History of The Street
The geographical feature is named Lavender Hill due to the commercial cultivation of lavender there in the pre-industrial era. Several other smaller streets including Lavender Gardens and Lavender Sweep (Lavender Gardens was the former home of Sarah, Duchess of York where she lived in a flat before her marriage) also bear the reference and can be seen on 18th century maps as being largely farmland, with the earliest reference to the still-existing Falcon public house at the west end of the street in 1767.
The opening of Clapham Junction railway station in 1863 led to rapid residential and commercial development along the street and by 1885 it was such a busy commercial district that Arding and Hobbs, the largest department store south of the River Thames, was built. The street also features the imposing Church of the Ascension, built in 1883 to cater to the growing population of the neighbouring Shaftesbury Estate, as well as a Welsh Methodist chapel (on Beauchamp Road) reflecting what was once a significant Welsh population.
Read more about this topic: Lavender Hill
Famous quotes containing the words history of, history and/or street:
“The history of all previous societies has been the history of class struggles.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)
“Let us not underrate the value of a fact; it will one day flower in a truth. It is astonishing how few facts of importance are added in a century to the natural history of any animal. The natural history of man himself is still being gradually written.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Think of admitting the details of a single case of the criminal court into our thoughts, to stalk profanely through their very sanctum sanctorum for an hour, ay, for many hours! to make a very barroom of the mind’s inmost apartment, as if for so long the dust of the street had occupied us,—the very street itself, with all its travel, its bustle, and filth, had passed through our thoughts’ shrine! Would it not be an intellectual and moral suicide?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)