common in 1782.
The 2nd Earl bought Allfarthing in 1816 and in 1825 was one of the Battersea Bridge proprietors who persuaded Battersea vestry to allow a 25' wide road across from Trinity Road to Five Houses Lane, now Bolingbroke Grove. This became St James's Road (since 1940 St James's Drive) whose northern section above Bellevue Road was, as the map neatly shows, destroyed by the railway. The Spencers sold the land for the 1838 L&SWR line (which cuts across the northern part of the common) and for the Brighton & South Coast's West End & Crystal Palace line that opened in 1854. The 4th Earl, who had a mansion in St James', was equally happy in 1850 to sell 20 acres of common to its parish's Governors and Directors of the Poor for their pauper industrial school.
Meanwhile in 1848 Henry McKellar of Wandsworth Lodge allegedly obtained manor court permission to enclose 5 acres but took 20. He claimed gypsies as his (very standard) excuse but an opponent noted "he rather encouraged these encampments by giving the gypsies beer, and then made it an excuse for his enclosures". Thanks to him and Lord Spencer almost all the common below Bellevue Road vanished between 1848 and 1856. A petition to Lord Spencer in 1863 sounds dangerously close to hens requesting a fox to guard their coop, but luckily the fox's attention was firmly focussed on Wimbledon so he merely declined to help. In 1868, when overall only 150 acres out of 400 were left, the prospect that "land-grabbers and jerry-builders would soon have joined hands on the last square foot of earth" was very real.
With hindsight this was the low-point. Powerful support for preserving London's commons was rapidly growing and although the legal method had to be by defence of manorial tenants' rights, the real and urgent motivation was to keep some wide open spaces for London's crowded masses. In 1864 Lord Spencer was thwarted in his attempt to enclose most of Wimbledon Common. Despite the permissive Metropolitan Commons Act of 1866, a petition in 1868 to the Metropolitan Board of Works still failed, but in 1870 Wandsworth's Common Defence Committee was formed and the Earl, presumably realising he was now unlikely to win any claim to exclusive rights, agreed to negotiate. He asked for £500 and settled for £250, and the common's preservation was enshrined in an Act of 1871. Its southern end therefore survives almost exactly within the borders shown here, although the section above the railway and below Nightingale Lane has gone. Some overdue maintenance included turning the other gravel pits into ponds, and some parts of the common were used for grazing, mainly by Scottish shepherds, until the 1920s when motor traffic started delivering too many fatalities to their sheep and dogs.
St James's Westminster Industrial School opened in 1851. It was bought by the Wandsworth & Clapham Poor Law Union in 1910 and rebuilt as a workhouse infirmary, became an ordinary hospital in the 1920s and closed in 1988; the replacement housing estate opened in 1995. This map's 1893 edition makes it extremely obvious that the area received more than its share of awkward institutions. The Union workhouse was transferred to Garratt Lane from Battersea in 1886 (and the buildings finally demolished in 1970) so its absence here is accurate. Less explicably, there is no indication that the Surrey House of Correction occupied any of the land at the northern map edge between the L&SWR line and Alma Road. Built in 1849-51, it came under Government control in 1877 and became Wandsworth Prison.
The earliest and most obvious institution is the Surrey County Lunatic Asylum. Henry Perkins (1779-1855), a wealthy Southwark brewer, bought the old Garratt estate in 1815 and erected a new mansion, Springfield, but then decided to move to Dover and sold out to the Surrey magistrates in 1838 for £8,985. The mansion went (although the icehouse survives within the grounds of Burntwood School) and the purpose-built, state of the art 350-bed hospital opened in June 1841. In the initial six months patient numbers climbed from 299 to 385 and the first of many extensions was added in 1849. When Wandsworth went into the new London County Council in 1888 the hospital was renamed the Wandsworth Asylum. During World War I it became Springfield War Hospital, a pioneer in the attempted treatment of shell shock, and was renamed Springfield Mental Hospital thereafter.
The farm buildings survived because they served the farmland, which was worked by patients as therapy. By 1950 there were still 50 cows, poultry, pigs, an orchard and a vegetable garden but in 1951-4 the LCC removed the land to build Burntwood School and a housing estate. As part of the general running down of mental hospitals in the 1990s, another tranche of land became a golf course in 1992 and although Springfield University Hospital is set to continue, further site redevelopment is expected.
