Milkwood Road

Milkwood Road was the main street of an estate developed from 1868 by the architects W. G. Habershon and A. R. Pite, after they took a 99-year lease of 24 acres from the Ecclesiastical Commissioners. Nothing in the sources used here explains why the name "Milkwood" was chosen.

What is recorded is the street's purpose: it was laid out, along with Lowden Road, as one of the two principal streets of the new estate.

The first stone of the new development was laid on 30 March 1869 by Lord Shaftesbury. Terraces went up along Milkwood Road, mostly two storeys, some three, many raised above basements.

Growth was fast. By 1872, the cheapest houses on Milkwood Road cost £200, while five houses on Lowden Road together cost £1,739. Within four years of the 1868 agreement, more than 200 private houses and shops had been built and occupied here, with more still under construction. Cheap workmen's fares, which the London, Chatham and Dover Railway's Metropolitan Extension was compelled to offer, did much to drive this pace.

Trams reached the area in 1884, running from Loughborough Junction under the railway bridge at Hinton Road and along the length of Milkwood Road. The bridge proved too low, and part of the road too narrow, for two tram tracks, so the route was altered to loop one way via nearby streets, returning along the original line on Milkwood Road. Trams were phased out in the 1930s in favour of buses.

Dorothy Kerin, later known as a Christian visionary and healer, was born in 1889 and moved to 204 Milkwood Road with her family soon after her father William died in 1902. She spent nine months in a sanatorium, returned home, and then contracted pneumonia and pleurisy. She died in 1963.

Alfred Arthur Rouse was born in Milkwood Road on 6 April 1894. He became known as the "Blazing Car Murderer" and was hanged at Bedford Gaol on 10 March 1931, for the November 1930 murder of an unidentified man at Hardingstone, Northamptonshire. Two very different lives began on the same short road within five years of each other.

The railway sidings that once ran alongside Milkwood Road closed in 1966. A large site that had been Nevill's Bakery became Milkwood Community Park. Further along, the Gandhi and Bessemer Park industrial estates now occupy the former sidings land.

Milkwood Road remains narrow, closed in by the railway viaduct, its retail units set into the arches and the backs of Herne Hill's shops the dominant sight. It runs parallel to Railton Road, one on each side of the viaduct, and still gives access to Herne Hill station through a foot tunnel, beside the turnback siding on the station's eastern flank.