The Underground Map

The Underground Map is a project which is creating street histories for the areas of London and surrounding counties lying inside the M25.

Baker Street

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.

As maps are displayed, click on the markers to view location articles.

Licence: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike Licence

Click here to explore another London street
We now have 666 completed street histories and 46834 partial histories
Find streets or residential blocks within the M25 by clicking STREETS

NOVEMBER

2018

Kinnerton Street, SW1X
Kinnerton Street - a small winding street - was originally the service road for Wilton Place and Wilton Crescent. This long street contains two and three storey painted and rendered brickwork buildings.

It contains 127 properties, nowadays used for both residential and commercial purposes. However in 1854 it was much more diverse and the following occupations were listed: cow-keeper, grocer, plumber, saddler, tailor, wheelwright and two sellers of asses’ milk (thought to be beneficial to health).

During the Second World War, a bomb is recorded as falling directly onto nearby Ann’s Close. This destroyed properties specialising in equestrian usage.
»read full article

NOVEMBER

2018

Canon Row, SW1A
Canon Row is at least one thousand year’s old. The definite origin of the name is unknown - either named after where the canons of St Stephen’s resided or a corruption of Channel Row, indicating a channel from the Thames.

It was in former days the site of several grand townhouses. John Stow states that among its inhabitants in his time were "divers noblemen and gentlemen".

Sussex House, home of Thomas Radclyffe, 3rd Earl of Sussex, was situated on Canon Row.

The current buildings in Canon Row include two Georgian buildings and the old police building, built in the early 20th century.
»read full article

NOVEMBER

2018

Broadwick Street, W1F
Broadwick Street runs west-east between Marshall Street and Wardour Street, crossing Berwick Street. Broadwick Street was formerly Broad Street. As such it was notorious for being the centre of an 1854 outbreak of cholera which killed 616 people. The disease was widely thought to be caused by air-borne miasma.

Physician John Snow’s hypothesis was that it spread because of germ-contaminated water. Dr Snow traced the outbreak to a public water pump on the street and disabled the pump. The outbreak ceased.

This discovery came to influence public health and the construction of improved sanitation facilities.

A replica pump, together with an explanatory plaque, was erected in 1992 close to the original location.

The site of modern Broadwick Street extends across four original estates - Colman Hedge Close, Little Gelding’s Close, Pawlett’s Garden and Pesthouse Close. Building started at the eastern end in 1686.

Until 1936, most of the street was called Broad Street and the eastern section Edward Street.
...
»more

NOVEMBER

2018

Bramber Road, N12
Bramber Road was built on the former land of the White House Estate. George Knights Smith built up the White House Estate of about 60 acres between Woodhouse Road, Torrington Park, and Friern Barnet Lane.

After his death, it was bought by Frederic Crisp of Holloway.

The White House Estate was acquired in 1908 by the British Land Company. By 1911 Ashurst Road, Petworth Road, Bramber Road, Warnham Road and Buxted Road had been laid out between Woodhouse Road and Friern Park.

Lewes Road was later built and Horsham Road was constructed across the grounds of Brook House.

On 10 October 1940, a 1000kg bomb fell in the middle of Bramber Road, outside no 6. It buried itself in the road before the full force of the explosion blew a crater 60 feet across and 60 feet deep. No one was killed or seriously injured.
»read full article

NOVEMBER

2018

Palmerston Road, N22
Palmerston Road was previously a tree-lined avenue. In 1850 the owner of Bowes Manor, Sir Thomas Wilde, was created Baron Truro of Bowes. Bowes Manor was situated between what are now Kelvin Road and Melbourne Roads.

When Wilde died in 1855, the estate was purchased by Alderman Sidney. Having been a successful tea merchant, he became an alderman of the City of London in a position he held for 36 years. We was Lord Mayor in 1853-4.

Sidney developed the western border of the Bowes estate, building Palmerston Road in 1870 on what previously had been a tree lined private road with a gateway at either end.

Sidney built 13 large houses backing onto the New River, between Whittington Road and Bowes Roads.

As well as his City of London duties, Sidney was also Liberal MP for Stafford in separate spells. This is the reason for the Whig politicians celebrated in local street names: Grenville, Kelvin, Melbourne, Palmerston, Russell and Spencer.

