October 2015 archive

Workers at Clapham Junction (1900)

Before the railway came, the Clapham Junction area was rural and specialised in growing lavender – the street Lavender Hill is east of the station. The coach road from London to Guildford ran slightly south of the future station site, past The Falcon public house at the crossroads in the valley between St. John’s Hill …

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The Fall Of The Leaf

Fall of the Leaf; by Walter E Spradbery, 1933 Just as leisure travel into the areas beyond central London was promoted to increase revenue during off-peak periods, commuters were encouraged to live further out from the city in the new suburbs for commercial reasons. Posters advertising days out by Tube, bus or tram were prominently …

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UCL Bloomsbury Project

While the project appears to have finished being put together, the website was still extant at the time of writing. The project’s lifetime was 1 October 2007–30 April 2011. The Leverhulme-funded UCL Bloomsbury Project was established to investigate 19th-century Bloomsbury’s development from swampy rubbish-dump to centre of intellectual life. Led by Professor Rosemary Ashton, with Dr …

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Alsatia

Liberties were areas which existed during the Middle Ages where rights reserved to the king had been devolved into private hands. London has many of them and the Liberty of Whitefriars was just one of them. Whitefriars was a monastery belonging to the Carmelites, just outside the City of London walls, in the ward of …

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Old and New London: Volume 1

Old and New London: Volume 1 was a book published in 1878 by Cassell, Petter & Galpin. Now out of print, it was digitised by the British History Online project. The Volume describes the western part of the City of London, including Cheapside and St Paul’s, and areas to the west of the City, including …

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Northumberland Avenue, WC2

In 1608–09, Henry Howard, 1st Earl of Northampton built a house on the eastern side of the former Chapel and Hospital of St. Mary Rounceval, at Charing Cross, including gardens running to the River Thames and adjoining Scotland Yard to the west. The estate became the property of Algernon Percy, 10th Earl of Northumberland when …

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1977: Underground map

One of the final superb-looking designs before the London Underground cartography section started to lose its way.

TUM Gallery

This area of Hyde Park is situated at Latitude 51.512, Longitude -0.16

Upper Richmond Road, SW15

Putney village, originally clustered around the church near the bank of the River Thames, developed very rapidly during the nineteenth century. In 1849 it was said to be only partly paved – although as early as 1656 thirteen parishioners of Putney petitioned Cromwell to be allowed to pave the High Street, which they said was …

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Hampstead

Hampstead is on a steep hill and the tube station platforms are the deepest on the London Underground network, at 58.5 metres below ground level. It has the deepest lift shaft on the Underground. Although early records of Hampstead itself can be found in a grant by King Ethelred the Unready to the monastery of …

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