Wandsworth Common
A Living Memory

Welcome, everybody. It is six o'clock, so we can kick off — I think everybody's here. A very warm welcome to you all. Thank you for coming out this evening.

This is the second in our Common Memories gatherings, where we're seeking people's memories of life in and around the Common since the 1960s, roughly. I'm Stephen, Chair of the Heritage Group of the Friends, and we have various colleagues here who have all been working on the Common Memories project. We'll be taking it in turns to try and prompt your memories of various topics. There are about nine of them altogether, so it will be about five or six minutes per topic on average.

If, as happened last time, we run out of time and go on much longer than anticipated, we might have to have another gathering — or you can always send us your memories via the historyworth.org email.

When you do want to say something, give me thirty seconds so I can pass you the microphone, not so that we can hear you, but so that John, who is recording, can pick up your voice. We are recording this evening and it will be going up on the Friends website, so please don't say anything you wouldn't want to be seen generally. You may need to be a bit careful about the opinions you express.

Hello. My name is Ros Page. I was involved with Common Memories Part One — the film — for which several of you were also involved. That project finished around 1960, so now we're looking at what has happened around the Common since then. One of the most important things that happened to our area was the proposed widening scheme for Trinity Road.

The map on the left-hand side of the screen is from one of the original copies, on loan to me from John Dawson, who was unfortunately unable to be here tonight. I'll put it out on a table at the end of the evening if anyone would like to look at it more closely. Essentially it shows a scheme for something like an inner M25 — a motorway circling around London.

In the bottom-left corner there was a junction that interestingly didn't connect with Trinity Road and Wandsworth Bridge. The spur road looked as though it was designed to come off around Wandsworth Town. At that stage, Trinity Road didn't actually link up with Wandsworth Bridge — you had to go via Old York Road.

There was a plan to use the roundabout as a flyover to join the south and north of the river, which, as we know, didn't happen. The thick black dotted line going south was a proposed spur road that would have carved through places like Burntwood Lane and joined the A24. It was quite a plan — but in that form it never came to pass. Trinity Road was expanded, however, and is as we know it today. I'd be very interested to hear from anyone living in the area back then, particularly during construction in the late 1960s.

Sorry — I wasn't expecting to speak quite so soon, just waving my arms to enforce my connection with the area! I came to live in St John's Hill Grove, just off the top of St John's Hill, at the end of 1960.

I had been moving into London from outside and was originally going to live in the Regent's Park area, where a university friend had bought a house. He was offering friends first choice of the flats — I had a grant promised from the council because of my teaching qualifications and my parents were going to lend me some money. The scheme was all fixed up when suddenly this treacherous old university mate came round and said an agent had told him he could get more money for the flats, and he promptly put £900 on the asking price.

So I thought — well, I have the mechanism to buy something for £2,950; I'll just find somewhere else at the same price. I went tramping around more or less the whole of West London. One day I answered an advert in the Evening Standard: "2,950 — house, three bedrooms, garage, garden." I didn't need a garage, a garden, or three bedrooms, but it was the right price, so I went to have a look.

The person selling it wanted to move quickly to Brighton with her dogs, so it all went through very smoothly, and I moved into 29 St John's Hill Grove in 1961. And that's how I come to be here.

We moved into Magdalen Road in 1962, when Trinity Road was still a single carriageway. Right opposite the prison there's a little cul-de-sac — you could drive in there from Trinity Road. Where the underpass starts there used to be Trinity Cars, which is now an old people's home. There was a cobbled street with a cafe called Tiger's Cafe — I don't know if anyone remembers that — and stables as well.

They started excavating the underpass all the way down to Wandsworth Bridge. I don't have photos of that, but I do have some photos from the 60s of the underpass looking very open, in fresh concrete. I think construction ran from about '68 to '72, so roughly four years once work began, though they'd been planning it for years before that. I believe there were quite a few protests about the widening and the loss of common land, though I don't personally remember the opposition.

I remember the widening. Originally they were going to have dual carriageway all the way from Wandsworth Bridge to the church near Streatham, and because of the churches along the road it was going to wiggle around them — the houses and people simply didn't matter, they were going to be knocked down.

We lived in Trinity Road at the time, and what was then the Surrey Tavern was going to end up in the middle of a roundabout at the top of Burntwood Lane and Bellevue Road, which was absurd — the pub would have been in the middle of the roundabout and everything around it demolished. Fortunately there were so many objections that idea was dropped.

