Clapham (London)

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Clapham
Coordinates 51 ° 28 ′  N , 0 ° 8 ′  W Coordinates: 51 ° 28 ′  N , 0 ° 8 ′  W
OS National Grid TQ296637542I2
Clapham (Greater London)
Clapham
Clapham
administration
Post town LONDON
ZIP code section SW4 and parts of SW9, SW12
prefix 020
Part of the country England
region London
London Borough Lambeth

Clapham is a borough in south-west London, within the London Borough of Lambeth . Part of historic Clapham is in the London Borough of Wandsworth . Clapham goes back to the Anglo-Saxons , it is believed that the name was formed from the Old English words clopp (a) and hām or hamm and means "home near a hill".

location

Clapham includes most of the postal delivery district of SW4 and parts of SW9 and SW12. Clapham Common Parkland is partially in the London Borough of Wandsworth , but is managed as a whole by Lambeth. Clapham is divided into three constituencies, Clapham Common, Clapham Town and Thornton. Portions of Clapham North are in the Ferndale constituency ( Brixton borough ) and Larkhall constituency ( Stockwell borough ).

Victorian Pavilion in the center of Clapham Common
East side of Holy Trinity Church, Clapham Old Town
Clapham Clock Tower, Clapham High Street
Residential houses on Sibella Road
Clapham Park Road
Clapham South Underground Station, with residential buildings

Clapham Common and Clapham Town

Clapham Common includes approximately 90 acres of green space with three ponds and a historic pavilion. In its vicinity is Clapham Old Town with buildings of Georgian and Victorian architecture and the Queen Anne style . Holy Trinity Clapham is also located here, a Georgian church built in 1774–1776 which gained importance through the Clapham sect . The newer Clapham Town is dominated by Clapham High Street and residential streets such as Clapham Manor Street, which has a leisure center, and Venn Street, which has an art house cinema, restaurants and a weekly market held every weekend.

Clapham South and Clapham North

Clapham South is mostly residential. Balham Hill is also commonly included in Clapham South because of its proximity to Clapham South Tube Station , although it officially belongs to the neighboring Balham district. The same goes for Clapham Common Westside, it belongs to the neighboring Battersea district .

Clapham North is on either side of Clapham Road and borders Stockwell . The northern part belongs to the Larkhall constituency, the southern part to the Ferndale constituency.

history

Ancient and Middle Ages

Today's Clapham High Street is an old branch of the Roman Stane Street , which led from London to Chichester and ran along what is now Clapham Road and Abbeville Road. A testimony to the existence of the road in Roman antiquity is a Roman altar discovered during construction in 1912, which today stands in front of the entrance to the public library in Clapham Old Town. According to its inscription, it was built by Ticinius Ascanius and is dated to the first century.

The first written mention of Clapham is in the Chronicles of Chertsey Abbey , in the second half of the 9th century. A Saxon duke named Alfred gave his wife Werburga 30 hides of land in Clappeham for life . In older literature, the place name is traced back to the Anglo-Saxon noble landowner Osgod Clapa, who is said to have owned the land around 1040. King Hardiknut died as a guest at the wedding party of a daughter of Clapas on June 8th 1042 in Lambeth , the area of ​​today's Clapham belonged to Lambeth at that time. Due to the earlier mention in the chronicles of Chertsey Abbey, it is impossible that Osgod Clapa was the namesake. However, the possibility is not excluded that there was another bearer of this name before Osgod Clapa.

According to the history of the Clapham family recorded by the College of Arms , Jonas, son of the Duke of Lorraine, received Clapham as a fief from King Edgar in 965 and has been called Jonas de Clapham ever since. The family remained in possession of the land until Jonas' great-great-grandson Arthur faced William the Conqueror during the invasion of the Normans in 1066 and, losing his land, had to flee north. The descendants of the family still live there today, mostly in Yorkshire.

