Gipsy Road

Gipsy Road shares its name with Gipsy Hill, which climbs south from it. The Survey of London explains where that name comes from.

Gipsy Hill, it records, "gets its name from the gipsies who encamped in the woods there for many years." A building called the Gipsy House once stood near the railway, by Oaks Avenue, a further trace of the name on the ground.

Gipsy Road did not grow organically out of a village lane. It was provided for in the 1810 Award of the Lambeth Manor Inclosure Commissioners, drawn up to give access to newly enclosed land on Rush Common and Norwood Common. In 1823 the parish Surveyors of the Highways took the new road, and others like it, into their keeping.

Building came gradually. Nos. 3 and 5 were put up under a 65-year building lease granted in 1832 to John Loat, a builder, and were already described as "lately erected" by 1842. They are a pair of houses sharing a front, with a small round window set in a triangular gable above. Historic England listed them in 1981.

Later in the century the road filled with institutions. Gipsy Road Baptist Church went up in 1881–2 at a cost of £5,000, probably designed by the builder Richard Henry Marshall, and was extended in 1890. Two board schools followed close together: Gipsy Hill Primary School opened in 1875 to a design by E. R. Robson, with a Junior Mixed School added in 1895–6, opening in 1896 for 410 children. Kingswood Primary School, also on Gipsy Road, opened in 1880 for 600 children to Robson's design, and was extended in 1904–5.

The Baptist church gives the road its most distinctive building. Within a decade of its building it hosted at least one Norwood wedding: William Farmer and Annie Louisa Cutter married there in June 1891.

Annie Louisa Farmer, married at the Baptist chapel in 1891, went on to edit the Norwood Review between 1907 and 1912. Mary Ann Bagshaw, widow of John Bagshaw MP, was living at Cambledon Villas on Gipsy Road at the time of her death in 1891.

The road's 20th-century households included loss as well as ordinary life. Joseph Russell lived at 156 Gipsy Road with his wife Emma before he was killed in action in France on 28 May 1917; Emma was still recorded at the same address in 1939, by then a widow. Next door at No. 154, Howard Frederick John Hales and his wife Margaret Irene were living in 1939.

Gipsy Hill still rises south from Gipsy Road, the line it has always traced. Two older pubs remain landmarks on the road: the Two Gipsy, a modest 19th-century pub remodelled between the wars, and the Mansion House, formerly the Paxton Arms, an Italianate building with a central tower.