Attractions of the area as a whole - between two Commons - Wandsworth and Clapham - from the 1870s onwards
Increasing number of people who worked in local businesses
- e.g. factories, docks, warehouses, gasworks esp. along the river
- or commuted to work in central London, such as ET's father Philip
The reciprocal influences of transport and housing...
- regular horse drawn omnibuses (horse-drawn trams from ? Electric trams/trolleybuses from) - East Hill - St John's Hill - Lavender Hill - Battersea Rise towards Clapham
- proximity to railway stations increasingly important - the railway companies initially had little interest in local passengers - mainly the carriage of goods and longer distance travellers - but suburban stations proliferated along the lines
-
- initially so-called Clapham Common station/LSWR (1838-1863) and New Wandsworth (1858-1869) /West End of London and Crystal Palace Railway (to 1860) / London, Brighton and South Coast Railway
These small stations closed down and became consolidated ...
- Clapham Junction Station (1863)
- WC Station (1869)
(South of the river, the Northern Line opened in 1890, and then only as far as Stockwell. Reached Clapham Common 1907. The section to Clapham South, Tooting Bec and on to Morden didn't open until 1926.]
New tips - when did Arding and Hobbs open?
Arding & Hobbs was established in 1876. The original building was destroyed by a fire on 20 December 1909.[3] The present building was constructed in 1910 in an Edwardian Baroque style, and the architect was James Gibson.[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arding_%26_Hobbs]
Highly regimented laid out streets in a semi-grid
New fairly small individual houses - more widely affordable (usually rented) - with some improvements in facilities (but still, so far as I know, few indoor lavatories, and there were probably no fixed baths. - the vitreous white baths with fitted taps did not appear generally until the 1910s [ ?] [Growing up around the prison, we had a steel? Bath.
I don't know what proportion of these single houses were occupied/shared by two or more families. [Could look in the Censuses. Ds Tim Walker discuss this?]
But there are also a number of purpose-built upstairs/downstairs houses with greater separation [like Atheldene Rd, what does Helen call them?]
Lots of churches and chapels (Anglican, Baptist, Methodist, a Welsh chapel off St John's Road.
Some, such as St. Mark's, were initially prefabricated tin tabernacles. Built bricks and mortar 1872-1874?
[Came from St ? In Leigham Court Road.. dismantled and taken to St Luke's 1874...]
St Luke's - today's church was built around this metal version 1881-1888, which was dismantled and probably taken elsewhere - or was it clapped out by then, having served three churches.
https://www.stlukeschurch.org.uk/history.htm
Edward's home on Wakehurst Road - a large Baptist Church practically next door - This church originated in a mission chapel in Chatham road and moved to the current church ca. 1882.
[so was built while ET was living o Wakehurst Road]
https://www.surreygraveyards.org.uk/wandsworth/batterseanoerthcote.shtml
Overall
- increased privatisation of families
- the obsession with position and conformity and respectability
- except of course in the Great Commonwealth of the streets
- and of course Wandsworth Common
Attractions of the Common itself
- the 1871 Act had protected the Common from further building - so although there was infixing after the rapid destruction o of the large houses and gardens, the open Common was inviolable
The Common was higher than the surrounding streets
- gravel - widely believed to be healthier than the clay elsewhere
- air - above all - open air - where you could breathe deeply - blow your cobwebs away
[Remember Kanthack!
Nature - Thursday 31 December 1896
Alfredo Antunes Kanthack, the brilliant young Brazilian scientist who counted bacteria on Wandsworth Common
"[I]n the open country air there are, other things being equal, considerably less micro-organisms than in the dusty streets of London. Thus there is an extraordinary difference between the air in Oxford Street and on Wandsworth Common . . . A plate exposed in Oxford Street would be covered with colonies, while a plate exposed on Wandsworth Common would show only a few."
Alfredo Antunes Kanthack lecturing, c.1898.