But in order to widen the road while keeping the common land, that big wide verge down the middle is actually common land rather than part of the road — and the trees were already there, so they just built around the wrong side of them.

I lived just off the Toastrack in Nicosia Road. I was away at college between '65 and '68, and returning to London in '68 I tended to walk across Wandsworth Common and get a train at the station for work in Clapham, so I perhaps missed much of the actual road construction.

I do remember the disruption to buses — the 49 and the 19 — waiting hours and hours, almost certainly because of traffic held up by the building work. I have photographs I took of the area around the prison, including the County Arms garden which was to the right of the pub as you face it — it was taken over and is partly a car park now. That's where their garden was, and they moved the cattle trough to the front.

Prior to the motorway, the prison had access from Trinity Road, but that got cut off with the building work. You could see where the original road was because of an avenue of trees. After Ronnie Biggs escaped, they wanted to increase security at the prison, but it was about ten years before they built a monstrous wall all the way around it.

Does anybody know what happened to all the people who were cleared from the streets near Trinity Road? That was a very densely populated area. I remember people crying in local shops about their houses being knocked down to make way for the road.

My mum bought her house in Bart Road in the early-to-mid-50s — it was terribly cheap because of planning blight and nobody quite knowing what was going to happen. The Fitzhugh Estate tower blocks — they were the first high-rise blocks in London, I believe, and rather iconic for that reason. They were built before Trinity Road became a dual carriageway, weren't they? I had friends who lived there and they loved it.

Before we move on — in answer to your question about displaced residents, I know that eight or nine double-sided roads of houses were destroyed. There are a lot of people online writing about their memories of those streets, which makes for very interesting reading.

The only person I know who was rehoused was living on Trinity Road and was rehoused on the top floor of Morville House on the Fitzhugh Estate — he was about sixth-form age when it happened and has written a nice account of his recollections. Where the others went, I'm not sure — perhaps dispersed all over the place. Roehampton possibly.

I grew up on the edge of the prison — always within sight of the prison wall because my father was a prison officer. I lived in three or four houses around the perimeter at various points from 1949 onwards.

When I was young, every single person who lived behind the prison was a prison officer, married to one, or the child of one — it was a very strange environment, a bit like an industrial town. They would march in their hundreds down Heathfield Road to work because one shift had to be there at six o'clock and another took over at seven. Enormous numbers of people, all dressed identically, and because they were all ex-military, they were marching — not strolling, marching.

Not infrequently when I was a child, [an escaped prisoner]] would come running along Heathfield Road. What was very odd was that nobody ran in the 1950s or early 60s — now everybody runs all over the common, but then nobody did. And these men would be dressed in prison singlets and trousers with big black boots. They would hide in or around our house and then be caught. It just happened all the time.

Enormous numbers of prisoners were also allowed out to do jobs around the area — cut the grass, paint and wallpaper houses. But executions — does anyone remember those?

I remember cycling to school one day knowing that someone — I think it was Podola — was about to be hanged in the prison. There was more than one execution while I was growing up there. That would have been in the late 50s.

One thing that sticks very vividly in my mind — I feel like crying telling this story — is Derek Bentley's execution. We lived in Coy Road and my mother's sisters lived there too. One of them was very friendly with Derek Bentley's sister. He came to the house once with his sister and their dog, and my parents were very aware that mentally he was not fully capable.

The morning he was going to be executed, my father used his lunch money to send a telegram to the Home Office begging for the execution not to go ahead, but they went ahead with it. It was heartbreaking that it was somebody the family knew personally.

And it wasn't even Bentley who fired the shot — that was his partner Craig, who was younger and therefore spared the death penalty. His sister eventually campaigned for and won a posthumous pardon after their mother died, and Bentley was exhumed from the prison and given a proper burial. A very sad story.

I'm in the Royal Victoria building and we understand there were tunnels from there to the prison. When it was an interrogation centre they were keeping prisoners there — is it Lord Haw-Haw who was executed there? I wondered if there's any truth to the tunnel story.

I think I know about it, but I can't quite see the point of building a tunnel all the way from the Royal Victoria Patriotic Asylum to the prison when you could just walk across. My father used to say the motto at the time for spies was "take them over the road and hang them."