Clapham is named Clopeham in the Domesday Book of the late 11th century and was part of the county of Surrey . The landowner was Geoffrey de Mandeville , and at the time eleven households lived in the estate, so it was very small. The area was given as 7 Carucatae arable land and 5 acres of grassland.

Clapham in the 17th to 19th centuries

As recently as 1638, Clapham was a small village with only 46 households. Large country houses began to be built in Clapham in the late 17th century, some based on plans by Christopher Wren . Clapham Common, previously swampland, was drained around 1720. During the 18th and 19th centuries, Clapham was a preferred residence for the wealthy citizens of the City of London , who built numerous large and prestigious structures in Clapham Common and in the old town. The population increased sharply, around 1780 there were about 240 houses in Clapham, in 1885 6,263 and in 1895 more than 7,000. Samuel Pepys spent the last two years of his life in Clapham, in the house of his friend, former servant and long-time companion, William Hewer .

Clapham Common was a popular recreation area during the 19th century that also attracted Londoners. Numerous sports were practiced in the meadows and boats were hired out or model ships launched in the ponds. This was also the residence of Elizabeth Cook , the widow of the explorer James Cook . She moved to Clapham in 1788, nearly 20 years after her husband's death, and died in 1835. Another well-known resident of Clapham Common at the time was Sir Charles Barry , the architect of the Palace of Westminster. The scientist Henry Cavendish lived in London, but he also owned a house in Clapham Common where he kept his scientific instruments. He carried out his historical experiment on the density of the earth in the garden of this house. John Francis Bentley, the architect of Westminster Cathedral, lived in the adjacent Old Town until his death in 1902. In 1900 the Japanese writer Natsume Soseki spent part of his two-year stay in London here.

In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the Clapham sect , a group of predominantly Anglican upper-class social reformers who lived in the Clapham Common area, formed in the parish of Holy Trinity Clapham . They included John Venn , William Wilberforce , Henry Thornton, Zachary Macaulay, the father of historian Thomas Macaulay , and William Smith , the grandfather of Florence Nightingale . Even John Shore, 1st Baron Teignmouth , the first president of the British and Foreign Bible Society , was one of them. The Clapham sect played a decisive role in the abolition of slavery and child labor, pushed for prison reform and promoted missionary activities in the British colonies. Clapham was considered the center of evangelicalism in England at the time.

The Clapham Rovers FC football club , based in Clapham at the time , won the English FA Cup in 1880 .

Until the founding of the County of London in 1889, Clapham was part of the county of Surrey. In 1900 Clapham became a district within the new Metropolitan Borough of Wandsworth . With the division of the Metropolitan Borough of Wandsworth in 1965, almost the entire area of ​​the historic parish of Clapham became part of the London Borough of Lambeth .

Clapham in the 20th and 21st centuries

With the development of the railroad, Clapham became a residential city for London commuters, and by 1900 the city had lost its appeal to the upper classes. It was from this period that the term Man on the Clapham omnibus comes from an average citizen who has been mentioned repeatedly in major court cases throughout the legal history of the Commonwealth.

Today Clapham is a district with different architecture. Many of the large villas were demolished by the middle of the 20th century. The preserved historical development includes the magnificent buildings of the Queen Anne Style and the Georgian and Victorian eras in Clapham Old Town and Clapham Common, and Victorian houses in Abbeville. As in other parts of London, there are a number of city-owned housing developments from the 1930s to 1960s.

By the 1980s, Clapham saw another transformation. As part of the gentrification of the neighboring districts, Clapham became a destination for those members of the upper middle class who, after the boom years of the 1980s and 1990s, could no longer afford living space around Sloane Square and in Belgravia . Today, Clapham is a multicultural neighborhood, with members of the middle class of various ethnic backgrounds, and home to an active gay community. The Clapham area attracts many young graduates and students. You are following a tradition that goes back to the time when the University of London had dormitories for students here.

Clapham has a large number of restaurants, bars, cafes, wine bars, boutiques and leisure activities. This makes the district a great attraction, which is reinforced by its good transport links to the City of London and the West End and the train connections to Heathrow and Gatwick Airports and the south of England. Clapham has three London Underground stations and two train stations.

