Is 'Charles Booth' Busby's real name then?
Geoff - are you my Dad? He was talking about Booth's poverty map yesterday. I'd never heard of it before then.
Awesome.
I am now a fully fledged link poster!
How on earth could I have remained ignorant for so long!
When we moved in the original lease was framed on the wall. The house was built by 1876 by a builder who lived in the last house on the left before you get to the park along Oxford Road.
It cost about £500 for the 99 year lease which sounds like a lot of money to me.
We also found lots of old newspapers stuck to the cellar walls which dated from 1907 - talking about the Kaiser and the Moors in Africa.
Odd to think that we were the first people to read them for over 100 years and that the First World War hadn't happened by then. Truly a different world.
Also, I did have a map showing where the bomb damage was after WWII. I think the Germans were trying to bomb the North London railway - i.e. the Crouch Hill line.
I had heard rumours as well that there was an Italian POW camp where the new building for the Islington Arts and Media school is, and that many people stayed in the area after the war. Maybe that is why we have such thriving pizzerias.
I got curious today after watching a history of our streets the other night about Caledonian grove, anyway I started wondering about my own house, and spent today trying to work out when my house was built. It's on Florence road.
Here's an 1886 map:
http://mapco.net/londongoods/goods04.htm
According to this map, most of Florence road isn't built yet, Although the road is there.
Here's the 1888 map:
http://www.oldtowns.co.uk/London1888-new/sheet-4.htm
Suddenly all the houses are there!
Does that seem realistic to you? Or do you think maybe the 1886 map is wrong? How could they have built so many houses so quickly?
By the way, here are some more maps, some of which have been posted above, showing most of the rest of the houses between Stroud green and Victoria road were built between 1872 and 1878:
1872 map - mostly fields http://london1872.com/stanford21b.htm and http://london1872.com/stanford05.htm
1878 map - some houses now: http://london1878.com/stanford21.htm and http://london1878.com/stanford05.htm
Isnt the 1872 map absolutely beautiful?
Anyway the 1881 census shows there were only houses 1-7 Florence road at that time.
So I guess my house was definitely bult between 1881 and 1888.
I think that probably the houses are there in the earlier map, they just haven't been drawn in.
It was Camberwell Grove Donna, it's Caledonian Rd next time. The book is utterly fascinating http://www.waterstones.com/waterstonesweb/products/joseph+bullman/neil+hegarty/brian+hill/the+secret+history+of+our+streets3a+london/9158993/
If you are keen on old maps, get yourself to the London map fair http://www.londonmapfairs.com/
@Donna, most Victorian terraced housing was built pretty quickly; individual builders would buy plots of land (or sometimes just make an arrangement with the landowner) and put up as many houses as they could afford. That's why, if you look at pretty much any street, you can see slight differences in front exterior decoration (& sometimes internal decoration, where original features survive) - stonework/plaster, corbels etc - between groups of houses, although they are built to a similar footprint/plan. These houses were not necessarily built to last as long as they have, as suggested by the shoddy brickwork (which is revealed if one has the courage to strip the walls right back - I don't recommend it, it's pretty alarming!) and the paucity of the foundation structure (not nearly deep enough for clay).
Yeah I was thinking just that vetski. It's interesting to think about the progression of houses built. So the houses at the start of Florence road were built first, so when you walk along you are effectively travelling back in time over a decade of architecture, if that makes sense!
Thanks miss Annie, yes it was camber well grove, it was really interesting didn't realise it was a book,
If you get to look at a Helena Barrett's book "Suburban Style" one of the examples of a map regression is SG. This shows fields to begin with - with the Old Dairy at the bottom of Crouch Hill the only thing for miles around and the then the rapid development of the streets out from the stations. 1880's was the boom time all over London. You have to be little bit circumspect about the updating of OS maps as they don't all get redrawn as soon as things happen, but it gives a pretty good idea of what was going on. There is a lot of local history at the Hornsey library at Crouch End and some rather splendid books of postcards produced by the local history society - always amazes me what people took pictures of back in the day.
The dairy also featured in some WW2 footage I saw the other day - showing a V2 rocket which landed in Hanley Road and accounts for the building of Shelley Court. The Wall Court flats were as a result of a stick of bombs which fell in 1940.
thanks Ali - must re-read that thread.
I've got a couple of maps bought from Hornsey Historical Society
Well worth a walk over the hill to Crouch End for a visit.
Here's their website
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!