Ferndale Road

The road already existed by 1841, when it appears on the Tithe map. An 1863 map captions the same route "Shepherds Lane". The sources used here do not explain how or why it became Ferndale Road, or what the name refers to.

Charity shaped this street more than any single landlord. The land south of Ferndale Road had belonged to Stockwell Manor until the Thornycroft family sold the remaining portion at auction in 14 lots in 1802. From the 1830s the Trustees of the City of London Almshouses bought up plots along the north side, and by 1836 had built 16 houses for 31 residents on land with a frontage of over 800 feet.

In 1856 the Corporation decided to move almshouses from Hart Street, Cripplegate, onto the spare land, and in 1882 it brought Sir Thomas Gresham's almshouses from Whitecross Street too. A foundation stone for rebuilt almshouses was laid in December 1884 by the Chairman of the City of London Freemen's Orphan School Committee, with Davis and Emanuel as architects. Three distinct groups still face each other round a shared quadrangle: Rogers' Almshouses in plain Gothic stock brick, the Gresham Almshouses in red brick quasi-Jacobean style, and the Freemen's Houses with galleried upper floors and corner towers.

The City of London Freemen's Orphan School opened alongside in 1854, designed by the City Architect J. B. Bunning, before moving to Ashtead Park in Surrey in 1926 and becoming the City of London Freemen's School. George Peabody bought a sixteen-acre estate nearby around 1865; after his death in 1869 his Trustees sold it for housing, and St Paul's Church rose on Ferndale Road, consecrated in 1881 to a design by W. G. Habershon, with its west tower never completed. The Jennings Estate terraces, built by Joseph George Jennings using his own bricks and terracotta, were recognised as a conservation area in 1994.

Failure came before success on this site. A public baths opened here in 1874 but closed in 1881, and the building passed briefly to the Lambeth Polytechnic School before the LCC converted it into the Brixton School of Building in 1904. A school of architecture was added in 1906 under Beresford Pite, and by the early 1970s the college taught some 6,000 part-time and 1,500 full-time students before merging into the new Polytechnic of the South Bank and moving to Wandsworth Road in 1974.

One Ferndale Road address holds a hidden tragedy. Beatrice May Gregory, performing as Ena Bertoldi, was a Sheffield-born contortionist billed in the press as the "Queen of contortionists", who toured America, Paris, Vienna and Berlin and reportedly earned £1,300 for a single year's contract in 1899.

She married fellow performer George Spink, known as Dandy George, in 1896, and he became her manager. In September 1904 she petitioned for legal separation, alleging he had assaulted her repeatedly at their home, 169 Ferndale Road. She died in 1906, aged just 28, and is buried in Lambeth Cemetery, Tooting.

The 20th century's institutions eventually left Ferndale Road. The old school of building site passed to Lambeth College, known later as the Ferndale Centre, which closed in 1994. More recently, the former Bon Marché department store building at Nos. 244–250 was restored and extended by Squire and Partners in 2017, and in 2024 the conservation area boundary was redrawn to refocus on Jennings's original terraces.

Ferndale Road still reads as a street of institutions. Only its eastern end, where it meets Brixton Road, sits within a conservation area, framed by tall late-Victorian retail buildings that give it a narrow, enclosed feel. The almshouses the City of London built here remain gated behind their 19th-century railings, a quieter echo of the shepherds' lane this once was.