Introduction
Draft Introduction Nowhere was London’s Victorian growth more dramatic and transformative than in Battersea. In 1841 most of the parish was still given over to market gardens, field strips and open farmland. Its population barely exceeded 6,500, spread among some thousand houses, concentrated near the Thames in the old village, or in the accumulating industrial quarter of Nine Elms. Yet within thirty years the number had swollen to 54,000 in around 8,000 houses (another 1,800 or so were either uninhabited or unfinished); and only ten years later, in 1881, had almost doubled, to 107,000 people in 14,500 houses. A peak of 170,000 residents came in the early 1900s, an increase of more than 2,500 per cent over sixty years. By then all of Battersea’s open land other than the commons and Battersea Park had been built over.1 The record of effort and organization represented by this phenomenal growth, and its diverse results, take centre stage in the present volume, whose focus is housing. Since that is the constant of Battersea’s built fabric, the book follows the topographical arrangement traditional to Survey of London volumes, in contrast to the thematic treatment allotted to other aspects of its development in volume 49 (Ill. 0.1). A broad overview of the parish’s history is given in the introduction to that volume, whereas the following pages draw out themes and currents of particular importance to Battersea’s housing. As in volume 49, the area covered here is the old parish and later metropolitan borough of Battersea, comprising around 2,164 acres, bounded on the north by the Thames, and including all the low-lying ground beside the river from Nine Elms in the east almost as far as Wandsworth Bridge in the west.
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