There were always dark stories about what went on in the Patriotic Asylum. I did interview somebody who told me she and a friend went down to a cellar there and saw chains and hooks on the walls — she said, "I felt awful. I knew bad things had happened in there." I was also shown a bricked-up arch in one of the basements and told, "That was the start of one of the tunnels." It's a long way — three or four hundred yards — so who knows. On behalf of the Society I will look into it.

I went to Spencer Park School and the tunnel was always a mystery and a theory. My attic bedroom looked across to the prison and I could see what I thought was the place where executions happened — a sort of glass turret on top.

As a teenager my paper round included the prison. On a Sunday with two sacks of newspapers I'd go up to the main door, knock, and the officer would let me in. It was great because it was only two drops, unlike the Fitzhugh flats which went on and on forever. The news agent was opposite the County Arms — there were two sweet shops, one of which was a news agent. One was Johnson's, where you could buy single cigarettes as kids.

When Ronnie Biggs got over the wall all the TV cameras were up on a flat in the Fitzhugh trying to get a better view of the prison. I had a lot of friends whose dads were prison officers — "screws," as we called them. My paper round was also in Heathfield Square — the green at the back of the prison. And another great part of the green was bonfire night — a massive fire and fireworks display.

As children we used to borrow the big trolleys the prisoners used — they had two big wheels and you'd drag them. A whole team of us would go all around the roads collecting rubbish to burn.

I came to live in Wandsworth in 1971 or thereabouts. My garden backs onto the railway line and over to the prison, so I've always had a very good aspect. In the early days we didn't think much about it until one New Year's Eve — being Scottish, I was celebrating — we opened the back doors at midnight and heard this tremendous roar from the prisoners. They still do it to this day. It's angry and it's also sad, full of different expressions. If anyone wants to hear it, come over next New Year.

I used to go regularly until one year I felt I didn't want to hear it anymore — there was something awful about it. Also, just the other day I was walking past the prison and there's a big notice up saying "No Drones" — they don't need tunnels nowadays.

Finally, I went into the prison in more enlightened times when a group of professional musicians went in, worked with the prisoners, and trained them to do musicals. I saw West Side Story there, and Guys and Dolls — they were terrific, and you could see what it was doing for the men. There's a famous actor who was in EastEnders who had been an inmate. The families were in the audience, and the performer-prisoners were ushered out one way, waving at their families. I'm so sorry that no longer happens.

I remember going in and serving teas — not to the prisoners but to their visitors. There was a group of us who would prepare afternoon tea and serve the people who came to visit their relations inside.

My name is Henrietta Gentilli. Like Ros and everyone else I was involved with the first Common Memories project. We didn't talk too much about schools in the film, but we'd really like to know your thoughts and reactions to the changes in the profile of schools in the area.

The most important change has probably been a shift from state to private education — the balance has shifted quite dramatically in the last twenty to thirty years. The photograph on the left is Broomwood Hall on Nightingale Lane, which I understand used to be a trade union building. Bolingbroke Hospital is now Bolingbroke Academy, which interestingly is the only secondary co-educational state school in the area — many people feel that's rather underrepresented. There was also Thomas' (formerly the county girls' secondary school), Broomwood Hall, the closure of John Archer School, and Spencer Park School, which had a youth club.

John Archer was purpose-built, very modern — a good piece of courtyard school design. It was boys-only secondary, on the common just above the Royal Patriotic Building. It later became Spencer Park, which had two buildings — the old building which is the Royal Patriotic Building and the new building. It had a lovely little outdoor swimming pool open to the public, and a youth club. I used to take my children both swimming and to the youth club from the other side of the common.

Sadly it shut, as did what I believe was Walsingham, the girls' school up on Clapham Common. They were built in the same era and both shut and demolished, swimming pool included. It's very sad — they provided a great deal.

Emanuel School next door was a direct-grant school — not state-funded but any child around here who passed the eleven-plus could go. Then it ceased to be open-access and became a private school again, as it had been before the Second World War.

During the period we're talking about, a lot of state schools — primary schools particularly — were closed. In almost every case they became private schools, which says something interesting about the demography of the area over this time. I've heard that something like forty-six percent of secondary school children in Wandsworth are now educated privately, though I'm not certain of that figure.

