Clapham Common Northside

The road running along the northern edge of Clapham Common carries an extraordinary weight of biography. The architect Charles Barry, who designed the Houses of Parliament, lived and died in the building which is now known as Trinity Hospice. Graham Greene lived at No. 14 from 1935 to 1940, and his blue plaque was unveiled in 2011. The Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg stayed at No. 47 when visiting London, and in 2004 a blue plaque was unveiled on the house where he stayed.

The road is overlooked by large Georgian and Victorian mansions and lies near Clapham Old Town. Opposite Northside, on Clapham Common, stands Holy Trinity Church, the place of worship that was home to the Clapham Sect, the abolitionist group whose members included William Wilberforce. The name itself goes back more than a thousand years — to a Saxon settlement on a low hill south of the Thames.

c. 1890

Holy Trinity Church, Clapham Common — the Clapham Sect’s church, directly across the road from Northside.

Wikimedia Commons · Public domain

c. 1890s

Clapham Common in the late 19th century — the open ground that gives Northside its name and its views.

Wikimedia Commons · Public domain

1697

Samuel Pepys (John Hayls, 1666) — diarist and naval administrator who spent his final years on Northside.

John Hayls · Public domain

1844

Sir Charles Barry — architect of the Houses of Parliament, who lived and died on Northside.

Wikimedia Commons · Public domain

The name reaches back before the Norman Conquest. “Clapham” began as a Saxon village: its name was originally clopp ham, which meant the village (ham) by the short hill (clopp). The Surrey Clapham is mentioned in a 9th-century Anglo-Saxon charter as Cloppahám. At the time of the Domesday Book in 1086, a Norman named Geoffrey de Mandeville held Clapham, which was then called Clopeham. As documented by British History Online, the surrounding common land was waste ground held jointly by the manors of Clapham and Battersea, over which commoners had ancient rights of grazing and fuel-gathering.

“Common” in the street name refers directly to that medieval common land. “Northside” is simply positional — identifying this road’s place along the northern perimeter of the Common, as opposed to the South Side and West Side roads that complete its triangle. The Common was acquired in 1877 by the Metropolitan Board of Works and designated a Metropolitan Common, which gives it protection from development. The road took its current form and name as the villas of the Georgian and Victorian period filled the northern edge, though the Saxon settlement it describes is more than eleven centuries old.

Clapham began to grow in the late 17th century, when refugees arrived from the Great Plague of 1665 and the Great Fire of 1666, and by the end of the century it was quite a large village. One early resident was Denis Gauden, a merchant who later became Sheriff of the City of London, who built a fine brick house here in 1663. The house was then purchased by William Hewer, who had held the lease since Gauden entered hard times in 1677.

Pepys moved out of London in 1701 to a house in Clapham owned by his friend William Hewer, who had begun his career working for Pepys in the admiralty. Clapham was in the country at the time. Pepys played a full part in the community until his death in 1703 and left a legacy of £5 to the poor of Clapham. The house no longer exists, having been demolished in the mid-18th century. Its site is now occupied by the Trinity Hospice buildings.

In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the Clapham Sect were a group of wealthy City merchants — mostly evangelical Anglicans — who lived around the Common. They included William Wilberforce, Henry Thornton and Zachary Macaulay, and were prominent in campaigns for the abolition of slavery and child labour. According to Historic England, the Georgian terraces and surviving individual villas along Northside reflect this period of wealthy patronage, with several properties carrying listed-building status today.

Graham Greene lived at No. 14 Northside. In 1940, a bomb destroyed his Clapham house, and Greene described similar scenes in his 1943 novel The Ministry of Fear — his novel of London during the Blitz — and later in The End of the Affair. The Blitz did not only destroy buildings; it furnished Greene with the raw material for two of his most celebrated works. As explored by SE1 Direct, the wartime transformation of south London’s streets is embedded in the fabric of Greene’s fiction in ways that make Northside — and its bomb damage — directly traceable in the novels.

The archaeological record beneath Northside is less visible but no less significant. Excavations reported by MOLA in the wider Clapham area have identified evidence of continuous settlement from the Roman period — consistent with the present-day Clapham High Street following the route of a Roman road, recorded on a Roman monumental stone found nearby. The ridge on which Northside sits was the same high ground that attracted Saxon settlers, Roman road-makers, and 17th-century Londoners seeking clean air in equal measure.

Samuel Pepys (23 February 1633 – 26 May 1703) is the most famous of Northside’s residents. Hewer, his former naval administrator and life-long compatriot, was the protégé of the effervescent Pepys, who is justly famed for both his commitment to building the Royal Navy and for writing one of history’s most compelling personal diaries. Pepys spent his last few years from 1700 to 1703 living in the house with Hewer to take advantage of the Clapham country air.

Charles Barry, who designed the Houses of Parliament, lived and died in the building which is now known as Trinity Hospice — on the same Northside plot where Pepys had died more than a century before. Edvard Grieg stayed at No. 47 when visiting London, and the blue plaques that now mark two houses on the road signal a street that has absorbed writers, architects and composers across three hundred years of continuous occupation.

Trinity Hospice was founded in 1891 in the building that had once housed both Samuel Pepys and Charles Barry. It remains one of London’s leading hospices and the road’s most historically layered building. Maitland House at No. 60 Clapham Common Northside dates from 1790–1792 and is Grade II listed, one of several Georgian properties along the road protected for their architectural significance.

No. 64 is one of the oldest houses still standing on the road, seeming to go back to some point in the 1780s, when it was a country cottage in the fields. That small and unassuming house has functioned over its lifetime as a country cottage, dairy, and staff quarters — home to servants, cows, booksellers, bricklayers, gardeners, and doctors. A planning battle to save it from demolition was resolved in 2024 when new owners committed to sensitive restoration — a rare case of local attention preserving a building that most streets would long since have lost.

Northside today is one of Clapham’s most sought-after addresses, its Georgian and Victorian townhouses looking directly onto the open ground of the Common. At over 85 hectares in size, Clapham Common is one of London’s largest and oldest public open spaces. As well as large open fields, it contains avenues of mature trees, three ponds, two woodlands, and species-rich meadows.

The street carries part of the A3 route towards Portsmouth, so traffic is a constant presence — but the Common ensures that the view from every front door remains unchanged in its essentials since the Georgian villas were first built. Trinity Hospice continues to operate. Blue plaques for Grieg and Greene mark their respective houses. The Saxon hillock that gave the place its name still rises slightly beneath the Common, invisible but present.