Old Town

No source explains the name outright, but it fits what the street was. Clapham's old village was based not on one street but three: Rectory Grove, Old Town and North Street, running down to the common.

The Victoria County History records that Old Town lies in the old town of Clapham, on the north of the parish, along and near the road to London that forms the High Street. That position, on the main road but at the historic centre, is why the street still carries the oldest surviving buildings in the area.

At the corner leading to Grafton Square stands a small late 17th-century building of red brick with a tiled roof, one of the street's oldest survivals. No. 45 is probably of the same date.

A little further along, Nos. 39, 41 and 43 form a well-preserved run of early-to-mid 18th-century town houses, two storeys with an attic and basement. No. 41's door, of six fielded panels, sits under a fanlight within a carved doorcase. Nos. 1 and 3, of around 1700, and Nos. 20 and 20A, early 19th century, add to a street where several centuries of brick sit side by side.

In 1762 a meeting-house was built in Clapham Old Town, a dissenting presence in the heart of the old village.

A side street brought an unlikely engineering story to Clapham village. Hounsfield's firm made production tools and gauges through the First World War instead of cars, before Trojan production finally began in 1920, not on Old Town but at a new works in Croydon. The Old Town site had briefly been considered for a police building, which was never built there.

A GLC blue plaque at No. 43 Old Town marks the home of John Francis Bentley, an architect who lived there and died in 1902.

Trade on Old Town kept changing through the 20th century. A corner site was a chemists shop in the 1920s and 1930s, then Downers Lane Engineering Works by the 1950s, and is now a modern restaurant. Battley Brothers Print Works operated on the street until 2002, when the family firm moved to Battersea as partners in Cantate.

Sycamore Laundry, which had begun in the 1860s at The Sycamores in Rectory Grove and later moved to 4 Old Town, merged with Blossom and Browne Laundry in 1994, closing a line of use that stretched back to its building's time as a girls' reformatory and a working men's club.

Old Town now mixes eras openly. Maritime House, built for the National Union of Seamen, is owned by the RMT Union and holds offices, flats and a Job Centre, its pediment still carrying a large fish and a ship's prow. A 1964 fire station stands nearby.

Alongside them, the early 18th-century houses at Nos. 39, 41 and 43, and the late 17th-century survivals near Grafton Square, keep the street rooted in the old village it was named for.