Unfortunately the changes are continuing. St Anne's primary school has now closed and is to become a nursery. The Arc Academy on Putney Common on the Lower Richmond Road has also closed as a secondary school.

This is the result of several things: declining population, the impact of COVID — many people left London — and Brexit, all of which had an enormous effect on the numbers of pupils needing to be educated in inner London. Wandsworth benefited enormously from regeneration after the war, but that led to a second and third generation who no longer wish to live here for economic or other reasons.

My experience was slightly different. My children went to Hearnville School, which no longer exists. The council at the time said demand for places was reducing. I said, "This place is called Nappy Valley — surely it has the highest rate of children in Europe."

The council actually interviewed me because I was interested in demography and I showed them how high the population rates were. What I hadn't realised — I feel so foolish now — was that they were excited because they could sell the school as a private school, and there would be huge demand. Which indeed there was.

I went to Spencer Park School. When I started in '62 the new building had only been built four years previously and was absolutely fantastic inside — library, gymnasium, really nice classrooms.

One funny story: we came back after the summer holidays to find some teenagers had pushed a vintage MG into the swimming pool, standing upright in the water. The headmaster was not at all happy, and it took a couple of weeks to get the car out. There was oil all over the bottom of the pool. But as a piece of 1950s architecture it was quite unique and iconic — quite special.

Here we have St James's Hospital, which some of you may remember. It was a general hospital founded in 1910, which survived until 1988 when it closed and was subsequently redeveloped as a housing estate.

And then Bolingbroke Hospital — also a general hospital, now largely repurposed though it still serves as an outpatient facility. Its latest reincarnation is as Bolingbroke Academy, the secondary school. Over to the floor.

A slightly convoluted memory of St James's. The local Brownies used to fundraise, and my mum was working at St John's Hospital in the occupational therapy department. The Brownies decided to buy a cockatiel for the hospital, and there was a big party where all the Brownies and patients came to hand over the bird.

A few weeks later mum went down with severe flu which turned into pneumonia. Eventually they discovered she had psittacosis — parrot disease — from the cockatiel. Dad was admitted a few days later, so they were both very seriously ill. Environmental health interviewed them quite aggressively about the bird.

Mum was too ill to stay in bed, so she took over the day room, which turned into a florist's shop with all the flowers being delivered to her. That was probably about 1983–84. She later went to work at Bolingbroke, and her occupational therapy department was in the wing with the beautiful tiled pictures, which are still there.

At St George's Hospital they have quite a few photographs of St James's on display in one of the corridors. The new building on St James's Drive was designed by Powell & Moya — rather an eminent firm of architects. Had it been just a little older it could have been listed, but it didn't quite make it. A great tragedy that it went.

I have a recollection of St James's — I damaged my thumb around 1982 and was walking around the common at two in the morning waiting for the pain to settle. It didn't, so I walked into the hospital.

A very nice physician said, "I can sort that out for you," took an unbent paperclip, heated it up with his lighter, burned a hole in the top of my thumb, and said, "There you are — all done." I walked away very happy because the pain had gone.

Every time I see the man who organises concerts at Perivale he says, "Gosh, John, you've come a long way from Balham — I was a registrar at St James's in 1980-something." He's very pleased to have moved out to Ealing.

A comment about Bolingbroke Hospital — one of my grandfather's brothers was actually an inpatient there in the 1920s, I think for something to do with his lungs. When we first moved to Mayford Road he said, "Oh, I was in that hospital."

The Bolingbroke always had the most fantastic collection of paintings because the walls and staircases were very large. They are now at St George's. It was always a real pleasure, in a funny kind of way, to go to Bolingbroke Hospital, partly for that reason.

I had a short stay at St James's overnight — I needed a general anaesthetic, which was quite a big deal. The next morning, feeling very woozy, I had to be helped out of the toilet and back to bed. I was late for breakfast and the sister in charge was very unhappy. She wouldn't let me have any breakfast and ticked me off. I had to go without. It was a very different time.

I'd like to draw attention to Springfield Hospital, which is a centre of excellence for mental health. I've had close connections with it and it's now up and running in its new form. It's a beautiful place with some of the most expert people in their field, right here in Wandsworth. If you ever need access, go through your GP and ask for a referral.

A very quick one: for whatever reason I was admitted to St James's with a broken arm — rugby — and required pyjamas, which was fine. When I was due to be released I phoned my wife and asked her to come and pick me up.

