Battersea has grown to be a fashionable and vibrant district of south-west London. Referred to as Patricesy in the Domesday Book, Battersea was historically best known for market gardening, providing fruit, vegetables and flowers for the City of London. However, the area moved from rural to urban with the coming of the railways, industry and large-scale housing from the 1840s, provoking a population growth from 4,000 to 120,000 by the beginning of the twentieth century. Glimpses of the pas...

The district of Wimbledon has become synonymous with its world-famous tennis tournament held here since 1922. This part of south-west London has been inhabited since the Iron Age and has developed over the centuries into two distinct parts: the ‘village’ and the ‘town’. The village developed first as it began to attract wealthy merchants from the city but the arrival of the London & South West Railway in 1838 saw the focus of subsequent developments shift away from the original village tow...

This attractive London suburb is known from many references in popular culture, frequent appearances on film and television and, of course, as the starting point of the Oxford & Cambridge Boat Race. Recorded as Putelei in the Domesday Book, it has many historic associations, not least as the birthplace of Thomas Cromwell and post-war Prime Minister Clement Attlee. Putney’s very first bridge, a toll bridge opened in 1729, was once the only Thames bridge between London and Kingston and led t...