Wandsworth Common History Project
Transcript of an illustrated talk by Phillip
The following is an edited transcript of an illustrated talk tracing the history of Wandsworth Common from its largely intact state in 1800 through the encroachments, railway cuttings, and enclosures that transformed it by 1871 — and the campaign to protect what remained. Slide references and navigational asides have been lightly condensed.
This view is intended to make everybody go "ooh" and "ah" — and I find it remarkably lovely. But it depends how you look at it. If you focus on the green areas — the ponds and so on — that is one picture. If you look at it slightly differently, you notice an awful lot of wedges, rectangles, and gouges: pieces bitten out of it. Once upon a time it would have been very much larger. But we love it, and that is what today is about. We've got what we've got — a kind of glorious leftover.
This poster appeared around 1869–70 and was the most prominent of several produced to defend the Common. I am almost certain that John Buckmaster himself drafted it, partly because so many of its phrases also appear in his wonderful autobiography, A Village Politician — but that is a story for another time.
The heading reads simply: Wsworth Common, followed by a nice piece of old poetry from roughly a century before 1869. It is addressed to "the inhabitants and working men of Wandsworth and Battersea" — women do not feature prominently in the text, though they were very much present in practice. We have other stories about that.
Here is the passage I think of as pure Buckmaster:
Will you allow bankrupt and speculating builders, land societies, beer shopkeepers, railway companies, tailors, gentlemen, and noble lords to rob you and your children of their Common rights and footpaths, and the liberty of walking on God's earth without a struggle?
During the last 30 years, enclosures have been made by the late Mr W. Keller and the late Mr Wilson, the enclosure for the telescope, the enclosures by the railway companies, the Patriotic School, the St James's Industrial School, the enclosure by the prison, the enclosure by Mr Costica and Mr Smith — making a total of upwards of 200 acres. Most of these enclosures have been filched from the Common and resold for enormous profit.
And the remedy, as you might expect: Down with the fences.
He ends: "Show Lord Spencer and the vinegar men on the Board of Works, who have neglected their duty, that you're going to maintain your rights like true liberals and keep them like true conservatives." Very characteristic of Buckmaster: although he was a radical liberal himself, he was always trying to work across party lines. He knew that to defend the Common successfully he would have to ally himself with some very varied characters indeed. He was also a religious man, so you get a lot of scriptural language: "Cursed is he who removeth his neighbour's landmark and robbeth the poor of his inheritance and joineth land to land to increase his riches."
And the closing call to action: Down with the fences.
Here is John Buckmaster. There is some doubt about his exact date of birth, but he lived a good long life, more than half of it in Battersea. This portrait of him is held in Teddington. The street in which he lived is now exceedingly run-down, and the house itself has long since gone. His children used to joke that they were practically born on platform seven of Clapham Junction Station — it was just off what was then called New Road, now Prested Road. He and his wife had five children, four boys and a girl, and they grew up in a small house with no grounds. All of them, he says, grew up essentially on the Common.
Now I want to go back in time. This is John Rocque's map from the middle of the 18th century — first drawn up in the 1740s and reprinted in various versions. At the top of the map is the Thames. On the left, running northward, is the River Wandle. On the right is another river, now sadly underground beneath Northcote Road — it enters the Thames at Battersea Creek. And where it ran you can see a rather large green area: three sizeable ponds. That is Clapham Junction, and even today, when it rains very heavily, manhole covers sometimes pop up and water floods out, because the area is built over those old lakes.
Moving to a later version of the map: in the top left of the Common, near the letter W, you can see quite a large lake that no longer exists. It is this lake that will later cause Trinity Road to veer around it — we will come to that in a moment. You can also see Heathfield Cottages to the south, and Westside and Northside running along.
Rocque makes clear that the Common was very rough in character — not smooth as it is today.
This is the first really accurate map of Wandsworth Common and south-west London. It is Thomas Milne's map of 1800. He used a new lightweight theodolite which allowed him to be very precise. And he did more than simply draw an accurate picture.
Here is Wandsworth Common, fully stretched out, not yet divided or encroached upon. You can see Clapham Common in the top right, and it almost reaches Wandsworth Common — just a little gap across the Falcon Brook. Previously they may well have joined together, which would have made sense, because both were Commons within the manor of Battersea. Commoners could move their animals between Wandsworth Common and that part of Clapham Common. Clapham Common was complicated because it also fell within another manor, and there were sometimes disputes between the people of Battersea and those of Clapham. But between Wandsworth and Battersea there was never any such conflict — they were part of a single manor, with two parishes, St Mary's and All Saints, but one manorial unit.
