Belvedere Road

The road began as Narrow Wall, a medieval embankment first recorded in 1443, raised to hold back floods and carry a causeway over the marsh beside the Thames. It was widened and straightened into a proper road between 1824 and 1829, with the old bend to the east cut off and renamed Ragged Row, or Belvedere Crescent.

The new name came from a house. In 1718 Charles Bascom opened a riverside house called Belvidere on ground near what later became Fowler's lead works, offering wine and river fish to visitors, and its name was carried forward into Belvedere Road — a derivation confirmed by published street-name reference works.

Once widened, Belvedere Road filled with industry. At No. 63 the architect David Riddal Roper designed a shot tower for Thomas Maltby & Co. in 1826, 30 feet across at the base and rising to a gallery 163 feet up, reached by a spiral stair cantilevered from the inside of the wall. Walkers, Parker & Co. took it over in 1839 and ran it as a going concern until 1949.

Next door, John Fowler built a house at No. 55 in 1821 and converted the adjoining riverside factory into a white lead works in 1839. At No. 59, James Courthope Peache built a house around 1818, dated from an inscribed rain-water head, and lived there until his death in 1858; in the 1930s it became a shelter for "down and outs", later the Embankment Fellowship Centre, before demolition in 1949.

William Croggon's artificial stone works, successor to Eleanor Coade's business, took a new lease on Belvedere Road ground in 1828, and the factory passed to Thomas Routledge and John Danforth Greenwood for terracotta and scagliola work after 1837. Eleanor Coade's own showroom, Coade's Row, stood nearby at the corner with Westminster Bridge Road from 1798, bearing a tablet reading "Coade's Row, 1798" until it was demolished in 1908.

James Goding had the Lion Brewery built in 1836–7 to Francis Edwards's design; it became the Lion Brewery Company Limited in 1866, was absorbed by Hoare and Co. in 1924, badly damaged by fire in 1931, and demolished in 1949 to make way for the Royal Festival Hall.

Not far away, at Fossil Villa, 22 Belvedere Road, lived Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins, the sculptor responsible for the famous dinosaur models at Crystal Palace Park.

James Courthope Peache built and lived at No. 59 until his death in 1858; the building later sheltered London's homeless as the Embankment Fellowship Centre.

John Fowler built No. 55 for himself before turning the works behind it into a white lead factory, tying his own house to the industry that lined the road.

James Goding gave his name to no street, but his brewery dominated this stretch of riverbank for over a century.

The postwar South Bank filled the ground cleared by the brewery's and shot tower's closure. Shell Centre, designed by Sir Howard Robertson, was built between 1953 and 1963 as the oil company's headquarters and was among the first office towers in central London.

Sculpture came with it. Franta Belsky's Shell Fountain, with shells pouring water into one another, was cast at the Corinthian Bronze Foundry in Peckham in 1958, and Eric Aumonier's six-foot Shell Ball, carved with shell motifs, was given by the building's architects in 1959. Marino Marini's Horse and Rider, made in 1961, and Siegfried Charoux's Motorcyclist of 1960 were also placed at Shell Centre.

Jubilee Gardens were laid out in 1977 on the site of the 1951 Festival of Britain, to mark the Silver Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II.

County Hall's North and South Blocks front Belvedere Road, both built in stages between 1937 and 1963 to the design of F. R. Hiorns, their foundation stones laid in 1937 but not finished until after the war. A retaining wall, 700 feet long, was completed along the embankment here by September 1950 at a cost of £450,000.

The stone arch that once carried the old Waterloo Bridge still spans Belvedere Road, now built into the southern approach of its replacement. From flood wall to office quarter, the road has kept its line even as everything beside it changed.