Battersea
Battersea is a large district in southwest London, part of the London Borough of Wandsworth, England. It is centred southwest of Charing Cross and also extends along the south bank of the Thames Tideway. It includes the Battersea Park.
History
Battersea is mentioned in the few surviving Anglo-Saxon geographical accounts as and later. As with many former parishes beside tidal flood plains the lowest land was reclaimed for agriculture by draining marshland and building culverts for streams. By the side of this was the Heathwall tide mill in the north-east with a very long mill pond regularly draining and filling to the south.Battersea appears in the Domesday Book of 1086 in Surrey within the hundred of Brixton as a vast manor held by St Peter's Abbey, Westminster. Its Domesday assets were: 18 hides and 17 ploughlands of cultivated land; 7 mills worth £42 9s 8d per year, of meadow, woodland worth 50 hogs. It rendered : £75 9s 8d. Price inflation was close to zero in the 11th and 12th centuries, so netting an annual income of £75 9s 8d would be.
St Mary's Church, completed in 1777, hosted the marriage of William Blake and Catherine Boucher in 1782. Benedict Arnold, his wife Peggy Shippen, and their daughter were buried in the crypt of the church.
Battersea Park, a northern rectangle by the Thames, was landscaped and founded for public use in 1858. Amenities and leisure buildings have been added to it since.
Until 1889, the parish of Battersea was part of the county of Surrey. In that year a new County of London came into being and the parish was made part of it.
Agriculture
Before the Industrial Revolution, much of the large parish was farmland, providing food for the City of London and surrounding population centres; and with particular specialisms, such as growing lavender on Lavender Hill, asparagus or pig breeding on Pig Hill. At the end of the 18th century, above of land in the parish of Battersea were occupied by some 20 market gardeners, who rented from five to near each. Villages in the wider area: Wandsworth, Earlsfield, Tooting, Balham – were separated by fields; in common with other suburbs the wealthy of London and the traditional manor successors built their homes in Battersea and neighbouring areas.Industry
Industry in the area was concentrated to the northwest just outside the Battersea-Wandsworth boundary, at the confluence of the River Thames and the River Wandle, which gave rise to the village of Wandsworth. This was settled from the 16th century by Protestant craftsmen – Huguenots – fleeing religious persecution in Europe, who planted lavender and gardens and established a range of industries such as mills, breweries and dyeing, bleaching and calico printing. Industry developed eastwards along the bank of the Thames during the Industrial Revolution from the 1750s onwards; the Thames provided water for transport, for steam engines and for water-intensive industrial processes. Bridges erected across the Thames encouraged growth; Putney Bridge, a mile to the west, was built in 1729 and rebuilt 1882, and Battersea Bridge in the centre of the north boundary in 1771. Inland from the river, the rural agricultural community persisted.Along the Thames, a number of large and, in their field, pre-eminent firms grew; notably the Morgan Crucible company, which survives to this day and is listed on the London Stock Exchange; Price's Candles, which also made cycle lamp oil; oil refiner and paint manufacturer S. Bowley and Son; and Orlando Jones' Starch Factory. The 1874 Ordnance Survey map of the area shows the following factories, in order, from the site of the as yet unbuilt Wandsworth Bridge to Battersea Park: Starch manufacturer; Silk manufacturer; ; ; Malt house; Corn mill; Oil and grease works ; Chemical works; Plumbago Crucible works ; Chemical works; Saltpetre works; Foundry. Between these were numerous wharfs for shipping.
In 1929, construction started on Battersea Power Station, being completed in 1939. From the late 18th century to comparatively recent times, Battersea was established as an industrial area with all of the issues associated with pollution and poor housing affecting it.
Industry declined and moved away from the area in the 1970s, and local government sought to address chronic post-war housing problems with large scale clearances and the establishment of planned housing. Some decades after the end of large scale local industry, resurgent demand among magnates and high income earners for parkside and riverside property close to planned Underground links has led to significant construction, Factories have been demolished and replaced with modern apartment buildings. Some of the council owned properties have been sold off and several traditional working men's pubs have become more fashionable bistros. Battersea neighbourhoods close to the railway have some of the most deprived local authority housing in the Borough of Wandsworth, in an area which saw condemned slums after their erection in the Victoria era.
