This is despite London being the largest city in the world at that stage with a population of nearly 3.2M.
Just 6 years earlier England had held the Great Exhibition of 1851 to showcase Victorian pomp and affluence to the world and Joseph Paxton had built his famous "Crystal Palace" that was to give the suburb its subsequent name. The site of Paxton's building is just a few miles from our house along the ridge at the top of Streatham Common. Despite all this activity nearby however Streatham was still clearly a village.
Victorian properity and successive waves of immigrants fleeing famine and persecution from the continent in the second half of the 19C saw London's population continue to expand rapidly until it was over 7M by 1910.
The big impetus however that led to the suburbanisation of Streatham and the building of our home by the 1890's was the opening of the railway station at the bottom of our road in 1862. The Victorians were nothing if not railway builders and this clearly allowed London's population expand into ever more comfortable suburbs around the capital.
This expansion contined into the 20C with the other side of the main road becoming suburbanised after the turn of the century. These roads are still home to many lovely large Edwardian family homes that clearly reflected the growing prosperity of Streatham.Just a pity we couldn't afford to buy one when we were looking to buy our house. I'm sure we wouldn't have liked them anyway.
Keep the architectural history coming, Phil. As an ex-pat myself now, I do miss being around architecture prior to circa 1973. OK, so that's a little harsh, Perth does go back a bit further than that. And I did get an Edwardian - and contemporary fix on a short visit to Melbourne last week, which was a lot of fun.
ReplyDeleteI can completely relate to the excitement of discovering the local history around your house and area though. Several years ago a local estate agent in Fulham junk-mailed, in a cardboard tube(!) a local map from the Eighteenth century. Colehill Lane was the sole minor road in the area, with the pub opposite the only marked building. And even then, was some tavern or coaching house. Subsequently my neighbour did some research and discovered, just off my map, a Colehill House a few decades earlier, with all of our immedate area on that estate. His archive found this up for sale, and it certailnly didn't survive into the Twentieth century. I kept that map on the wall for years.