Loughborough Park

Loughborough Park takes its name from Loughborough House, which stood on what is now the south-east corner of Evandale Road. The house was supposed to have taken its own name from its occupant, Henry Hastings, first Baron Loughborough, the younger son of the fifth Earl of Huntingdon, who fought for the Royalists in the Civil War and was living there in 1664. At the Restoration he was made Lord Lieutenant of Leicestershire, and in 1664 he promoted a private Bill in Parliament to make the stream from Brixton Causeway into a navigable river to the Thames. The Act received Royal Assent, but Hastings died two years later, and the scheme came to nothing.

The house went on without him. By the late 18th century it had become a "superior Academy", and in 1787 a book of elocution lessons was dedicated to "the Young Noblemen and gentlemen receiving their education at Loughborough House School". In 1820 it was described as a "very large old house of light construction", its grounds by then reduced to about 11 acres. Thomas Willett bought the leasehold in 1825 for £5,000 and died in 1846; the house itself was pulled down around 1854. Its name lived on not only in this street but in Loughborough Road and Loughborough Junction nearby.

The road itself was laid out in the years 1844 to 1857, on land within the manor of Lambeth Wick. Its layout dates from about 1844, when Lady Holland began granting building leases of one or two plots at a time. In 1846 Benjamin Currey, acting with William A. Loch, granted further leases with the estate trustee's consent, and Loch continued granting leases up to 1857. Henry Currey, whose father had this connection with the estate and who was himself developing land north of Coldharbour Lane, may have designed the layout. Most of the houses were built by Edwin Heritage.

The result was a carefully composed development. On the east side, detached houses sit two storeys over half-sunken basements, each with a central porch. On the west side the houses are mostly paired, in a plainer style. At Nos. 89–91 and 93–95, once known as Warburton Villas, pairs of houses were joined together to look like one grand building.

A parish grew up alongside the street: St Catherine's, Loughborough Park, was formed in 1877, though its church was only ever a temporary building and closed in 1902, after which the site was taken for a fire station. The railway arrived in 1866, when a station called Loughborough Park opened nearby; its viaduct and embankment are credited with pulling denser housing into the wider area.

Royce died in 1920, knocked over by a motor car while stepping off a tram at Kennington Gate. His story is a reminder that this quiet villa street once housed working performers of the London music halls, not only the merchants and professionals its houses suggest.

James and Lucy Allison, a comedy dance duo and pantomimists, lived at 89 Loughborough Park in 1911. James Allison, whose real name was James Beddoe, had been King Rat of the Grand Order of Water Rats in 1907, and in 1909 served as Vice Chair of the Variety Artistes Federation. Like Royce further down the street, the Allisons represent a theatrical thread in the street's otherwise sedate residential history.

The Second World War left its mark directly on the street. Gates and railings enclosing the front gardens were removed for the war effort, and houses on the western side were damaged and never replaced. On the resulting gap, sixteen prefabricated houses known as "Park Gardens" were put up after the war. In 1953 the London County Council bought land and property here to form the open space later called Wyck Gardens, serving its new Loughborough Park Estate.

The street's surviving character was given special protection in 1981, its boundary later revised in 1987, when it was proposed to link up with the Brixton Town Centre area, and again in 2023.

Thirty-five houses on the street are protected, from the early pairs at Nos. 35–45 to the villas at Nos. 47–61 and 63–73. The street is still largely characterised by the middle-class 19th-century villas that its builders put up. The house that lent the street its name is long gone, but its name has outlasted both the house and the railway station that once borrowed it too.