History
The medieval village of Walworth is mentioned in the Domesday Book, comprising Walworth Manor House, 19 other households and a church. By the beginning of the C19, much of the area was still semi-rural with large tracts of rough pasture and market gardens behind houses fronting the streets. But in the first two decades of the C19 the population of the Parish of St Mary Newington (including the Manor of Walworth) grew rapidly from 14,847 to 44,526, and by 1901 it had reached 122,172. The growing influx of workers moving to the area gradually shifted Walworth from being a wealthy Georgian suburb to being a densely-populated working-class area, with much of the open land developed with terraced housing by the middle of the C19. The opening of the Walworth Road and Camberwell New Road railway stations in 1862 accelerated the construction of housing for workers who could now easily commute to central London, both on previously undeveloped land and on the sites of demolished early C19 houses. Much of the housing in the area was built speculatively by local builders and, later in the C19, by philanthropic organisations including the Guinness Trust and the Peabody Trust. Further redevelopment by the Ecclesiastical Commissioners for England in the Edwardian period in response to the continuing influx of working-class people resulted in the redevelopment of much of the Georgian housing on the Commissioners’ land south of Liverpool Grove. Much of the resulting Arts and Crafts style blocks built by the Commissioners’ with the expertise and guidance of Octavia Hill survives. In the second half of the C20 the area underwent another transformation with slum clearances and the development of large public housing schemes on the Aylesbury and Heygate Estates. The multiple phases of housing development through the C19 and C20 by different builders and organisations have resulted in a diversity of architectural styles and approaches to housing concentrated in a relatively small area in Walworth.
In 1884 the Commissioners asked Octavia Hill (1838-1912) to take on the management of some of their properties, which had deteriorated into slum conditions. These were initially in Deptford and Southwark, but eventually Hill took on responsibility for a 22-acre estate of Commissioners’ housing in Walworth, where she and other women trained by her collected rents from tenants and supervised repairs. Hill already had many years of experience in creating improved housing conditions for the poor, having from 1864 established a wide portfolio of London dwellings rehabilitated and rebuilt with financial investment from John Ruskin. When in 1903 the 100-year lease on the Walworth Estate expired, the Commissioners decided to rebuild the estate at an estimated cost of £200,000 rather than attempt to rehabilitate the existing houses and shops. The Commissioners sought Hill’s expertise for the design of the new dwellings; as with all their estates, they stipulated that there would be no public houses. Hill favoured small-scale solutions rather than institutional or municipal approaches to housing, and in Walworth she successfully argued for cottage-style blocks on a domestic scale to replace the estate’s earlier model industrial dwellings. Hill was closely involved in the revised planning of the area and the design of the new houses, and she included the tenants in the process. The resulting two-storey cottages and three-storey ‘cottage flats’ were built by Cluttons under Hill’s direction, and construction was largely complete by 1909 although it continued until 1925 interrupted by the First World War, ultimately providing homes for around 800 families. Hill also had some involvement with the Garden City Movement. Although the planning of the estate adhered to the historic street pattern, resulting in higher density of development than that generally found in garden cities, the village aesthetic of the cottage flats set around communal open spaces with avenues of trees shows the influence of the Movement on the estate’s design. The estate represents the culmination of Hill’s long career as one of the most important housing and social reformers of her time, embodying her ideals on the largest scale she had ever attempted.
Aycliffe House, 1, 1A, 3-11 and 13-23 Portland Street – the Estate’s group of listed buildings – all date from the pre-First World War phase of the estate; they are visible on the 25-inch Ordnance Survey Map revised 1913-1914 and published in 1916. Unlike some other parts of the estate, the listed Portland Street houses buildings appear to have been relatively unscathed by Second World War bombing; the 1945 Bomb Damage Map only shows non-structural blast damage to number 5.
Details
This list entry was subject to a Minor Enhancement on 19 July 2023 to amend the description and to add historic background and selected sources
Legacy
The contents of this record have been generated from a legacy data system.
Legacy System number:
471203
Legacy System:
LBS
Sources
Books and journals Websites https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/33873
Legal
This building is listed under the Planning (Listed Buildings and Conservation Areas) Act 1990 as amended for its special architectural or historic interest.
End of official list entry
