Early history

The present day Clapham High Street is on the route of a Roman road.^[1] The road is recorded on a Roman monumental stone found nearby. According to its inscription, the stone was erected by a man named Vitus Ticinius Ascanius. It is estimated to date from the 1st century CE. (The stone was discovered during building works at Clapham Common South Side in 1912. It is now placed by the entrance of the former Clapham Library, in the Old Town.)^[2][3]

According to the history of the Clapham family, maintained by the College of Heralds, in 965 King Edgar of England gave a grant of land at Clapham to Jonas, son of the Duke of Lorraine, and Jonas was thenceforth known as Jonas "de [of] Clapham". The family remained in possession of the land until Jonas's great-great grandson Arthur sided against William the Conqueror during the Norman Conquest of 1066 and, losing the land, fled to the north (where the Clapham family remained thereafter, primarily in Yorkshire).

Clapham's name derives from Old English, meaning 'homestead or enclosure near a hill', with the first recorded usage being Cloppaham circa 880.^[4]

Clapham appears in Domesday Book as Clopeham. It was held by Goisfrid (Geoffrey) de Mandeville, and its domesday assets were three hides, six ploughs, and 5.0 acres (2.0 ha) of meadow. It rendered £7 10s 0d, and was located in Brixton hundred.^[5]

The parish comprised 1,233 acres (499 ha). The benefice remains to this day a rectory, and in the 19th century was in the patronage of the Atkins family: the tithes were commuted for £488 14s. in the early 19th century, and so the remaining glebe comprised only 11 acres (4.5 ha) as of 1848. The church, on the site of the current St Paul's and belonging to Merton Priory was, with the exception of the north aisle which was left standing for the performance of burials, taken down under an act of parliament in 1774.^[6] A new church, Holy Trinity, was erected in the following year at an expense of £11,000 (equivalent to £1,472,467 in 2021), on the north side of the common.^[7]

Clapham in the 17th–19th centuries

In the late 17th century, large country houses began to be built there, and throughout the 18th and early 19th century it was favoured by the wealthier merchant classes of the City of London, who built many large and gracious houses and villas around Clapham Common and in the Old Town. Samuel Pepys spent the last two years of his life in Clapham, living with his friend, protected at the Admiralty and former servant William Hewer, until his death in 1703.^[8]

Clapham Common was also home to Elizabeth Cook, the widow of Captain James Cook the explorer. She lived in a house on the common for many years following the death of her husband.

Other notable residents of Clapham Common include Palace of Westminster architect Sir Charles Barry,^[9] Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg^[10] and 20th century novelist Graham Greene.^[11] John Francis Bentley,^[12] architect of Westminster Cathedral, lived in the adjacent Old Town.

In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the Clapham Sect were a group of wealthy City merchants (mostly evangelical Anglican) social reformers who lived around the Common. They included William Wilberforce, Henry Thornton and Zachary Macaulay, father of the historian Thomas Macaulay, as well as William Smith Member of Parliament (MP), the Dissenter and Unitarian. They were very prominent in campaigns for the abolition of slavery and child labour, and for prison reform. They also promoted missionary activities in Britain's colonies. The Society for Missions to Africa and the East (as the Church Mission Society was first called) was founded on 12 April 1799 at a meeting of the Eclectic Society, supported by members of the Clapham Sect, who met under the guidance of John Venn, the Rector of Clapham.^[13] By contrast, an opponent of Wilberforce, merchant and slave-trader George Hibbert also lived at Clapham Common, worshipping in the same church, Holy Trinity.^[14]

In 1848, Clapham was described in the Topographical Dictionary of England as a village which "has for many years, been one of the most respectable in the environs of the metropolis".^[6] At this time, the patronage of Holy Trinity church belonged to the Atkins family.^[6]

Clapham in the 20th and 21st centuries

After the coming of the railways, Clapham developed as a suburb for commuters into central London. Clapham High Street railway station opened in 1862 and the underground City and South London Railway was extended to the area in 1900. By 1900 Clapham had fallen from favour with the upper classes. Many of their grand houses had been demolished by the middle of the 20th century, though a number remain around the Common and in the Old Town, as do a substantial number of fine late 18th- and early 19th-century houses. Today's Clapham is an area of varied housing, from the large Queen Anne-, Regency- and Georgian-era homes of the Old Town and Clapham Common, to the grids of Victorian housing in the Abbeville area. As in much of London, the area also includes social housing on estates dating from the 1930s and 1960s.

In the early 20th century, Clapham was seen as an ordinary commuter suburb, often cited as representing ordinary people: hence the familiar "man on the Clapham omnibus". By the 1980s, the area had undergone a further transformation, becoming the centre for the gentrification of most of the surrounding area. Clapham's relative proximity to traditionally expensive areas of central London led to an increase in the number of middle-class people living in Clapham. Today the area is generally an affluent place, although many of its professional residents live relatively close to significant pockets of social housing.

Local government

A map showing the Clapham wards of Wandsworth Metropolitan Borough as it appeared in 1916.

Clapham was an ancient parish in the county of Surrey.^[15] For poor law purposes the parish became part of the Wandsworth and Clapham Union in 1836.^[16] The parish was added to the Registrar General London Metropolis area in 1844 and consequently it came within the area of responsibility of the Metropolitan Board of Works in 1855. The population of 16,290 in 1851 was considered too small for the Clapham vestry to be a viable sanitary authority and the parish was grouped into the Wandsworth District, electing 18 members to the Wandsworth District Board of Works.^[17] In 1889 the parish was transferred to the County of London and in 1900 it became part of the new Metropolitan Borough of Wandsworth. It was abolished as a civil parish in 1904, becoming part of the single Wandsworth Borough parish for poor law. The former Metropolitan Borough of Wandsworth was divided in 1965 and the area of the historic parish of Clapham was transferred to the London Borough of Lambeth, along with Streatham.^[15] Clapham gave its name to a Parliamentary constituency between 1885 and 1974.