Railway age
Battersea was radically altered by the coming of railways. The London and Southampton Railway Company engineered their railway line from east to west through Battersea, in 1838, terminating at the original Nine Elms railway station at the north east tip of the area. Over the next 22 years five other lines were built, which continue to carry all of the trains to and from London's Waterloo and Victoria termini. An interchange station was built in 1863 towards the north west of the area, at a junction of the railway. Taking the name of a fashionable village a mile and more away, the station was named 'Clapham Junction': a campaign to rename it "Battersea Junction" fizzled out as late as the early twentieth century.During the latter decades of the nineteenth century Battersea had developed into a major town railway centre with two locomotive works at Nine Elms and Longhedge and three important motive power depots all in an initial pocket of north Battersea. The effect was precipitate: a population of 6,000 people in 1840 was increased to 168,000 by 1910; and save for the green spaces of Battersea Park, Clapham Common, Wandsworth Common and some smaller isolated pockets, all other farmland was built over, with, from north to south, industrial buildings and vast railway sheds and sidings, slum housing for workers, especially north of the main east–west railway, and gradually more genteel residential terraced housing further south.
The railway station encouraged the government to site its buildings in the area surrounding Clapham Junction, where a cluster of new civic buildings including the town hall, library, police station, court and post office was developed along Lavender Hill in the 1880s and 1890s. The Arding & Hobbs department store, diagonally opposite the station, was the largest of its type at the time of its construction in 1885; and the streets near the station developed as a regional shopping district. The area was served by a vast music hallThe Grandopposite the station as well as a large theatre next to the town hall. All this building around the station shifted the focus of the area southwards, and marginalised Battersea High Street into no more than an extension of Falcon Road.
Social housing estates
Battersea has a long and varied history of social housing, and the completion of the Shaftesbury Park Estate in 1877 was one of the earliest in London or the UK. Additionally, the development of the Latchmere Estate in 1903 was notable both for John Burns' involvement and for being the first estate directly built by a council's own workforce and therefore the first true "council estate". Indeed, both of these earlier estates have since been recognised as conservation areas due to their historical and architectural significance and are protected from redevelopment.Battersea also has a large area of mid-20th century public housing estates, almost all located north of the main railway lines and spanning from Fairfield in the west to Queenstown in the east.
There are four particularly large estates. The Winstanley Estate, perhaps being the most renowned of them all, is known as being the birthplace to the garage collective So Solid Crew. Winstanley is close to Clapham Junction railway station in the northern perimeter of Battersea, and is currently being considered for comprehensive redevelopment as one of the London Mayor's new Housing Zones. Further north towards Chelsea is the Surrey Lane Estate, and on Battersea Park Road is the Doddington and Rollo Estate. East, toward Vauxhall, is the Patmore Estate which is in close proximity to the Battersea Power Station.
Other smaller estates include: York Road, Ashley Crescent, Badric Court, Carey Gardens, Chatham Road, Ethelburga, Falcon Road, Gideon Road, Honeywell Road, Kambala, Peabody, Robertson Street, Savona, Somerset, Wilditch and Wynter Street.
World War I: The Battersea Battalion
On the outbreak of World War I in August 1914 Earl Kitchener of Khartoum, issued his famous call to arms: 'Your King and Country Need You'. But the flood of volunteers overwhelmed the ability of the Army to absorb them, and units began to be raised by local initiative rather than at regimental depots, often from men from particular localities or backgrounds who wished to serve together: these were known as 'Pals battalions'. The 'Pals' phenomenon quickly spread across the country, as local recruiting committees offered complete units. Encouraged by this response, Kitchener approached the 28 Metropolitan boroughs of the County of London, and the 'Great Metropolitan Recruiting Campaign' went ahead in April 1915, with each mayor asked to raise a unit of local men.One such unit was raised on 3 June 1915 by the Mayor and Borough of Battersea as the 10th Battalion, Queen's . was still the Regular Army regiment covering South London, while the London Regiment, including the 23rd Battalion based at Clapham Junction, consisted entirely of part-time soldiers of the Territorial Force
The Battersea Battalion served alongside Pals battalions from Lambeth, Bermondsey and Lewisham in 41st Division on the Western Front, including the battles of the Somme, Messines, and Ypres, on the Italian Front, and then back in the west against the German spring offensive and in the final victorious Hundred Days Offensive. The Battersea Battalion was kept up to strength with dismounted cavalrymen from the Surrey Yeomanry, based at Clapham Park. After the Armistice it took part in the Occupation of the Rhineland and was finally disbanded in 1920.