Barrington Road

Barrington Road's name is linked to Henry Hastings, who in 1660, when Charles II was restored to the throne, was created 1st Baron Loughborough. Hastings had commanded Royalist forces in Leicestershire during the Civil War. In the 1660s he was living at Loughborough House, just east of Brixton Road, at the corner of the present Loughborough Road and Evandale Road. That house was rebuilt before 1700 and later used as a boys' boarding school until its demolition around 1854.

Local tradition draws this connection, though it doesn't explain why the street is called Barrington rather than Loughborough itself.

A grand country estate gave way to speculative streets. The engineer Henry Currey drew up a plan for the layout of St James's Crescent, Millbrook Road and Barrington Road as part of the wider Lambeth Wick estate. Building lots fronting Barrington Road were first offered to the public by advertisement in 1843. Development continued through the 1840s and 1850s under the 3rd Lord Holland, and sections of Barrington Road and neighbouring Loughborough Park from that period survive, aside from later replacements.

A railway station arrived on the street in 1866, when the London, Brighton and South Coast Railway opened Loughborough Park station with an entrance in Barrington Road. The company had itself built both pairs of lines running through here, from Crow Lane junction in Peckham to the Barrington Road junction in Brixton. From 1 May 1867 a steam passenger service on this new South London line connected Victoria and London Bridge to inner south London suburbs including Brixton. The station changed its name more than once, becoming Loughborough Park and Brixton in 1870 and finally East Brixton in 1894. It stood on the east side of the southernmost rail bridge over Barrington Road, near Coldharbour Lane. It closed in 1976.

A girls' orphanage once stood where flats rise today.

Numbers 43, 55 and 57 Barrington Road served as the Brixton Orphanage for Fatherless Girls from the 1880s until 1936. A school built in the 1880s to serve the orphanage, College Green Court, was designed by the architect E. J. Tarver. It later became an annex to the Brixton School of Building between 1947 and 1970.

Council housing reshaped the street after the war. Eleven-storey blocks of the Loughborough estate rose around Barrington Road, part of a broader rebuilding of Loughborough Junction.

Victorian houses still mark one busy corner. Numbers 59, 61 and 63 Barrington Road, mid-Victorian houses, prominently define the corner where Barrington Road, Coldharbour Lane and Moorland Road converge. A short walk along, the Gresham Baptist Chapel stands at No. 36 Barrington Road.