Prominent residents of the neighborhood in the 20th and 21st centuries included writers Graham Greene and Kingsley Amis , military historian John Keegan , actors Jeremy Brett , David Calder , Lena Headey , Miriam Margolyes , Corin Redgrave , Vanessa Redgrave , Kelly Reilly and Dennis Waterman , singer and musician Patrick Wolf, and former basketball player and TV presenter John Amaechi .

Personalities

literature

  • Edward Wedlake Brayley: A topographical history of Surrey , 4 volumes, G. Willis, London 1850, Volume 3, pp. 277-293, archive.org , accessed January 27, 2014.
  • Daniel Lysons: Clapham . In: Daniel Lysons: The environs of London: being an historical account of the towns, villages, and hamlets, within twelve miles of that capital interspersed with biographical anecdotes , 4 volumes, T. Cadell, London 1792, Volume 1, p. 159 –169, archive.org , accessed January 26, 2014.
  • John Telford: A sect that moved the world. Three generations of Clapham saints and philanthropists . Charles H. Kelly, London undated (1907), archive.org , accessed January 26, 2014.
  • James Thorne: Clapham . In: James Thorne: Handbook to the Environs of London , 2 parts, John Murray, London 1876, Volume 1, pp. 110-113, archive.org , accessed January 27, 2014.
  • Percy M. Thornton: Battersea and Clapham . In: George Clinch, SW Kershaw: Bygone Surrey , Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent & Co., London 1895, pp. 170-185, archive.org , accessed January 26, 2014.

Web links

Commons : Clapham  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Percy M. Thornton: Battersea and Clapham , p. 173.
  2. ^ Daniel Lysons: The environs of London , Volume 1, p. 163.
  3. ↑ without author: A short history of Clapham and Stockwell , website of the London Borough of Lambeth, lambeth.gov.uk ( Memento of the original from March 3, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , accessed January 25, 2014. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.lambeth.gov.uk
  4. ↑ without author: list entry 1080492 (Roman Altar in forecourt of number 1). In: National Heritage List of England , English Heritage, english-heritage.org.Retrieved January 25, 2014.
  5. ^ Daniel Lysons: The environs of London , Volume 1, p. 159.
  6. ↑ James Thorne: Handbook to the Environs of London , Volume 1, p. 110.
  7. ^ Edward Wedlake Brayley: A topographical history of Surrey , Volume 3, p. 277.
  8. ↑ without author: Place: Clapham . In: Open Domesday , free online edition of the Domesday Book, domesdaymap.co.uk , accessed January 26, 2014.
  9. ^ Edward Wedlake Brayley: A topographical history of Surrey , Volume 3, p. 278.
  10. ^ Percy M. Thornton: Battersea and Clapham , p. 170.
  11. ↑ a b James Thorne: Handbook to the Environs of London , Volume 1, p. 111.
  12. ↑ a b Percy M. Thornton: Battersea and Clapham , pp. 184-185.
  13. ↑ John James Sexby: Clapham Common . In: John James Sexby: The municipal parks, gardens, and open spaces of London. Their history and associations. Cheap edition , Elliot Stock, London 1905, pp. 95-115, archive.org , accessed January 27, 2014.
  14. ^ Walter Besant: Captain Cook . Macmillan and Co., London 1890, pp. 189–191 archive.org , accessed January 26, 2014.
  15. ^ John Telford: A sect that moved the world , p. 231.
  16. ^ John Telford: A sect that moved the world .
  17. ↑ Percy M. Thornton: Battersea and Clapham , pp. 179-183.
  18. ^ Henry Elliot Malden: Ecclesiastical History . In: Henry Elliot Malden (ed.): The Victoria history of the county of Surrey. Volume two , James Street, Haymarket 1905, pp. 1–53, here pp. 45–46, archive.org , accessed January 26, 2014.