Norwood High Street

Norwood means the North Wood. The name belonged to the Great North Wood, a tract of woodland that once extended northwards from what is now Croydon, and it was attached to this district long before the street existed. The high street simply carried the district's name when it was built.

The wider area was known as Lower Norwood, reflecting its lower altitude than Upper Norwood, until the name was changed to West Norwood in 1886. Maps as early as 1563 described the land hereabouts as fields, coppices and woodland, and a map of 1745 shows only a small cluster of buildings around the Horns Tavern as the nucleus of what would become Lower Norwood.

The street exists because of an Act of Parliament. Edward Thurlow, who became Lord Chancellor in 1778, had gradually built up an estate around Knight's Hill Farm in the late eighteenth century; when he died in 1806 no buyer came forward for the land despite its closeness to London. His trustees obtained an Act in 1809 allowing them to sell or lease the ground and lay out new roads to encourage building, and Norwood Road appears on a map of that same year as part of "Lord Thurlow's Copyhold".

Norwood High Street itself was constructed in 1810 by the Lambeth Manor Inclosure Commissioners, built to give access to the newly enclosed Norwood Common and Rush Common. In 1823 it passed, with the other Commissioners' roads, to the parish Surveyors of the Highways. A handful of small, unremarkable houses from immediately after 1810 survive, much altered, along the street.

In the early nineteenth century this was still a small hamlet of a few houses occupied by well-off gentlemen. That changed abruptly in the 1850s, when a railway line was driven through on an arc from west to south of St Luke's Church, physically severing Norwood High Street in two. The Crystal Palace line opened in 1856 with a station at Lower Norwood, later renamed West Norwood. Three decades later, in 1886, the district itself dropped the old name and became West Norwood.

The cemetery's entrance has changed with time. An engraving of 1853 shows it leading directly off the street; low iron railings appeared on the forecourt by 1890, and by 1938 the forecourt was fully enclosed by railings over two metres high. In 1999 the cemetery was listed Grade II on the Register of Historic Parks and Gardens, and in 2009 it was upgraded to Grade II* as the second commercial cemetery to serve London, noted for its Victorian and Edwardian funerary monuments and for an early crematorium of 1915, later replaced in 1960.

St Matthew's Roman Catholic Church, opened on the street in 1905 and probably designed by F. W. Tasker, was one of four small churches of this kind — described in the 1950s as "Ellis churches" — built nearby in the area's first Edwardian decade, and judged of no great architectural distinction at the time. After bomb damage in 1940 its west end was rebuilt in 1949-50 by Donald Plaskett Marshall, with a stone statue of St Matthew, carved by Joseph Cribb, an associate of Eric Gill, set in a round arch over the entrance. Tiles made by the pottery of James Stiff, who is buried in the cemetery, can also be found along the street.

Nettlefold, a manufacturer of wood screws and a philanthropist who lived from 1833 to 1913, gave the site for the Lower Norwood Free Public Library and laid its foundation stone in 1888; he is remembered today in Nettlefold Hall on the street and is buried in West Norwood Cemetery. The library was open from seven to ten on weekday evenings, and later on Sundays as well.

At the point where the street meets the cemetery, a fountain commemorates Mrs Woodford Fawcett, a local temperance campaigner. She is buried in the cemetery whose entrance faces the fountain directly.

The original free library of 1888 was Lambeth's first. It was replaced in 1969 by West Norwood Library and Nettlefold Hall, designed by Edward Hollamby and built on the site of three nineteenth-century houses, standing between the cemetery's two main gateways. Princess Margaret officially opened the new building on 12 April 1969.

The wider street and its cemetery frontage were given protection in 1978, when the West Norwood Conservation Area was designated, and the protected area was extended in 2003 to take in terraces at 545-551 Norwood Road and 9-21 Norwood High Street, together with mid-Victorian model dwellings of 1865 in Dunbar Street.

Norwood High Street held the earliest group of shops in the area, but it never grew into the district's main shopping centre; that role went instead to Norwood Road, where the principal parades were built around 1900 between York Hill and the railway station. A late Victorian fire station by the architect Robert Pearsall still stands on the street, alongside the cemetery's long brick wall and railings.

A road built to carry traffic to an enclosed common now carries traffic past one of London's great Victorian burial grounds — the destination has changed, but the name of the wood that gave the district its name remains.