Chapel Road

Chapel Road was provided as a new road by the Lambeth Manor Inclosure Commissioners in 1810, built to give access to newly enclosed plots on Norwood Common. Before that it already existed under a different name: it appears as Gipsy House Road on Rocque's 1745 map of the Great North Wood and again on the 1806 Norwood Common inclosure map, running eastward from Knight's Hill as far as Salter's Hill. Its western stretch then stood on land belonging to Lord Thurlow, its eastern stretch, near Elderhole Coppice, on land belonging to the Archbishop of Canterbury.

A Congregational chapel was built on the road between 1819 and 1821, on land bought by William Salter from Benjamin Shaw, who had been allotted it by the Inclosure Commissioners. The sources used here do not explain exactly when or why the road came to be called Chapel Road rather than Gipsy House Road, but the change followed within a decade of that chapel's construction.

In 1823 responsibility for maintaining the road passed from the occupiers of land and houses on Norwood Common to the parish Surveyors of the Highways.

By 1863 the large plots south of the road had been subdivided and built up with the chapel and houses, and the opposite side carried terraces too. By 1895 the road held five landmarks: the Congregational Chapel and the Lower Norwood Working Men's Institute at either end, the Bricklayers Arms public house, the Boat House, and the Norwood Brewery behind the pub.

The chapel itself is a plain brick building with a grand front and arched wings that were built as Sunday schools. A Methodist day school opened nearby in 1860, in a loft over a stable at the corner of Chapel Road and Woodcote Place, before moving to a permanent building behind West Norwood Methodist Church in 1861 as the Eden Road Wesleyan Day School.

The institute at one end of the road, and the Congregational Chapel at the other, bracketed a street otherwise given over to beer and building. The brewery behind the Bricklayers Arms bottled Norwood Pale Ale under Duberly & Brook in the 1870s, at a shilling a gallon.

The Bricklayers Arms stood at no. 29, later renumbered no. 34, built in the rapid expansion of London in the 1860s. The Wallis family held it for decades, reported in 1887 to have lived there more than forty years. Thomas Wallis senior, a bricklayer in the 1841 census, had become its publican by 1861, and he died in the pub itself in 1889, buried nearby in West Norwood Cemetery.

His sons stayed close by: Edward Wallis lived at no. 18 as a builder, and Thomas Wallis junior traded next door as a "Builder and Grocer" in 1881. A third son, also named Thomas Wallis, was born at the Bricklayers Arms around 1872–73 and went on to become an architect. As a young man he worked as a grocer's assistant in a Chapel Road shop that was part of the pub, recorded in the 1891 census, and may well have studied at Norwood Technical College, then standing at the junction of Chapel Road and Knight's Hill.

The pub's last long tenants were Billie and Elsie Barnes, who managed it from 1931 and became its tenants in 1947, raising four children there before moving to a smaller house in Nunhead. After they left, the Bricklayers Arms was converted into flats. Elsewhere on the road, William Sebry, a boot maker born in 1809, lived with his wife Dinah in cottages on Chapel Road, recorded there in the 1861 census.

The brewery passed through several owners: Richard Bennet in 1850, George Wadley & Sons by 1874, Frederick William Brooke and Charles Conrad Grey Duberley from 1879 trading under a Hercules-with-a-club trademark, then Flower and Sons of Stratford-on-Avon from 1888, and finally Hoare and Co from 1919, eventually passing to Bass Charrington. It closed, by one account, because the council would not permit new boilers to be installed so close to the road.

The brewery was sold at auction on 9 February 1920. Its premises were then used by A. White, printers and bookbinders, before demolition after the Second World War, when its wells were covered over. The site later became the premises of Winn & Coales (Denso) Limited, an industrial coatings firm.

Several early houses survive on Chapel Road's local heritage list. Nos. 4 and 6, and nos. 8 and 10, are pairs of early 19th-century houses with arched windows above the doors, while nos. 12, 14 and 16 form a terrace stepping downhill. No. 22a keeps the remnants of a mid-19th-century corner shop front, and no. 24 presents a neat, symmetrical face to the street.

At the corner with Knights Hill stands a granite drinking fountain, presented by E. H. Moscrop and A. W. Jaffray and erected by the Metropolitan Drinking Fountain and Water Trough Association. A protected view runs north from the road along Weaver Walk to the tower of St Luke's Church, identified in Lambeth's Local Plan of 2015. The brewery is gone, the pub is flats, but the road built for farm access still carries the houses, the fountain and the view that grew up around it.