Date and place unknown [to be followed up at the Wellcome Collection. These images here and here.]
Dr. A. A. Kanthack, Lecturer on Pathology, St. Bartholomew's Hospital, writes:
THE surface of the earth is inhabited by bacteria: wherever there is dead organic matter, wherever there are human or animal excreta, wherever decomposition is going on, in stagnating or in flowing water, within our houses and without, bacteria collect. They are so widely distributed that practically everywhere we are surrounded by these minute vegetable cells. From the bacteriological standpoint we live amongst de-composing matter...
Dust is laden with bacteria, and since a great part of dust is derived from decomposing matter, it follows that, although we do not realise it, we are living in an atmosphere of decomposition.
The air which we breathe, therefore, contains bacteria. These vary in amount with certain conditions. If the air is calm their number diminishes, but if there is wind or draught, they may be present in enormous numbers. Again, in the open country air there are, other things being equal, considerably less micro-organisms than in the dusty streets of London.
Thus there is an extraordinary difference between the air in Oxford Street and on Wandsworth Common.
The air may be roughly tested by coating sterile plates of glass with gelatine, and exposing them for a given time in the locality which we wish to examine. The bacteria will fall on the surface of the gelatine, and on incubation at a suitable temperature they will develop into visible colonies which can be readily counted . . .
A plate exposed in Oxford Street would be covered with colonies, while a plate exposed on Wandsworth Common would show only a few . . .
The bacterial flora of air varies considerably. The lady shopping in Oxford Street will inhale more bacteria than the boy who runs about on Wandsworth Common . . . "
But why Wandsworth Common?
Perhaps no explanation is needed. Close as it is to built-up London, it was famously much airier and higher here, and demonstrably much healthier. This had been stressed e.g. in novels and adverts for houses for more than a century. It had probably encouraged many people to move here.
[nb coal fires, coal-fired railway trains and coal-fired power stations nearby led to dense fogs]
- the late Victorians were increasingly sport-minded - hence the numerous tennis clubs, bowls clubs, cricket grounds, rugby / football pitches [the Common was the venue for public games, but most of the private clubs were on the other side of the Common [map]
- nb unlike a park, the Common was accessible all round, day and night (perhaps at some risk, but one most people thought was worth taking)
- and you were free to traverse it in which ever direction you pleased
- walking was considered almost a "Great British Liberty"
[Many of the new small houses had little or no garden in front or behind them.
- hence there were designated grounds on which people could beat their carpets [and hang out washing?]
- a plentiful supply of servants
- people could perambulate on the Common in their best clothes
- hence surfaced paths
- ornamental features such as the two lakes and the Rustic Bridge
- ice skating
(Nb pressures to "parkify" the Common [with fences round and within]
vs to imitate rural life - run in urge - a vivid personal memory for a large number of adults, though obviously decreasingly so because children born here
- a breeding ground - then as now between the Commons could have been called Nappy Valley [ good to look at censuses - but to give one example, Edward Thomas's own family
- lighting at night on some routes
- benches
- the
- children could run free
- there was minimal adult supervision, but there was some - parkies - from when? [ET never mentions them, does he?]
- local elementary schools - state schools, such as the new Board School Belleville opens 187? (Honeywell followed in 189?)
- girls small secondaries such as [upper tooting?], ? At Clapham Common, then - Wimbledon High from 187?
- also numerous private schools. [Halbrake,
But for ET personally the Common it inspired his love of birds, flowers, fishing
And as it was tamed, and the fields were infilled with houses...
An inspiration / safe starting point from which to walk out to - to Morden and Merton (then still country), to Wimbledon Common (also protected I 1871, but larger, with more remote areas where the teenage Edward and Helen Noble would first make love, to Richmond Park, Kingston and the Thames...
