Time Walk
A Cambridge Farm Turned Into a Clerk's Suburb
A Cambridge college owned this ground for three centuries before a single house stood on it. Walking along today, the street is a tidy run of Edwardian red brick, with bay windows, porches, and the open green of Tooting Common filling the view to the south.
Beneath the bay windows and porch lamps lies a farm that Emmanuel College leased to tenant farmers for three hundred years before deciding, late in the 19th century, to build on it instead. That decision, and the college that made it, gave the street its name.
Name Origin
From Richard Martyn to the College Gate
Emmanuel Road is named after Emmanuel College, Cambridge, the landowner of the Hyde Farm estate on which it was built. The connection runs back to 1587, when Richard Martyn bought the land and sold it to the college, founded only three years before. The college held the farm, let to tenant farmers, until the late 19th century, when it chose to develop the site for housing. The road itself was laid out and built between 1900 and 1903, as part of that development.
History
Houses for Clerks, Rooms for Veterans
Edward Hayes Dashwood was the lead builder of the Hyde Farm estate, including the properties along Emmanuel Road. The new houses were advertised as "high class" and "exceptionally well built", pitched at city clerks who could commute from Balham station.
Not every house on the street was built for sale. Some were set aside as rent-free accommodation for ex-military men who had served in the Boer War and the First World War. That tradition outlasted the Edwardian building boom: by 1946 the Hayes Dashwood Foundation, based at No. 69, was providing around 100 flats for disabled ex-service personnel, with a further 50 let on the open market.
Emmanuel Road is the only street in the whole Hyde Farm Conservation Area where the porches still have their original historic external doors.
"high class" and "exceptionally well built"Advertisement for the Hyde Farm estate houses, c.1896–1916
Culture
Tyneside Flats and a Corner Shopfront
Emmanuel Road is the only street in the Hyde Farm area where those porches still carry their historic external doors. Sash windows, leaded lights and French doors to the first floor complete the decorative joinery.
At the corner with Radbourne Road, No. 69 breaks the pattern. It carries a shopfront set in an arched opening, with a boot-scraper by the entrance, and now serves as the Dashwood Foundation's Estate Office. East of that junction runs a short parade of shops with flats above, some keeping their period shopfronts, built by Dashwood with stables behind them. Not everything is Edwardian: Nos. 31 and 32 are post-war infill, matching the scale of their neighbours but not their style.
Today
Common Ground
Tooting Common sits directly opposite, across the borough boundary, giving the houses an open aspect rarely found on a terraced street. The Tyneside flats, grouped in four distinct clusters, remain singled out as some of the street's most attractive buildings.
On the Map
Emmanuel Road Then & Now
Frequently Asked Questions
Why is it called Emmanuel Road?
It is named after Emmanuel College, Cambridge, which owned the Hyde Farm land on which the street was built between 1900 and 1903.
What is Emmanuel Road known for?
Its Edwardian Tyneside flats, especially at Nos. 35–69, its open aspect facing Tooting Common, and the Hayes Dashwood Foundation estate office at No. 69, which has provided flats for disabled ex-service personnel since 1946.
Who built Emmanuel Road?
Edward Hayes Dashwood was the lead builder of the Hyde Farm estate, including Emmanuel Road's houses, shops and former stables, built between 1896 and 1916.