Sidney died in 1889 and th...
»more

NOVEMBER

2018

Myddleton Road, N22
Myddleton Road runs east-west from the High Road to Whittington Road. The road was named after Sir Hugh Myddleton who completed the New River in 1609 to bring drinking water into London. In 1858, the route was shortened, bringing the New River through what became Bowes Park. There is a listed 19th century tunnel entrance adjacent to Myddleton Road.

The development of the present day Bowes Park began in 1843. Bowes Manor Farm sold off part of its land to the east of Bounds Green Road. This eventually became the Myddleton Road area.

A new railway line from Alexandra Palace station to Enfield was opened in 1871 and triggered development in the area between the railway line - Bowes Road, Wood Green High Road and Clarence Road. Bowes Park station subsequently opened in 1880.

Also in 1880, part of the Bowes Park estate was offered up for auction to ’persons seeking rural and salubrious residences’. Apart from development along the High Road, Lascotts Road, Myddleton Road, Marquis Road and Parkhurst Ro...
»more

NOVEMBER

2018

Pinkham Way, N12
Pinkham Way is a section of the North Circular Road. As early as 1912, a local Government board had recommended the creation of a network of arterial roads around London. North Circular road was one of these. The North Circular Road was finally begun in the 1920s

In 1933, the final section of the local part of the road - Pinkham Way - opened. The single carriageway cost £169,500 to build by Messrs G Wimpey and Co of Hammersmith.
»read full article

NOVEMBER

2018

Alma Primary
Alma Primary School is a Jewish school (capacity 210) which accepts students between the ages of 4 and 11. On 27 February 2018, Theresa Villiers, MP for Chipping Barnet, attended a dedication ceremony marking the move of Alma Primary School to its permanent site in the former police station building in Whetstone.

Alma Primary was founded by a group of parents and educators. Opened in September 2013, it was located at a temporary site in
Moss Hall Grove in North Finchley before moving to Whetstone.
»read full article

NOVEMBER

2018

Maida Vale
Maida Vale took its name from a public house named after John Stuart, Count of Maida, which opened on the Edgware Road soon after the Battle of Maida, 1806. The area was developed by the Ecclesiastical Commissioners in the early 19th century as middle class housing. The main building started in the mid 19th century and from the 1860s red brick was used. The first mansion blocks were completed in 1897.

Maida Vale nowadays makes up most of the W9 postal district - the southern part of Maida Vale at the junction of Paddington Basin with Regent's Canal, with many houseboats, is known as Little Venice. The area to the south-west of Maida Vale, at the western end of Elgin Avenue, was historically known as Maida Hill.

Maida Vale tube station was opened on 6 June 1915, on the Bakerloo Line.
»read full article

NOVEMBER

2018

Babmaes Street, SW1Y
Babmaes Street was originally called Wells Street. Babmaes Street had a name change and began to be called after Baptist May, a courtier to Charles II. May was the son of Sir Humphrey May and May the younger became Keeper of the Privy Purse in 1665, a role he continued until Charles’s death.

After a failed attempt to become the MP for Winchelsea in 1666, he got into Parliament as the member for Midhurst in 1670.

Baptist May was granted land in this area and Babmaes Mews was named after him. Wells Street and the mews were combined into Babmaes Street.
»read full article

NOVEMBER

2018

Hungerford Bridge
Hungerford Bridge is a rail bridge crossing the Thames into Charing Cross station. The first Hungerford Bridge, designed by Isambard Kingdom Brunel, was opened in 1845 as a suspension footbridge. It was named after neighbouring Hungerford Market. Hungerford Market in turn was named for Sir Edward Hungerford, an MP between 1659 and 1702.

In 1859, Brunel’s bridge was bought by the South Eastern Railway is they extended the South Eastern Railway into the newly opened Charing Cross station. The suspension bridge was replaced with a structure designed by Sir John Hawkshaw, comprising nine spans made of wrought iron lattice girders, which opened in 1864. Walkways were added on each side, with the upstream one later being removed when the railway was widened. The chains from the old bridge were reused in Brunel’s Clifton Suspension Bridge. The buttress on the South Bank still has the entrances and steps from the original steamer pier Brunel built.