On Milne's map, the pink areas labelled PP stood for paddocks and small parks. Each represents a house with its grounds — quite substantial acreages — and they cluster in the top right corner of the Common: the area that will become "Between the Commons." A few more lie further along. One small pink enclosure is particularly significant: it will be rented by the Wilson family, who owned and ran Price's Candleworks and were fanatical horticulturalists. That enclosure will grow larger and larger as they plant more and more, until they eventually run out of space. One of the Wilsons later bought Ripley, becoming a leading figure in the Royal Horticultural Society; Ripley eventually became part of the RHS gardens. Their old house and grounds in Wandsworth were knocked down. There was a fine lake nearby, known as the Black Sea, and the whole triangular area became Spencer Park — which is essentially the relic of their former ground.
Here is my own simplification of the Common as it was in 1800. Trinity Road runs roughly north-south up the middle. The area off to the left around Bolingbroke Grove corresponds to the pink paddock area on Milne's map — that will become "Between the Commons." Nightingale Lane heads off to the upper right. Later we will see railways arrive and new roads appear: Heathfield Road, Westside, and so on around the perimeter.
The first really significant addition to the road network came probably in the 1820s. If you look at a map of south-west London, there are almost no straight roads — and certainly no straight roads built before this period. This new road was more than two miles long, though at first it came to an abrupt halt at the top of the Common and did not continue to Wandsworth Bridge. It is important in the history of the Common because its length and straightness made it subsequently ideal for racing — walking races, running races, trotting races, velocipede racing, and cycling — it was the longest and straightest road to be found anywhere in south-west London at the time.
The second new road was what would become St James's Drive. It runs dead straight, then bears slightly to the right. The top end has since disappeared, because a railway was coming in the late 1830s.
Here is an image from 1837, while they were building the Trinity Road Bridge — an extraordinarily modern-looking image in some ways. You get a clear sense of the two tracks and the cutting.
This intriguing map from around the 1860s shows all the railway lines then planned or in existence. I want to draw your attention to one question: why does the London Brighton and South Coast Railway line make such an enormous loop — virtually a semicircle — through Wandsworth Common, when it could simply have run straight up to Victoria, or gone directly through Clapham Common? The answer is straightforward: the people around Clapham Common were wealthy, numerous, and politically powerful. The people around Wandsworth Common at that time were very few. It was far cheaper for a railway company to cut through Common land than to demolish houses and pay compensation to influential residents.
There was also a line that never was built: the Putney, Balham and City Junction Line. It would have started at Wandsworth Common Station, headed to Putney and Balham. It would have passed through the Toast Rack, just south of the prison, through the top of Magdalen Road Cemetery, and crossed the Horsfield line. One can only say: thank goodness that didn't happen.
There were also plans for a fourth and fifth railway line across the Common — fortunately neither was built.
By 1871 the Common had been cut through by roads and railways in every direction. We take these divisions for granted now; we probably don't even register them. But when the Common stretched six miles around with nothing to interrupt your walk, it must have been a very different experience.
When I first looked at a map of the Common with all its encroachments marked, it reminded me of one of those butcher's diagrams showing the prime cuts of an animal. The earliest nibbles were small: among the first was the Huguenot Cemetery at the top. This illustration — I believe it may be by Arthur Rackham, who lived about five minutes' walk away as a teenager, though probably nobody agrees with me — shows what was probably among the last little pieces to be enclosed. In the foreground you can see the cemetery; below is a small patch of Common with a pond that had become so unpleasant — posters were put up asking people not to deposit rubbish and worse things in it, to no effect — that it was eventually paved over and built upon, becoming the Board of Works offices, then Bookhouse, and now luxury flats.
More significantly, around 1840, came the Surrey County Lunatic Asylum — still standing today, albeit somewhat rotated on its axis from what you might expect on a map.
Then St James's Industrial School on St James's Road, no longer with us.
Wandsworth Prison itself was not built on the Common — that land was owned by a man called Potter, who did well out of selling it. But all the land in front of the prison was Common land. You can see this on the 1940s aerial photograph: the Royal Victoria Patriotic Building, Emmanuel School in the far distance, the railway lines, and all the open ground in front of the prison — which the prison authorities bought up in order to prevent further development.
It is worth noting that what is often called the Royal Victoria Patriotic Asylum was not the first large institution to be built on this land. The Royal Masonic School for Girls predates it by nearly ten years and is in a very similar style. Practically all this land was sold very cheaply by one or other Earl Spencer. Spencer was a prominent Freemason, which partly explains his generosity to the Masonic school.
