Burton Road

The sources used here do not explain where the name Burton came from. It was already in place by the 1860s, when the western end of the street was built. The name carried on when the street was extended east of Brief Street as part of the Minet Estate development between 1871 and 1900.

Burton Road grew in two distinct phases. The western end was built in the 1860s, with the street further laid out with houses around 1870. East of Brief Street, the remainder was built as part of the Minet Estate between 1871 and 1900, giving it its full Victorian length.

That length did not last. In the 1960s and 70s, parts of Burton Road were demolished for Myatt's Field South Estate as part of a programme of housing modernisation. More than sixty Victorian villas were destroyed in the early 1970s alone, and only the easternmost third of the street survived.

Two other buildings from the same few years still mark the street. Michael Church, built in 1889 with a tiled turret topped by an ornate iron weathervane, stands on Burton Road. A Swedenborgian church followed in 1890.

The street also has a literary afterlife. George Gissing's lodgings there in 1893 fed into his fiction, as he walked through nearby Camberwell gathering impressions for his novel In the Year of Jubilee.

Composer George Le Brunn moved into 54 Burton Road, a house called The Nook, in 1902 with his wife Eliza. He died there of meningitis on 18 December 1905, aged 42.

Next door, at 55 Burton Road, the music-hall performer Harry Tate — born Ronald McDonald Hutchison — was living with his wife Julia at the time of the 1901 census. He moved along the street to No. 57 in 1903. Earlier still, in 1871, the sculptor and plasterer Charles Henry Mabey lived at 53 Burton Road, close to his parents on Loughborough Road.

George Gissing took lodgings at 76 Burton Road in the summer of 1893 with his second wife. In the 1920s, Irene and George Pye lived on the street near a Loughborough Road fish shop before moving to a bigger house on Knatchbull Road as their family grew.

Housing modernisation reshaped the street in the 1960s and 70s, and Burton Lane now runs through the estate where the demolished houses once stood.

The easternmost third of Burton Road survived. No. 80 was home to John Major in the 1960s, before his election to Lambeth Council in 1968.

Only a fragment of the original Burton Road remains. The narrow bend from Akerman Road to Knatchbull Road still carries Victorian houses at its western end and the landmarks of 1889 and 1890 along its length, while the houses that once filled its eastern reach have given way to Myatt's Field South Estate and Burton Lane. The street that housed a composer, a comedian and a future Prime Minister is now, for the most part, somewhere else entirely.