In the mid-1990s a decision was made to replace the footbridge with new structures on eithe...
»more

NOVEMBER

2018

Manor House
Manor House station was named after a nearby pub. Situated at the junction of Seven Sisters Road and Green Lanes, it was opened on 19 September 1932.

It was designed by Charles Holden and, on the Piccadilly Line, it lies between Finsbury Park and Turnpike Lane stations. The sub-surface areas of the station were tiled in biscuit coloured tiles lined with blue friezes.

Like other stations on the 1932 Cockfosters extension, Manor House set new aesthetic standards. The station tunnels have a diameter of 7 metres and were designed for the greater volume of traffic expected. The provision of ’suicide pits’ between the rails was also innovative.
»read full article

NOVEMBER

2018

Westbourne Terrace, W2
Westbourne Terrace was an idea of George Gutch the builder. By 1840 plans had been made to exploit more of the Paddington Estate as the eastern part of Bayswater, where the future Gloucester Terrace, Westbourne Terrace and Eastbourne Terrace were to lead to Bishop’s Road.

The layout was drawn out by George Gutch, whose long avenues contrasted with the interrelated squares and short streets of nearby ’Tyburnia’. Terraces were chosen, rather than villas, perhaps in order to mask the railway.

Westbourne Terrace was begun from the south end in the 1840s and finished between 1856 and 1860. The main builders were William King and William Kingdom. The blocks north of Craven Road were by Kingdom, who also built most of Gloucester Terrace between 1843 and 1852.

Westbourne Terrace was described by a contemporary as "unrivalled in its class in London or even Great Britain". The houses form long stuccoed terraces of four storeys and attic over a basement, with pillared porches, many of them designed by T...
»more

NOVEMBER

2018

Cambridge Circus, WC2H
Cambridge Circus is the intersection of Shaftesbury Avenue and Charing Cross Road. Shaftesbury Avenue and Charing Cross Road were new streets, the former opening in 1886 and the latter, opened to the public by the Duke of Cambridge in February 1887. The intersection of the two streets at Cambridge Circus was named after him.

The Palace Theatre is located on the west side of the junction, while The Ivy and a number of private clubs are accessible from the south of Cambridge Circus.

Cambridge Circus was the location of Marks & Co. booksellers, located at 84 Charing Cross Road, which featured in Helene Hanff’s 1970 book.
»read full article

NOVEMBER

2018

Peabody Avenue, SW1V
Peabody Avenue, completed in 1885, is a monument to the birth of social housing. The Peabody Trust estates were designed for the working poor with a high quality of build. This was reflected in the rents which were higher than the average. The buildings of the Trust spread out over late Victorian London.

Peabody Avenue was relatively cheap to build, mixing low-cost bricks and reconstituted stone. The flats were small and originally built without bathrooms and decent-sized kitchens.

In the new millennium, the Peabody Trust was active again in the street. It commissioned Haworth Tompkins’ architects to build a further 55 new homes for the Peabody Trust housing association, at a cost of £8 million. The firm had built pioneering social housing before at Coin Street, Southwark completed in 2001.

The newer Peabody building slightly follows the curve of the neighbouring railway tracks.

https://www.standard.co.uk/lifestyle/joined-up-thinking-of-pimlicos-peabody-avenue-6394281.html

»read full article

NOVEMBER

2018

Birdcage Walk, SW1E
Birdcage Walk runs east-west from the Parliament Square area (as Great George Street) to Buckingham Palace. The Royal Menagerie and Aviary which were located on the future route of Birdcage Walk in the reign of King James I. King Charles II expanded the Aviary when St James’s Park was laid out from 1660. Storey’s Gate, named after Edward Storey, Keeper of the King’s Birds, was originally the gate at the eastern end of Birdcage Walk.

Only the Royal Family and the Hereditary Grand Falconer were permitted to drive along the road until 1828, when it was opened to the public.
»read full article

NOVEMBER

2018

Arundel Street, WC2R
Arundel Street runs from the Strand to Temple Place. Before the construction of the Victoria Embankment between 1865 and 1870, it ran down to the River Thames.

