Arodene Road

The sources used here do not explain the name Arodene. No lease, map or local history note in this collection gives its derivation, so the name stands unglossed alongside its neighbour, Helix Road, approved for formation at the same time in 1891.

Rush Common had been protected since 1806, when an Inclosure Act banned new building on it. In 1891 the London County Council agreed to let Arodene Road and Helix Road be formed across part of that common — on condition that no buildings went up on the protected ground. Lambeth's own appraisal records the road as part of a wider wave of rapid Victorian terrace-building for artisan and middle-class occupants that same year.

The condition did not hold. By 1896 the Council was receiving protests that houses were being built on land the 1806 Act was supposed to keep clear. The houses went up regardless, in defiance of the old proscription, and they still stand today. A little further along Brixton Hill, a similar pattern had already played out: a shop parade near Arodene Road grew from a cottage said to date to at least 1786 — itself an encroachment onto Rush Common some twenty years before the Inclosure Act was even passed.

The houses have full-height bay windows rising to decorative finials, and recessed porches set behind arched entrances. Many of the columns and consoles supporting those porches are still elaborately detailed, and the eaves carry contrasting red brickwork against slate roofs.

Small front gardens, enclosed by dwarf walls, railings or privet hedges, sit before doors that often keep their original stained glass, tiled porches and chequerboard paths. At the northern end, the terraces pick up the design of neighbouring Helix Gardens, with gothic arches over the first-floor windows filled with decorative clay-tile spandrels. It is a streetscape built, by its own builders' admission, where it technically should not have been.