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 and Lavender Hill.
On 21 May 1838 the London and Southampton Railway became the London and South Western Railway (L&SWR), and opened its line from Nine Elms as far as Woking. That was the first railway through the area but it had no station at the present site.
The second line, initially from Nine Elms to Richmond, opened on 27 July 1846. Nine Elms was replaced in 1848 as the terminus by Waterloo Bridge station, now Waterloo. The line to Victoria opened by 1860. Clapham Junction opened on 2 March 1863, a joint venture of the L&SWR, the London, Brighton and South Coast Railway (LB&SCR) and the West London Extension Railway (WLER) as an interchange station for their lines.
When the station was built, much of Battersea was the site of heavy industry while Clapham, a mile south-east of this point, was fashionable. The railway companies, to attract a middle- and upper-class clientele, seized the unindustrial parish calculating that being upon the slopes of Clapham’s plateau would only re-inforce this distinction, leading to a long-lasting misunderstanding that the station is in Clapham. The railway companies were not alone in eschewing the name of Battersea; from the 1880s until the 1950s the imposing private houses forming the streets of the district were commonly recorded by property-owning residents as ‘Clapham Common N. Side, London’ and ‘Clapham Common W. Side, London’ despite being well away from those park-side streets.