Villa Road

The sources used here do not explain why the road was called Villa Road. What they do show is that its earliest recorded house, No. 26, was itself a small stuccoed villa — a two-storey house with a central porch of cast-iron trelliswork and a tent roof, shown on the Inclosure map of 1810 as one of a matching pair. The entrance carried a delicate fanlight patterned with three ellipses and a reeded surround finished with lion-head stops. Whether the road took its name from this style of house or from something else, the record consulted here is silent.

No. 26's twin villa did not survive. It was pulled down to make room for the row of terrace houses that later lined the road. Those Victorian terraces, dating from the 1880s, went up facing what is now Max Roach Park.

Nearly a century later, the terrace was threatened again. People began moving into Villa Road in early 1973, when the street was scheduled for demolition. By the summer of 1975 around 200 squatters were living there — anarchists, British Black Panthers, feminists, Marxists and primal screamers among them. From 1974, squatters also occupied properties on what became Max Roach Park itself, protesting against the Brixton Development Plan; those houses, similar to the ones still standing on Villa Road's north side, were demolished in 1978. Villa Road's own terrace survived, Lambeth's own appraisal records, in part thanks to that resistance to comprehensive clearance.

By 1999, the gaps left by demolition were filled carefully. No. 5 is a faithful re-creation of the lost Victorian houses, down to the chimneys, bay windows and decorative corbels. At the east end, Lambeth Housing Department and the Metropolitan Housing Trust built new housing the same year, matching the scale and building line of the old terrace in a contemporary style.

Villa Road's squat produced its own small library. The 1980 book Squatting the Real Story included a chapter on the road written by Nick Anning and Jill Simpson, and in 2006 the squat was profiled in the BBC Four documentary series Lefties.

William Theodore Brailey, born in Walthamstow in 1887, lived at 10 Villa Road. He was a pianist who played in the Titanic's trio alongside Georges Krins and Roger Bricoux, performing in the ship's À la Carte Restaurant and Café Parisien. On the night of 15 April 1912, after the ship struck an iceberg, Brailey and his fellow musicians kept playing to calm passengers while the crew loaded the lifeboats; all eight died in the sinking.

Six decades later, the road gained a different kind of resident. Christian Wolmar, later a journalist, author and railway historian, squatted at Villa Road and helped save it from demolition, going on to co-edit Squatting the Real Story.

The street's name resurfaced in an unexpected way in the late 2000s, when a Brixton street gang named Villa Road split off from the larger GAS Gang around Brixton Road. Opposite the road, part of the site later built on for St Helens School and the Bedwell House flats had once, it is thought, been occupied by Brixton Greyhound Stadium.

Villa Road today mixes old and faithfully rebuilt. The Victorian terrace still fronts Max Roach Park, with the 1999 infill built to match its scale. No. 26 remains the street's oldest recorded building — a reminder that this terrace was once squatted to keep it standing at all.