Tulse Hill

The areas now known as Tulse Hill and Brockwell Park correspond roughly with the manors of Bodley, Upgrove and Scarlettes. During the Commonwealth these manors were held by the Tulse family, from whom Tulse Hill takes its name.

The family member most clearly tied to the name is Sir Henry Tulse, Lord Mayor of London in 1683. His daughter Elizabeth married Richard, the first Lord Onslow, who served as Speaker of the House of Commons from 1708 to 1710. Tulse Hill is one of nine wards of the metropolitan borough of Lambeth, and as early as 1331 the area formed part of the district known as Lambeth Deane, alongside Brixton, Herne Hill and Norwood.

In 1789 most of the Bodley, Upgrove and Scarlettes property was sold to William Cole. It was Dr Thomas Edwards, a legal writer who married Mercy Cressingham around 1811, who built Tulse Hill and Upper Tulse Hill roads before 1821, and the parish took the roads over as early as 1822, abolishing the tolls. By 1843, just over twenty years into the development, Edwards's property carried some 125 houses.

This was development aimed squarely at the wealthy. Plots were let on leases of up to 99 years, with safeguards fixing a minimum house cost of around £700, a minimum distance from the road, and a ban on any school, shop, trade or manufactory without permission. A new road, now Trinity Rise, was built shortly after 1844 to link Tulse Hill with Norwood Road. In 1855 Jonah Cressingham gave the site for a church and parsonage on Trinity Rise, and Holy Trinity Church, designed by T. D. Barry and seating 1,000 at a cost of about £6,000, was consecrated on 5 February 1856.

Railways arrived in the late 1860s. The London, Brighton and South Coast Railway opened a suburban line through Tulse Hill in 1868, and a spur line between Tulse Hill and Herne Hill opened on 1 January 1869, used also by the London, Chatham and Dover Company and the London and South Western Company. The London County Council bought 78 acres of the neighbouring Brockwell estate in 1891 for £117,000.

By the time the Survey of London described the street in the 1950s, the smaller houses that had lined Upper Tulse Hill since the second quarter of the nineteenth century were fast disappearing under redevelopment.

The church is protected as a listed building, built in a fourteenth-century style with no pillars blocking the view of pulpit or altar. By 1886 its parish held a population of 6,302, served by three clergy.

The writer and political activist Yvonne Kapp was born at 170 Tulse Hill in 1903, into a Jewish immigrant family. The composer Michael Finnissy, later a leading figure of the New Complexity movement, was born in Tulse Hill in 1946.

The artist and banknote designer Stephen Gooden was born in Tulse Hill in 1892. Thomas James Rowsell, later honorary chaplain to Queen Victoria, was the youngest of fifteen children of the lawyer Samuel Rowsell of Tulse Hill. Arthur Fleming-Sandes, a Victoria Cross recipient, was born at Northstead Road, Tulse Hill Park, in 1894.

The painter Euan Uglow lived in Tulse Hill as a child, where his father worked as an accountant, and attended the local Strand School.

Through the twentieth century Tulse Hill became known for its schools. Strand School, a boys' grammar school, moved here from King's College in the Strand in 1913 and closed in 1979 after contested attempts to make it comprehensive. Tulse Hill School, an eight-floor comprehensive for boys serving almost two thousand pupils, opened in Upper Tulse Hill in 1956 and closed in 1990. Dick Sheppard School, founded for girls by the London County Council as Tulse Hill School's sister establishment, ran from 1955 to 1994. St Martin-in-the-Fields High School for Girls relocated to a larger Tulse Hill site in 1928 and closed in 2024.

No. 166 Tulse Hill is a protected early-to-mid nineteenth-century stucco villa, one of few survivors of the estate Dr Edwards built. Tulse Hill station, rebuilt after its original glass roof was removed following the 1905 Charing Cross roof collapse, now carries four platforms on the Thameslink route toward Blackfriars and Sutton.