Springfield took a long while to attract any housing but other institutions were quicker. Alma Terrace was part of a small area of 1850s prison-related development. By 1878 a St James' churchwarden noted smugly that his parish's Industrial School had brought "population...changing in the course of a comparatively few years this out-of-the-way corner of a wild heath into a piece of singularly eligible building land". Similarly the bridge proprietors' new road had become a "leading public thoroughfare...by common consent, as it were, named St James's Road". Thanks to Trinity church (1855, designed by Salvin) the name of the original leading thoroughfare is shown as it shifts from Wandsworth Lane to Trinity Road, a process completed in 1879.
Development was not in fact Henry McKellar's intention when he enlarged his house's grounds at the expense of the common but at his death in 1863 the whole estate was swiftly sold. Two of the usual land companies started building for the growing numbers of the respectable working and lower middle classes and the first streets and pubs are shown. McKellar's house, late 18th-century Wandsworth Lodge, was soon demolished and the three 19th-century Burntwood mansions also became too big to survive in a modest area. Burntwood House had gone by 1893; the other three vanished a little later and are commemorated by street names.
St James's was combined with neighbouring parishes into the Westminster Poor Law Union in 1868 and in 1870 the disgruntled vestry sold the school and 7 of the original 20 acres to the Union. The vestry intended to develop the rest, the profits to be devoted to charitable purposes, but because the common's preservation rapidly pushed up land prices it was told it must capitalise and sell the land as freehold. In 1878 the 14'2 acres acquired in 1850 for £30 an acre fetched £1,000 an acre and by the end of the year the plans for the surrounding stretches of road were approved. The houses closest to the new consumptive ward and mortuary were cheapest.
The map shows two railway lines but no stations. In fact the Crystal Palace line's temporary 'West End' terminus had briefly been on the north side of Bellevue Road but was closed when the track reached Chelsea Bridge in 1858. The new Wandsworth Common station south of the road opened in 1869. On the L&SWR line there was no station between Wimbledon and Clapham Junction until Earlsfield & Summers Town (now simply Earlsfield) opened in 1884. Here too the eventual station reflected suburban growth rather than forming it, the long-established but poor hamlets of Summerstown (just S of the map), Garratt and Duntshill having remained unattractive to commuters and to railway companies. In 1868, however, Robert Davis, whose wife's maiden name was Earl, bought Elim Lodge in Allfarthing Lane and soon added a new house which he called Earlsfield. In 1876 he acquired another 59 acres and began building, and it was Earlsfield Road, authorised in 1878 and running from Garratt Lane along the northern side of the railway, that gave the area its name. In 1885 the British Land Company bought the lower part of Davis's land and the building pace quickened, but only north of the track.
By 1893 and this map's next survey the only newcomers south of the track in the fields between Garratt Lane and Burntwood Grange were some staff houses round the prison perimeter; Wandsworth Cemetery (1878); Magdalen Road, put through in the late 1870s but still totally undeveloped; St Andrew's church and vicarage (1889-90); and the Board School at Garratt (1885, destroyed in 1940). Magdalen College Oxford, which by then owned much of the area, was obviously in no hurry to capitalise, and the last of the fields above Burntwood Lane only vanished in the 1930s.
Who in 1868 could have guessed that the industries, hamlets, farms and most of the institutions would disappear but the common survive?
Pamela Taylor October 2014
Notes
Principal sources and further reading: C.T.Davies, industries of Wandsworth (1898 but republished with introduction by Derek Bayliss 1983); Rita Ensing, 'Some Field- and Place-Names of Wandsworth', Wandsworth Historian 52, Spring 1987; Dorian Gerhold, Wandsworth Past (Historical Publications 1998); Survey of London: Battersea (vols 49-50, English Heritage 2013); Pamela Taylor, 'Wandsworth, Putney and Wimbledon: the Battersea bounds west of the Wandle', Wandsworth Historian 89, Spring 2010; various websites.
The publisher is grateful to the National Library of Scotland for their help and for permission to reprint the map. The cover photograph is from the collection of Alan Godfrey Maps.