She said yes, but had previously taken away the clothes I was admitted in and forgot to bring any others. There I was in my pyjamas reaching for the car out in the street. Not quite like a prison escape, but it certainly felt like one.

A small point linking back to the prison: I was run over on Trinity Road when I was fifteen and in a coma for some time, and was taken to St James's. When I eventually woke up, I was surrounded by older men — I was by far the youngest person there by thirty years. Almost everybody in the ward was a prisoner from Wandsworth Prison. A curious experience, but they were terribly nice, I have to say.

This topic is timely as this year's heritage festival theme is shops and high streets. The photographs show Trinity Road on the left with Haddock's on the corner, and an earlier shot of Bellevue on the right. We'd love to hear your memories and stories about any of the shopping areas you remember.

Coming up from Wandsworth Common Station from the Hope there was a butcher, a fishmonger, a little post office which later combined with a tobacconist. There was an art gallery for a while, a cafe, and three bakers around the corner past St Mary Magdalene's who baked their own bread.

There was a phase when they were all stripped-pine shops. There was a "Lucky Parrot," a wonderful hardware shop, a decorator's shop, a sewing and knitting shop. This would include the 1960s and before.

I remember the parade of shops on Trinity Road, straight opposite the County Arms where the phone box is. There was the greengrocer Gaudion's, the news agent next door where I did my paper round, and the baker's shop with a post office at the back.

When we moved there in 1962, before they smartened up the pavement, the area outside was gravelled and unpaved. They had a Pepsi machine outside — a blue box shaped like an old Ovaltine container — where you could put in sixpence and get a carton of Pepsi Cola.

Haddock's was on the corner; you'd walk in to floorboards and Mr Haddock would be in a white coat. It was an off-licence and general grocer — sliced meats, boxes of broken biscuits (I helped break them, actually, delivering on a bike to Lyford Road and the surrounding streets). Mainly gin and whisky — those were the important deliveries. The shops didn't really change for years.

I remember the Bellevue Road and Trinity Road shops around the corner, probably in the early '70s. We were sent to the butcher's for a pound and a quarter of mince. Wells the greengrocer's is where Pizza Express is now.

I found an old parish magazine from 1958 — I forgot to bring it — which has lots of adverts for the shops. There was Muriel's the hairdresser's next to the church, the wool shop, Moons the news agent's, Thompson's the sweet shop. And I have memories of a sweet shop on the corner of Western Road and Nottingham Road — we used to go to ballet at the church institute on Western Road and stop at the sweet shop on the way home for penny sweets.

When I first came to Wandsworth in '71 or '72 there was a very useful little parade of shops in Balmuth Road — everything you needed: butcher, grocer, fruit shop, post office. Before the rise of the big supermarkets. It's rather sad they've gone.

And that was where I found a postcard in the window announcing a meeting in the local library that night of the Wandsworth Society. As they say, the rest is history. It was a hilarious meeting — a very serious debate about whether loos on the common should be kept open.

Does anybody know the story of the Carmichael's sign on the wall just before the County Arms? That was James Carmichael's, a builder's timber yard on Trinity Road just past the County Arms. They were there until the '80s, then they moved out and the site was developed into small town houses, but I think the sign is still there.

There was Brew Brothers on the corner of Magdalen Road and Trinity Road — a Rootes dealer, selling Hillman, Singer, Humber, and Hillman Imps. They had a lovely little low white wall around it. The manager used to whitewash it every three or four months and plant little flowers in it. You wouldn't get that at a petrol station today.

There was also Sherard's, the clock shop on Bellevue by the bus stop — some of his clocks ended up in the Science Museum. He had one with a little ball on a tray that would tip at the end of a minute so the ball rolled the other way. Fabulous thing in his window.

I want to mention Gainsborough Road, next to Balmuth Road. My first business was a workshop in a shop on the corner there. I was doing some work nearby about six months ago and saw the door of my old workshop open — a woman was standing there. I shyly went up and said, "This used to be my workshop."

Her mother came down the stairs and, without a word, pointed at me and said, "You. Yes. You were in here." They had cursed whoever had used it as a workshop because when they converted it to a flat, there was dust everywhere and they couldn't move. It just tickled me how these linking stories of the past can reach right the way to today.

