Kings Avenue

The street was recorded as Loats Road in 1849, when it was lined with large houses on its eastern side while the western edge still ran out into open fields. At some point it was renamed Kings Avenue, the name it carries today.

The sources used here do not explain why the change was made, or when exactly it happened. What they do confirm is the sequence: Loats Road first, Kings Avenue now.

By 1849 only the eastern side of the street was built up, with large houses facing fields across the way. Building over the following decades filled in much of that western edge with more villas of the same scale.

No. 4 Kings Avenue, a three-storey villa with a basement, dates from around 1860 and is thought to have been built by Henry Harris; it is listed Grade II. Several neighbours followed in the same mid-19th-century style: No. 6 and No. 14 are also listed mid-century villas of three storeys and basement, and a detached coach house at No. 89B survives from the same period. Nos. 12 and 28 are later additions to the local heritage list, each recognised as a positive contributor to the surrounding area.

The twentieth century brought change behind the street rather than along it: in the post-war decades, new housing was built behind Nos. 4 and 14, filling in the rear gardens of the older villas. A school was also built on the street.

Behind the ordinary front door of No. 19 lived a family whose working life was spent performing under a stage name, tied by that 1911 record to a quiet corner of residential Clapham.

Historic villas still stand in places along Kings Avenue, marking out the street's oldest phase. Around them sit the later housing built behind Nos. 4 and 14, and the school added to the street at some point in its history. What began as Loats Road, half-fields and half-grand houses in 1849, is now a street where that Victorian frontage survives in fragments among twentieth-century additions.