Robsart Street

The sources used here do not explain why the street is called Robsart Street. No naming record, estate map or rate book in this pack gives the origin, so the name is left unexplained rather than guessed at.

Shops and cottage houses lined Robsart Street, some of them built as early as 1820. Just south, the part of Stockwell Park Road below Robsart Street was built in the late 1840s on land called Long Field, part of the wider Angell estate that shaped this corner of Brixton.

A Roman Catholic church, St. Helen's, opened on the street in 1905, probably designed by F. W. Tasker, and was one of four small local churches known as the "Ellis churches" after a benefactor. It was a plain brick building with a gabled front, lean-to entrance lobbies, a large circular window above them, and a cross on the gable. A Lady Chapel was added to its west side in 1938 by architect J. O'Hanlon Hughes.

The congregation left in 1953, moving to a disused Independent Church on Brixton Road. That building had opened in June 1870 as Brixton Independent Church, was heavily damaged in the war of 1939–45, and was restored in 1952–3 for St. Helen's congregation by architects Justin Alleyn and John Mansel, reopening for worship on 8 December 1953 as Our Lady of the Rosary. St. Helen's own building on Robsart Street was by then closed, and in 1955 was being converted into an annexe of Corpus Christi Primary School.

Wartime damage was uneven: most houses on the north side of the street survived the war intact, and those on the south side, though damaged, were repairable, yet both were demolished as redevelopment went ahead. The London County Council laid out Slade Gardens on part of the cleared ground in 1958, opening it in 1962 and naming it after Robert Slade, the landowner behind many of the early 19th-century houses on nearby Brixton Road.

In 1871 the street held a family split across two addresses. William Stanley lived at No. 18 with his wife Elizabeth and three of their children, Herbert, Cyrus and Clara, while his eldest son Edwin Henry had set up house with his wife Eliza just two doors along at No. 20.

A later resident of the street went into trade rather than family life. Sydney Solomon Lynes began his theatrical printing business at No. 4 Robsart Street before moving it to larger premises at 283 Brixton Road in 1913, where it continued for decades.

The street's newest buildings owe little to its 19th-century past. No. 2 Robsart Street, behind No. 272 Brixton Road, was reconstructed in 1994 as a tall commercial building in brick with red-brick trim and three arched bays. Its stepped window of dark stained wood was designed to recall the balconies of 19th-century houses in Lima, Peru.

At the Brixton Road end, Story Park Heights now stands twenty storeys tall on ground once held by Wayland House, a 1960s block of the Stockwell Park Estate. Slade Gardens remains close by, its name still carrying the memory of the landowner who shaped this part of Brixton two centuries ago.