Having talked about Haddock's selling booze, let's think about the pubs that have existed around the neighbourhood. This photograph is the Bolingbroke pub, which was off Bolingbroke Grove in what is now Cobham Close. Some of the pubs have survived — the County Arms and the Hope being two. The Bolingbroke has obviously closed.

There was another one I'd like to mention called the Invitation on Shelgate Road, just off Trinity Road near the cemetery. There was also the Surrey Tavern (now a brasserie), the Roundhouse on Battersea Rise, the Gardener's Arms on Chatham, which was closed down because it was so rough — there was a murder there.

After the war a lot of these pubs had pool tables and fruit machines and rather a rough atmosphere. Magdalen College wouldn't allow any pubs on their land — everything between the common and Garrett Lane, between Burntwood Lane and the railway line. The pubs tend to concentrate on the Battersea side.

I knew the Bolingbroke from earlier. It was a single-level pub just on the little square beside St Michael's Church. Rather sad when it closed.

A story about the Bolingbroke — a whole crowd of us, including my eighty-year-old mother-in-law, objected when the landlord tried to throw us out before we'd finished a round we'd just bought. He said "Get out" and we said "We just bought these drinks." The end of it was that the eighty-year-old mother-in-law got banned along with the rest of us. "You're all banned," he said.

Our local was the County Arms, where I've spent many a happy hour over the years. Back in the day it had lovely etched glass and a rough wooden floor in the public bar and a posh saloon bar at the back.

When I was teaching at Honeywell School, I used to do a Victorian walk from the school across the common to that area, and they used to let me take thirty children into the pub in the mornings as long as we were out by eleven before the customers came in. They could see all the harness from the horses around the walls. Then it got modernised and all the lovely glass was taken away.

We still did the walks but just looked at the horse trough outside and moved on to the prison. And you need a mortgage to drink in there now.

There was apparently a square mile somewhere in the area where there was a moratorium on selling alcohol. Is that true or did I dream it?

Magdalen College wouldn't allow any pubs on their land — essentially everything between the common and Garrett Lane, between Burntwood Lane and the railway line.

As for why there aren't many pubs elsewhere either, I think it partly depends on the age of the buildings. Pubs were part of the Victorian infrastructure, whereas Magdalen Road and Burntwood Lane are younger developments. Builders used to put a pub at each end of a new development — the workers needed somewhere to drink while building, hence the Hope and the Nightingale at either end.

Young's Brewery was nearby — a real institution. Until relatively recently the beer was delivered by horse and cart. The horse trough now in front of the pub was originally further along because the horses had to get onto the pavement and offload the barrels of beer. I remember that — wonderful.

Does anyone have memories of the Surrey Tavern? My daughter, now in her forties, used to go in there when she was far too young. She said it's the only place she's ever been in where she actually saw someone break a chair over somebody else's back. Not a pub of choice for most people, by the sounds of it.

I'd like to share a memory of being a young child at the County Arms. My friend's parents used to go in there before Sunday lunch and we'd play in that little garden at the side — there was an old gas lamp lying down and we'd climb on it. My friend's parents would always buy us Smith's Crisps with the little blue salt packet.

Later, as a teenager, we used to all meet at the County Arms on a Friday or Saturday to decide where the party was. We'd always gather in that lovely red room at the back, which was a really sumptuous, nice place to meet. And as teenagers in '68 or '69, about sixteen or seventeen of us, we used to sit outside in Alma Terrace and scrape our initials on the wall of the County Arms. They're still there today. A lot of the prison warders used to drink there too.

I was on my way to school one day when they were filming a Charlie Drake film — The Cracksman. He was coming out of the prison with his bag of belongings. I was about fourteen and thought it was great, all the film crew there. That would have been about 1964.

The photograph on the left is the Church of Latter-day Saints at the end of Ravenslea Road — a rather unfortunate piece of modern planning, one might say. And the photograph on the right is the old synagogue near St Mary's Cemetery in Battersea, which is now a residential home. Any memories about places of worship?

Being in the Brownies and Guides we had to attend church parade at St Mary Magdalene. I also went through a religious phase with junior school and used to go to Trinity Road Chapel just across the road.

We had missionary helpers in the late 50s. We'd roll bandages — there was a little machine and you'd turn the handle to roll strips of cotton into bandages — and make scrapbooks for people in foreign countries. That was how we spent our Saturday afternoons being missionary helpers.

