Clive Road

Clive Road was not always Clive Road. It was first called Hamilton Road, after Robert Hamilton, a Norwood gentleman who lived off his investments, rents and land speculation. The name recurred often enough across London that it caused confusion at the Post Office, and the street was renamed.

Its new name honoured Robert Clive, 1st Baron Clive (1725–1774), a controversial figure who served two terms as Governor of Bengal and is remembered as the first British Governor of the Bengal Presidency. It was customary in the Victorian period to name streets after imperial figures to lend prestige to an address, and Clive Road's renaming is usually placed in this period, though the street was named nearly a century after Clive's death.

The ground beneath Clive Road once belonged to Lord Thurlow's estate, sold off at auction in 1846, forty years after his death, as Lot 12. In 1851 the land was still mostly grazed by cows, with scattered cottages for agricultural labourers and woodmen, and the area sat on a disputed boundary between the parishes of St Mary, Lambeth, and St Giles, Camberwell.

Change came fast. By 1861 the wider district of Lambeth, St Mary, Norwood had a population of 162,000, and the following decade brought master tradesmen to the street, drawn by the freedom to build more creatively. The 1871 census shows almost every household on the street, however modest, keeping a general servant or housemaid. Building accelerated further with the expansion of the London, Chatham and Dover Railway nearby.

At the heart of this growth stood Emmanuel Church. A temporary church seating 430 had already gone up nearby in 1872, and in 1876 John Westwood freely gave land for a permanent building. Francis Peek laid the foundation stone on 8 July 1876, and the architect E. C. Robins and builders T. H. Adamson and Sons raised the first part of the church, consecrated by the Bishop of Rochester on 8 September 1877. A District Chapelry was carved out from St Luke, Lower Norwood, in 1878, and the church was finally completed in 1893 with the addition of the baptistery and the two westernmost bays of the nave.

Built of stone in a thirteenth-century Gothic style, faced with Kentish ragstone and Bath dressings, the church has an apsidal chancel, transepts, a clerestoried nave with plate-traceried windows, and an incomplete buttressed tower at the north-east corner. Inside, white gault brick walls and four bays of stone arcading with foliated capitals separate the nave from its aisles.

Elsewhere on the street, No. 109, formerly known as Dudley House, went up in 1882 for Ralph Gardiner, a plasterer and builder, who covered its façade in elaborate and rather bizarre plasterwork.

Caroline Hook was born in 1861 at No. 4 Clive Road, West Norwood, and died in 1928. Ralph Gardiner, the plasterer and builder behind No. 109's decorated front, lived there from its construction.

Emmanuel Church brought its own cast of names: John Westwood gave the land, Francis Peek laid the foundation stone, and E. C. Robins worked with T. H. Adamson and Sons to raise the building. Decades later, in 1937, Charles Tripp married Grace Brookes within its walls.

Clive Road still displays a range of architectural styles dating back to the 1870s, a legacy of the tradesmen who built freely here as the area filled in. The twice-renamed street keeps its Victorian Gothic church and its oddly plastered Dudley House as reminders of how quickly fields and cottages became a Victorian suburb.