The street was laid out on land previously occupied by Arundel House and its gardens. This was the property of the Howard family, Dukes of Norfolk and was knocked down by the earl of Arundel in 1678. Arundel Street, Howard Street, Norfolk Street and Surrey Street were all built after Arundel House was demolished

The Whittington Club, formed 1847, stood on the corner with Water Street. The Arundel Hotel was built at the southern end in the nineteenth century. It billed itself as "the largest private hotel in London".
»read full article

NOVEMBER

2018

Aberdeen Place, NW8
Aberdeen Place was built on the site of a farm once owned by John Lyon, who founded Harrow School in 1571. The farm was located in the former Lisson Manor and it was built over after 1823. The new street names derived from governors of Harrow School. Aberdeen Place was named after George Hamilton-Gordon, 4th Earl of Aberdeen, who had gone to school at Harrow. He was Prime Minister between 1852 and 1855.

The farm had been held by the governors of the school. The profits from the agricultural side of the business helped with the maintenance of the Harrow Road between Harrow and London.

»read full article

NOVEMBER

2018

Jack Cornwell Street, E12
Jack Cornwell Street was named after a local First World War hero. Jack Cornwell was born in West Ham and 16 years old when he was horribly wounded at the Battle of Jutland in 1916 and subsequently died.

Cornwell was a sight-setter on a forward gun on HMS Chester. On 31 May 1916, the ship found itself facing four German cruisers and was attacked. The rest of Cornwell’s team were killed and, though seriously injured, he stayed at his post awaiting orders.

More than 6000 men died in the naval battle, though it allowed Britain to continue its crucial blockade of Germany.

Cornwell would have remained in obscurity, but Admiral Sir David Beatty mentioned him in the battle dispatch, printed in July 1916. The Daily Sketch picked up on his story and began to campaign for a burial with full naval honours.

In September 1916, Jack Cornwell was awarded the Victoria Cross. A pub is the street was in due course named ’The Victoria Cross’.
»read full article

NOVEMBER

2018

Ashcombe Road, SM5
Ashcombe Road was built in the early 1930s. The majority of the houses have large sized front gardens used for off-street parking. Mature shrubs give some privacy to the properties.Â Mature planting within the properties and on broad verges complements and provides unity with the Park.
»read full article

NOVEMBER

2018

Aldridge Road Villas, W11
Aldridge Road Villas is a surviving fragment of mid-Victorian residential development. The Aldridge family held land beside the Harrow Road at Westbourne Park by 1743. John Aldridge, who died in 1795 and was MP for Queensborough, married a wealthy widow, Henrietta Busby. She was a considerable Bayswater landowner and added several scattered fields in Bayswater and Westbourne to John Aldridge’s possessions.

The street’s nineteenth century heart is bounded on three sides by post 1970s housing and with its western side forming part of the boundary between Westminster and Kensington and Chelsea.

Aldridge Road Villas contains a mixture of mid-Victorian semi-detached villas with stuccoed Ionic and Corinthian porches and bays, heavily architraved upper floor windows, and broad over-hanging caves. These are adjacent to groups of brick and stucco mid/late-Victorian terraces, some with elaborate dentilled cornices, semi-circular architraved windows and stuccoed, canted bay windows at ground and first floors.

Situated on the no...
»more

NOVEMBER

2018

Albion Street, W2
Albion Street was laid out over the Pightle field in the late 1820s. To the immediate east of the street, St George’s Fields was a burial ground from 1763, and later used for archery, games and as allotments. The burial ground was closed in 1854. The land was owned by St George’s Church in Hanover Square, which sold it to developers in 1967 who left a few tombstones in place.

East of Albion Street and south of Connaught Street, the St George’s Fields group of flats is a development by Design 5 from the early 1970s. They are set back in beautifully planted gardens. The mature plantings inside the estate enhance views from Connaught Street, Stanhope Place and Albion Gate, and the scale of the new buildings is such that they do not disrupt the historic townscape.