What we're trying to tease out here is the story of change. The photograph on the left shows the current Heathfield Cottages, which back in the day were nothing like as smart — in fact they were due for demolition as part of the Trinity Road widening scheme, but thanks to a lot of local protest they survived and have become rather expensive and fashionable residences.

The photograph on the right is John Archer School, which became quite a large housing estate next to the Royal Patriotic Building. The left photograph shows how demography has changed from rather rundown cottages into multi-million-pound homes.

I remember being told that Dulwich Road, as recently as the 70s, wasn't a very desirable place to live — lots of rather rundown flats. Even then it was a place taxi drivers wouldn't come to drop you off.

I live in Wexford Road, just beside Wandsworth Common station, and moved in in 1975. It was a very shabby road. There were a couple of buildings that were council dwellings — you had a lot of council residents in two of the large houses there, while the rest of us were mainly flat-dwellers in converted Victorian houses.

It's very strange to think of those ex-council houses now being turned into really posh dwellings — I just can't believe that what were council houses are now million-pound properties.

There was a lot of compulsory purchase around parts of Wandsworth because of desperate housing need after the war. There were also bomb sites, which made for quite a mixed demography — interesting at the time.

About the new houses and flats where Spencer Park / John Archer School was — they must have been very expensive when first built because a child at our school was able to buy one because her family won the lottery. The important thing to note is that the building of that estate led to the construction of a new bridge over the railway, for which I have photographs.

And on St John's Hill Grove, the cottages on the left-hand side going down towards the railway were all due for demolition in the early 60s — it was only local opposition that saved them. They are some of the most beautiful architecture in that part of the borough and we nearly lost them.

Plans for a great road along Trinity Road started in the 1930s and persisted through the Second World War into the 60s. All the houses on the right-hand side going towards Tooting Beck were really dilapidated. I have quite a number of photographs of them semi-derelict or entirely derelict, designated brownfield sites — they couldn't be bought and sold in any ordinary way because everyone was certain the motorway was just a matter of time.

When the decision was finally taken in 1967 not to proceed, that was the turning point. I'm writing about it for the next Wandsworth chronicles, incidentally.

Does anybody remember whether there was a cinema on what was the Trinity Cars site on the north side, which is now the nursing home? I've seen it mentioned somewhere as having been designed as a cinema.

There was also a public baths along there, and a swimming pool on East Hill — I think it was further down, coming up from the High Street.

On the subject of derelict housing — we lived in Magdalen Road in the 60s and as children we used to play in the old vicarage on the corner of Loxley Road and Lyford Road, which was empty for years. We used to go in and play in the garden and the house.

And opposite the old petrol station on the corner of Magdalen Road and Trinity Road, a couple of the houses were empty for years, dripping with water. As a child I was terrified walking past them. Really horrible and spooky.

Just quickly — the Scout building, the Romany on Lyford Road, which my dad and uncles were very involved in building in the 60s. I have a video transcribed from cine film with footage of little boys running around with concrete — which you wouldn't be allowed today.

There was also a Colin somebody who ran a very hot rhythm and blues club in the hall next to St Mary Magdalene's — I used to go there. It was quite something.

The final item is events. I particularly want to mention the fire at the Royal Victoria Patriotic Building — we have yet to find an eyewitness, which seems very odd given it was quite a major event. And there's the Clapham Rail Disaster.

The coronavirus pandemic is probably too recent and too vivid in people's memories, but subsequently we would very much welcome stories about how people experienced the common and the area during that time.

My wife and I were at an antenatal class in Quarry Road. We finished about half past nine or ten and came out of the front door and looked towards the common to see this enormous great glow of red. We were at the top of Quarry Road, so some distance away, but it was a fearsome sight.

What astonishes me today is how good the building looks — it must have suffered very significant fire damage. For many years afterwards we didn't come across to see what was happening. But thank goodness it was saved. The Wandsworth Society subsequently got it listed as a Grade II listed building.

The idea of these meetings is just to provoke memories, and you'll probably dream tonight about something from the past. Write it down and send it to us at history@wandsworthcommon.org. We're going to distil all these memories and thoughts into something — we're not quite sure what yet. So keep the memories coming, and thank you very much everybody for coming out this evening.