Landor Road

Landor Road was formerly known as Stockwell Private Road. During the early-to-mid Victorian period it was privately maintained rather than adopted as a public highway. The sources used here do not explain where the name Landor itself came from.

The late Victorian period brought a wave of terrace building along Landor Road. By the mid-20th century the Survey of London described most of its buildings as dating from the mid to late nineteenth century, in a variety of forms. A pub had already gone up at the junction of Clapham Road, Bedford Road and Landor Road earlier in the Victorian period.

The street's most substantial Victorian building was the South Western Hospital, built in 1869–70 for patients suffering from fever and smallpox. It took the form of two symmetrical groups of buildings joined by a wide central corridor, arranged across a long north–south site. Thomas Henry Wyatt designed the northerly group and Frederick Marrable the southerly one; William Howard was contractor for both.

At the Lingham Street and Stockwell Green junction stands St Andrew's Church. Lambeth's Local Heritage List dates it to 1767, one of the oldest churches in the borough, and records that it was substantially remodelled in 1867, when its plain Georgian front was reworked in an Italian Romanesque style with a campanile and spire. The Victoria County History of 1912 gives a different date, describing a Romanesque church "built about 1860", with a chancel and nave of equal width, a three-sided gallery and a north transept chapel. The two are probably describing the same thing from different angles: the county historians seem to have dated the Victorian Romanesque building they could see, not the Georgian church underneath it. The parish of St Andrew's, Stockwell Green, was formed in 1868.

The South Western Hospital's two symmetrical blocks had two different designers, Wyatt and Marrable, with William Howard as contractor for both.

Landor Road's Victorian character is still visible in its surviving buildings. The Landor pub is a large corner building with its bar still fitted with slender iron columns and an ornate bar back. Further along, the Clapham North pub presents a long elevation to Landor Road, with brown brick below and red brick above, and historic casement windows facing the street. At the eastern end, varied Victorian houses give the road an attractive setting within the Stockwell Green area, with St Andrew's tower still dominating the junction with Lingham Street and Stockwell Green.