Many of the features I've mentioned above can be found in his writing
His essays, short stories, his one novel (The Happy Go-Lucky Morgans, which starts...), and of course ultimately his poetry
There are no poems directly referring to the Common and its immediately surroundings, so far as I know, but there are - I think - numerous resonances
- his poem about hanging dead birds reminds us that the Prison was a powerful presence on one edge of the Common - in some years there were no executions but in?? And ?? There were 3 a year. I remember personally the pall over the area on execution days (though maybe I felt it more because my father worked in the prison)_
[Why they moved away? ]
BIRDS IN LONDON, WH Hudson:
Wandsworth Common (183 acres) is a very long strip of ground, unfortunately very narrow, with long monotonous rows of red brick houses, hideous in their uniformity, at its sides. Here there is no attempt at disguise, no illusion of distance, no effect of openness left: the cheap speculative builder has been permitted to spoil it all. A railway line which cuts very nearly through the whole length of the common still further detracts from its value as a breathing-space. The broadest part of the ground at its western extremity has a good deal of furze growing on it, and here the common joins an extensive piece of ground, park-like in character, on which stands an extremely picturesque old red brick house. When this green space is built upon Wandsworth will lose the little that remains of its ancient beauty and freshness.
Among the small birds still to be found here- 246 - is the yellowhammer, and it strikes one as very curious to hear his song in such a place. Why does he stay? Is he tempted by the little bit of bread and no cheese which satisfies his modest wants—the small fragments dropped by the numberless children that play among the bushes after school hours? The yellowhammer does not colonise with us; he goes and returns not, and this is now the last spot in the metropolis within four miles and a half of Charing Cross where he may still be found. He was cradled on the common, and does not know that there are places on the earth where the furze-bushes are unblackened by smoke, where at intervals of a few minutes the earth is not shaken by trains that rush thundering and shrieking, as if demented, into or out of Clapham Junction.
I fear the yellowhammer will not long remain in such a pandemonium. The people of Wandsworth are hardly deserving of such a bird.
- a degree of privacy in comparison with the streets around - where Edward and Helen could hold hands, and kiss. (Though they went to the wider, wilder, more secretive Wimbledon
Common to make love [for the first time? Other times?]
- the workers' demonstration [ gathering at WC station and walking Bolingbroke ]
- nb his horror at the meanness (literal and spiritual) of the lower middle class I his area
The London General Omnibus Company
In 1856 the London General Omnibus Company (LGOC) entered the London bus market, which they would soon dominate. Within a year they owned 75% of London’s buses, and by 1860 they were carrying 40 million people annually.
From 1863, the underground railways challenged the LGOC on some routes, but did not have the same flexibility. Horse trams, running on fixed rails in the road from 1870, were cheaper and popular in working class districts, but they were forbidden from entering the City or the West End. The bus remained the most popular and profitable form of public transport.
The LGOC bought out most of it is competitors in the 1900s, growing ever stronger, but Tilling’s held out until 1933 and the formation of London Transport. This Tilling horse bus in the Museum collection dates from the 1870s.
The beginning of the end
By the 1890s, London had over 2,000 horse buses and 25,000 horses, with stables and a small army of grooms, blacksmiths and saddlers. But in 1899 the LGOC started its first trials with motorised buses, powered first by steam and later petrol. Change happened slowly, but the process had begun.
The beginning of the end
By the 1890s, London had over 2,000 horse buses and 25,000 horses, with stables and a small army of grooms, blacksmiths and saddlers. But in 1899 the LGOC started its first trials with motorised buses, powered first by steam and later petrol. Change happened slowly, but the process had begun.
The LGOC experimented with most of the available early motor buses in the following years, building up the experience and expertise that would lead to the development of their revolutionary B type bus of 1910. For the LGOC, the horse bus era ended in October 1911. Their old competitors the Tilling company operated the last London horse bus service in London on 4 August 1914, the day Britain declared war on Germany and became embroiled in the First World War.
https://www.ltmuseum.co.uk/collections/stories/transport/londons-horse-bus-era-1829-1910