Tulse Hill, Lambeth
A socially disadvantaged locality situated on the south-eastern edge of Brixton
Tulse Hill, not too long ago
Three estates, Bodley, Upgrove and Scarlettes were united in 1352 under the ownership of the Hospital of St Thomas the Martyr, an Augustinian priory then located in Southwark. Henry VIII seized the property at the dissolution of the monasteries and by 1563 a house called Brockalle was in existence, near the present junction of Norwood Road and Rosendale Roads. In 1656 the estate was in the hands of the Tulse family. Sir Henry Tulse was Lord Mayor of London in 1683–4 and made a fortune from the west African slave trade.
In 1807 the estate was divided in two. John Blades, a City glass manufacturer, acquired the eastern part, and he demolished the old house and built Brockwell Hall on the hilltop in 1813. Dr Thomas Edgar, a legal writer, later gained possession of the western part of the estate through his marriage to Mary Cressingham. He acquired an additional strip of land giving access to Brixton Hill, created the curving sweep of Upper Tulse Hill and began to build a high-class estate here.
In 1855 Jonah Cressingham gave land for the construction of Holy Trinity Church, which was built in the face of objections from nearby vicars who feared a lightening of their collection plates. The opening of Herne Hill station in 1862 prompted John Blades’ grandson to build some large detached houses on the perimeter of the Brockwell Hall estate. Brailsford Road and Arlingford Road were laid out with terraces of houses and shops in the late 1880s.
Lambeth council and the London County Council acquired Brockwell Hall and its grounds in 1891 and opened Brockwell Park in the following year. The park was later enlarged and is now one of south London’s best-known amenities and a popular venue for summer events. Brixton Skating Palace opened at the far northern end of Tulse Hill in 1901, on a site occupied earlier by a large villa and later by a carpet superstore.
In 1939 the LCC began construction of the large Tulse Hill estate, where the former Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, grew up. Throughout the post-war decades Lambeth council added smaller estates, continuing into the early 1980s with the completion of Cressingham Gardens, which has 306 dwellings. A large number of Tulse Hill’s residents still rent their homes from the council, although private gated estates have recently been built in the area.
St Martin in the Fields Girls’ High School is very highly regarded. The majority of pupils are of black Caribbean or African descent and the school bucks the national tendency for these ethnic groups to underperform at GCSE level, despite pupils’ below-average socio-economic background.
It is hard to imagine Tulse Hill as the birthplace of astrophysics, but in 1856 the astronomer Sir William Huggins built a private observatory here, where he conducted pioneering research into the spectra of stars, nebulae and comets. Huggins continued his work in Tulse Hill until 1908, dying here two years later.
The locality has frequently been the subject of jokey references; Carter USM’s 1991 album 101 Damnations includes a track called ‘24 Minutes from Tulse Hill’.
Wendy Cope created a Tulse Hill-based character called Jason Strugnell, whose verses parodied the work of well-known poets: ‘If men deride and sneer, I shall defy them / And soar above Tulse Hill on poet’s wings — / A brother to the thrush in Brockwell Park’.
Postal district: SW2 (the station is in SE27)
Population: 13,119
Station: Southern and Thameslink (zone 3)
Further reading: Margaret Siddall, From Schoole to School, Devonshire House, 1999 (a history of St Martin in the Fields School)
Website: Friends of Brockwell Park
London Historians
