Stockwell

Stockwell, Lambeth

An ethnically and socially diverse neighbourhood often regarded as the northernmost part of Brixton


Bronze Woman,* with Stockwell deep level shelter and the war memorial clock tower

Stock­well’s name, which referred to a well-spring by a tree stump, was first recorded in 1197. Stockwell Green formed the focus of the settle­ment, with the manor house on its north side and a public well in the south-west corner. The Swan, the Plough and the Old Queen’s Head were the earliest public houses.

The manor house was demol­ished around 1755 and a new mansion was built, which survived for less than a century – a period in which Stockwell changed from a collec­tion of nurseries with the usual scat­tering of grand houses into a nascent ‘villa land’. William Cox of Kennington began to develop Stockwell Park as a high class estate after 1838, whereupon several other builders pitched in with vari­a­tions on his theme. Many of the villas were terraced or otherwise tightly packed – the secret of their survival to the present day.

Several public and phil­an­thropic insti­tu­tions arrived here during the 1860s, including an orphanage and a college. Commodious churches replaced cramped chapels. Stockwell Green was built over in the 1870s despite attempted resis­tance via the courts.

Stockwell became the southern terminus of London’s first deep tube line in 1890 but it was not until after the Second World War that the landscape was again trans­formed – this time by the construc­tion of several large municipal estates, notably the LCC’s Stockwell Gardens (on the site of Stockwell College), the GLC’s Spring­field, and Lambeth council’s Stockwell Park.

Stockwell gained tragic notoriety on 22 July 2005 when police wrongly iden­ti­fied Jean Charles de Menezes, a Brazilian elec­tri­cian, as a suspect in the previous day’s failed attempts to set off bombs on three tube trains and a bus. When Menezes boarded a tube train at Stockwell, officers shot him seven times at close range without warning. In December 2008 an inquest jury returned an open verdict, after the coroner had ruled out unlawful killing as an option.

According to the 2011 census, 28.5 per cent of Stockwell’s residents are black or black British – down from a third in 2011. A quarter of the popu­la­tion is non-British white (up from 15 per cent in 2001), including a thriving Portuguese community.

The Stockwell ghost was a supposed poltergeist that created a great sensation in 1772. The author of the strange noises turned out to be Anne Robinson, a maidservant.

Postal district: SW9
Population: 14,777 (2011 census)
Station: Victoria and Northern lines (zone 2)
Further reading: Ken Dixon, Alan Piper et al, Brixton Heritage Trails: Six Walks Around Brixton and Stockwell, Brixton Society, 2001
and Edward Walford, John W Brown (editor), Walford’s History of Stockwell and Kennington, Local History Reprints, 1996
* The picture of the Bronze Woman at the top of this page is slightly modified from an original photograph at Flickr, copyright Subherwal, made available under the Attribution 2.0 Generic licence. Any subsequent reuse is hereby freely permitted under the terms of that licence. Click here to read more about the statue.