The community of 300 flats is set in over two acres of woodland gardens. The Ziggurat pyramid style buildings incorporate five levels of large balconies each with hanging gardens.
»read full article

NOVEMBER

2018

St James Gardens
St James Gardens were used as a burial ground between 1790 and 1853. St James was opened in 1788 as the new burial ground for St James’ Piccadilly. It was once rectangular in shape but the building of Euston station, covered the east end of the graveyard.

Edward Walford writing in Old and New London in the late nineteenth century said: “St. James’s Church, formerly a chapel of ease to the mother church of St. James’s, Piccadilly. It is a large brick building, and has a large, dreary, and ill-kept burial ground attached to it. Here lie George Morland, the painter, who died in 1804; John Hoppner, the portrait-painter, who died in 1810; Admiral Lord Gardner, the hero of Port l’Orient, and the friend of Howe, Bridport and Nelson; and without a memorial, Lord George Gordon, the mad leader of the Anti-Catholic Riots in 1780, who died a prisoner in Newgate in 1793.”

It was closed for burials in the mid-nineteenth century. In 1887 the majority of the monuments and tombstones were removed and St J...
»more

NOVEMBER

2018

Queens Road Peckham
Queens Road Peckham railway station serves the area to the east of Peckham. The station originally opened, with the line, on 13 August 1866 and had two wooden side platforms but three tracks passing through it.

Until 1911 passenger trains ran to the East London Line stopping at Old Kent Road.

The present island platform dates from the 1970s which is on a viaduct with the line: there are 48 steps leading to it, and one block of platform buildings.

It became a London Overground station on 9 December 2012, having previously been on the Inner South London Line.
»read full article

NOVEMBER

2018

Queen’s Road, SE15
Queen’s Road, formerly known as Deptford Lane, was renamed in honour of Queen Victoria. Queen’s Road extends eastwards from Peckham High Street to New Cross Road.

The surrounding neighbourhood area was market gardens until about 1840 when a network of terraces called New Peckham began to be laid out.

Albert Road, a turning out of Queen’s Road, was formerly known as Cow Walk.

The first branded cigarettes manufactured in Britain - Sweet Threes- were made at a factory on Queen’s Road around 1859 by Robert Peacock Gloag. Gloag had been paymaster to the Turkish forces during the Crimean War, where he is reported to have seen locals smoking. Gloags business was largely responsible for the popularity of cigarettes in the UK.

In 1926 the first holistic health centre in Britain, known as the Pioneer, later known as The Peckham Experiment, was opened at 142 Queens Road. Opened by doctors George Scott Williamson and Innes Pearse of the Royal Free Hospital, it was purposefully located in the area due to the...
»more

NOVEMBER

2018

Anne Boleyns Walk, SM2
Anne Boleyns Walk represents a cohesive example of the historic development and expansion of Cheam’s centre. The road has a typical inter-war suburban form and represents a cohesive example of the historic development and expansion of Cheam district centre. The area has a high townscape value and architectural quality with consistent mock-Tudor architecture and construction detail/materials such as tile hanging, magpie work and painted timbers.

Just outside Cheam stands Henry VIII’s Nonsuch Palace was the inspiration for the name of Anne Boleyns Walk.
»read full article

NOVEMBER

2018

John Islip Street, SW1P
John Islip Street commemorates the Abbot of Westminster between 1500 and 1532. Islip entered the monastery as a 16 year old in 1480, rising up the ranks to eventually become friends with both Henry VII and VIII. Probably a good job he died before the Dissolution of the Monasteries a few years later.

While Islip was Abbot, the Abbey’s nave was finished and the west towers built as high as the nave roof. The Lady Chapel was also started under his tenure, with the Abbot laying the foundation stone.

Millbank Estate is a red-brick housing estate that gives the area behind Tate Britain a distinct character. The estate was built between 1897 and 1902, the bricks being recycled from Millbank Penitentiary, which had closed in 1890.

It was one of the first large council housing estates for the working classes, and accommodated 4500 people. It marked an important milestone in the development of local authority housing and the evolution of ‘Arts and Crafts’ principles of architecture as applied to large scale housing proje...
»more

MAP YEAR:	1750	1800	1810	1820	1830	1860	1900	1950	2024	Show map without markers
	Use the control in the top right of the map above to view this area on another historic map

PREVIOUSLY ON THE UNDERGROUND MAP...