Flodden Road

No source consulted for this page explains where the name Flodden comes from. The road already appears, its plots largely empty, on maps of the 1870s, which gives the earliest dated record of it under its present name. The houses that now line it followed later in the nineteenth century. The name is given here as recorded, not guessed at.

This was open ground on paper into the 1870s. A drill hall for the 1st Surrey Rifles was already standing by the mid-1870s, opposite the house where the orchid-grower Richard Isaac Measures had just settled his family. The large semi-detached villas that still line the west side of the road's southern stretch were built in the following decades.

No. 20 has a gabled return and an ornate central porch. Next door, Nos. 22-24 form a grander red-brick pair, rich with decorative tiles and a boundary wall that has lost some of its original detail. Further along, Nos. 26-32 mix textures in a picturesque style; the conservation appraisal describes the effect as a

combination. No. 32, on a generous corner plot, is crowned by a brick tower that still catches the eye as a landmark. Only the west side of this southern section was drawn into the Minet Conservation Area when it was designated in 2016, with its buildings logged in detail on Lambeth's Local Heritage List in 2021.

A regimental football club grew up alongside the drill hall. The 1st Surrey Rifles F.C. was playing at Flodden Road by 1877. William Maynard had already played forward for England in the country's first-ever international football match in 1872 before joining the club.

Decades on, a different regiment's football story became attached to the same street. The crosses commemorating men of the 47th Division are now kept at Connaught House on Flodden Road, home of the London Irish Rifles since 2000.

Richard Isaac Measures was born in Thorley, Cambridgeshire, in 1833 or 1834. In the mid-1870s he and his wife Mary Ann moved with their seven children to a house on Flodden Road, directly opposite the drill hall that was then the base of the 1st Surrey Rifles. The house, No. 7, became known as Cambridge Lodge, and there Measures built up a collection of orchids that won 85 awards from the Royal Horticultural Society's Orchid Committee between 1876 and 1907.

From the early 1890s until around 1900, his gardener Henry J Chapman worked at Cambridge Lodge and became known in his own right for hybridising orchids and winning awards. Measures also went into business as Measures Bros Ltd with his younger brother R. H. Measures, who kept his own notable orchid collection at Woodlands in Streatham.

A different kind of distinction belonged to William Maynard, who died in 1921 after a life that began with playing for England in its first international match in 1872.

Two wooden crosses carried this history forward. Carved on the battlefield near High Wood and Eaucourt l'Abbaye by Royal Engineers of the 47th Division in 1916 and 1918, they were replaced on the battlefield by stone memorials in 1925. The originals were kept at the Duke of York's Headquarters in Chelsea until that building was sold in 2003, when they were moved to Connaught House, the London Irish Rifles' new home on Flodden Road.

The regiment itself had arrived on the road in 2000, moving from Chelsea. By 2014 its main memorial to the dead of both world wars stood in the drill hall at Connaught House, No. 4 Flodden Road.

Flodden Road still runs as a busy, tree-lined link between the roundabout at Calais Street and Knatchbull Road and Camberwell New Road. Grand Victorian villas, protected since 2016, line its west side. At No. 4, Connaught House remains a working Army Reserve Centre, home to the London Irish Rifles and custodian of crosses carved on First World War battlefields. The street that was empty fields on the 1870s map is still, in its quiet way, a soldiers' road.