The Underground Map is a project which is creating street histories for the areas of London and surrounding counties lying inside the M25.
In a series of maps from the 1750s until the 1950s, you can see how London grew from a city which only reached as far as Park Lane into the post war megapolis we know today. There are now over 85 000 articles on all variety of locations including roads, houses, schools, pubs and palaces.
You can begin exploring by choosing a place from the dropdown list at the top left and then clicking Reset Location.
As maps are displayed, click on the markers to view location articles.
You can also view historical maps of London - click on the "pile of paper" control on the top right of a page's map to change to a particular decade.
Latest on The Underground Map...
Risley Avenue is part of the Tower Gardens Estate. The Tower Gardens Estate has a very special place in the history of Council house building. It was one of the first ’garden suburbs’ in the world and its architecture is of extremely high quality.
At the turn of the twentieth century Tottenham was a suburb served by new railways and at the end of the tram lines. It was surrounded by fields which the newly formed London County Council (LCC ) could acquire using as-yet hardly-used powers to buy land and build housing.
Early experiments in housing design for workers had produced beautiful picturesque estates outside London modelled on traditional rural housing, such as Port Sunlight and Bourneville. They were designed by some of the most progressive architects of their day and funded by rich social reformers. Their architectural philosophy respected co-operation between architects and craftspeople and was called the ’Arts and Crafts Movement’.
The LCC wanted to improve housing conditi...
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Crouch Hill is a railway station as well as a street in north London The area of Crouch Hill was still mostly farmland until Crouch Hill station opened in July 1868.
After the railway arrived, housebuilding started in earnest. Each of the road called Crouch Hill, John Farrer built Cecile Park in the 1880s and 1890s. To the west, W.J. Collins was at work at the same time.
Between the two world wars, Crouch Hill saw council housing appears. In 1972, the Holly Park estate’s 17-storey Ilex House was completed.
Crouch Hill crosses over the Parkland Walk, a public foot and cycle path and linear park that stretches from Finsbury Park to Alexandra Palace, and follows some of the course of the Northern Heights planned rail extension to the Northern line, abandoned on 9 February 1954.
Since January 2010, trains from Crouch Hill run every 15 minutes in each direction, towards either Gospel Oak or Barking throughout the day.
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St Ann’s Villas, W11
St Ann’s Villas, a tree-lined if busy road, leads into Royal Crescent from St Ann’s Road The Norland estate had been 52 acres of ground, bounded on the east by the streets now known as Portland Road and Pottery Lane, on the south by Holland Park Avenue. By the mid 1830s, Norland was looking attractive for speculative building.
In 1836, the incorporation of the Birmingham, Bristol and Thames Junction Railway occurred. The company proposed the construction of a line from Willesden to the Kensington Canal. The route authorised was north-south a few yards outside the western boundary of the Norland estate, across the Uxbridge Road at Shepherd’s Bush.
Drainage problems posed by the construction of the railway promoted the development of the Norland Estate. Between the Uxbridge and Hammersmith roads the railway was to extend along or very close to the course of the Counter’s Creek sewer, the natural open ditch which discharged surface water into the Kensington Canal. In 1837–8 the Westminster Commissioners of Sewers insisted that the railway ...
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Severus Road, SW11
Severus Road is almost opposite the main entrance to Clapham Junction station and runs down to Eckstein Road In 1885, the area which became Severus Road and other local streets consisted of meadowland and gardens. In that year and for the following four years, builder Alfred Heaver and architect C. J.Bentley went to work. Having paid £16 000 for the land, Heaver named the area St John’s Park and proceeded to build 225 houses on five streets.
Most of the land was acquired from the Whiting family. Also included was George Alder’s former house on St John’s Hill, which gave main-road access from the north. The area was bounded on the east by St John’s Road and to the south by Battersea Rise.
Alfred Heaver suggested names for the new roads: Markfield Road, Winton Road, Manbury Road and Danehurst Road. Boutflower Road already existed as a lane. The Metropolitan Board of Works rejected the new road names as ’unsuitable’ and suggested instead, rather exotically, Aliwal Road, Comyn Road, Eckstein Road and Severus Road. Boutflower Road, for the existing lane,...
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Philharmonic Hall
The Philharmonic Hall was a major music hall throughout the 1860s and early 1870s The Philharmonic Hall was built by the contractors Holland and Hannen on the site of some former tenements. It opened with a banquet on 7 November 1860. The Hall was the first of many places of entertainment that would be built on this site, culminating in the Islington Empire of 1908.
The Hall was redecorated in 1874 and the building was also renamed the Philharmonic Theatre, with a seating capacity for some 758 people. Alas it was destroyed by fire in September 1882. The Grand Theatre opened on its site in August 1883.
Like its predecessor, the (first) Grand Theatre was destroyed by fire, this time only four years after being built, during the staging of the annual Christmas pantomime on 29 December 1887.
The owners, Holt and Wilmot, immediately set about rebuilding the Theatre with Frank Matcham again doing the redesign. The second Grand Theatre reopened a year later on 1 December 1888 with a production of ’The Still Alarm’.
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