The larger loss — the beating heart of the Common — came with the two great railway cuttings. Some 55 acres of the Common's heartland was sold off to form the Royal Victoria Patriotic Asylum, created during and after the Crimean War as a home for the orphaned daughters of soldiers, sailors, and marines. A girls' school occupied the whole large site. Then a boys' school was built alongside — not as Emmanuel School, but as the Royal Victoria Patriotic Asylum for Boys. That boys' school lasted only ten years before it was privatised and sold to Emmanuel School. The lake in front of the Asylum, which can be seen in this early photograph, was known as the Black Sea — not because of the Crimean War; it had that name much earlier. Almost certainly one of the Wilsons was a Russia merchant, and it was probably his way of commemorating how he had made his fortune. It was a beautiful and remarkable area until it fell into disrepair and was eventually incorporated into Spencer Park.
Emmanuel School today: can you see the difference from its Victorian appearance? The clue is the spire. It fell down in the 1930s, which is why the roofline looks slightly odd now.
By 1871, all the grey areas on the map — previously part of Wandsworth Common — had been absorbed into other uses. The green areas that remained were protected by that year's Act. The Common had shrunk to about 150 acres from a probable 350 to 400 acres at its greatest extent.
Rather than going through every part of the Common, I want to focus on one area as an example: the Toast Rack.
An old map — I cannot give a precise date — shows a small piece of land in the centre labelled "Common belonging to Allfarthing Manor": a roughly rectangular patch. Everything else in the area was Wandsworth Common, originally "Wandsworth and Battersea Common," all united — except for this small rectangle, which had been separately managed. By 1740, this piece is labelled the "Allfarthing Piece." On the right-hand side of the map is Burntwood Lane; top left is Lyford Road; on the left is Magdalen Road. It is striking how directly our modern roads map onto those old field boundaries.
The reason this piece was attached to Allfarthing Manor rather than the Common goes back to the early 16th century, when Thomas Cromwell — of Wolf Hall fame — was busily acquiring land across south-west London. He eventually lost his head, and the land passed to Endymion Porter. The map you were looking at a moment ago was made for Endymion Porter.
In 1800 the area was entirely rural — hardly any houses. The Common was intact; the Toast Rack as we know it did not exist. Then Endymion Porter's descendants sold the land to Thomas Shepard. Shepard died and left it to his wife, Sophia Shepard, who had substantial landholdings across Wandsworth and the wider country. A few years later, a fence went up around her land. A few years after that, buildings began to appear within the Toast Rack — at first scattered and random, mostly nurseries and market gardens, quite unlike the ordered streets we know today.
By 1871 — the year of the Act — you can see a large bite taken out of the Common near Wandsworth. This man is Martin Rall, Sophia Shepard's brother, who was President of Magdalen College, Oxford. He knew that the land — the whole of the Magdalen Road area — needed to generate income for the college. He engaged one of the Salissans as architect to draw up a plan for what was formally titled "Plan of Allfarthing Piece, Wandsworth Common, for Magdalen College, Oxford," dated 1890. All the street names in the Toast Rack connect in some way to Magdalen College — we could go into that, but not today. The result: one of the most distinctive residential enclaves in south London, carved out of what had been open Common.
One thing that has always struck me as peculiar about the Toast Rack — among many peculiarities — is that all the houses turn their backs to the Common and their fronts to the road, with the sole exception of Dalcott. There was apparently a requirement, for reasons I haven't fully established, that there should be a road between the houses and the Common. Nowhere else around the Common is that true.
Not everything was lost. Over time, several pieces of land were added back to the Common.
One site had been earmarked for an observatory. Another was one of Potter's large pits. A strip alongside the railway was technically on Common land but had been treated as railway sidings; when it was no longer needed, it reverted. But the most important addition by far was roughly a third of the total area of the Royal Victoria Patriotic Asylum, which the London County Council purchased and added to the Common. That is the large cricket-pitch area we know today.
More recently, the only significant further loss was caused by the widening of Trinity Road. Growing up in the 1950s and 1960s, it was plain that the eastern side of Trinity Road was in very poor condition and that a motorway was coming. It never fully materialised, but a section from the County Arms northward was severed: many houses were knocked down and a way was found through to Wandsworth Bridge.
But because of the protection provided by the 1871 Act, anything taken from the Common had to be replaced. The compensating pieces added at that time included: a small meadow-like strip along Trinity Road; two patches in front of the prison that had been bought in the 1850s; a small acre directly opposite the Royal Victoria Patriotic Asylum; the cut-back rear gardens of Heathfield Cottages; and Marcelli Road — the old diagonal road that once crossed that corner — which has now been turfed over and is a pleasure to walk along, with a fine avenue of plane trees where the road once ran.
This is what we are left with. We love it, but it is, as you can see, something of an archipelago: a scattering of green fragments rather than one continuous whole. A great deal has been lost — but thank heavens, a very large part of it still remains, 150 years on, thanks to John Buckmaster and the people he worked with.
And that, as they say, is that. What a carve-up.