Walcot Square

The square is named after Edmund Walcot, who bought the land from Augustine Skinner in 1657. Walcot — his name is also spelled Walcott in the records — later left the property in trust for the poor of St Mary, Lambeth, and St Olave, Southwark. The wider holding became known as the Walcot Estate, which in the following century was granted to the trustees of St Mary, Lambeth, and it was this estate that eventually lent its name to the square built across part of it.

The square was built in a single burst between 1837 and 1839, on ground that had until then been garden ground. Three builders divided the work between them: John Woodward of Paradise Street put up Nos. 9–81, Charles Newnham of Paris Street built Nos. 16–24, and John Chapman of Waterloo Road took on Nos. 26–50. Writing in 1951, the Survey of London found that the northern, western and southern terraces differed slightly in design but together made a modestly formal domestic scene.

Thomas Barnes, editor of The Times, lived at No. 77 in 1840–41, having moved from Nelson Square in Southwark. He died in 1841, not long after settling in the square.

At No. 20, in the same years, lived William Hosking, an architect and civil engineer apprenticed as a builder in Sydney before coming to England in 1819. Hosking went on to serve as engineer to the West London Railway and held a professorship at King's College London. He designed Trinity Chapel in Poplar and buildings at Abney Park cemetery, published a work on bridges, and claimed to have originated the design for the British Museum Reading Room. He married a daughter of the printer William Clowes.

Three decades later, in 1870, the antiquary William Henry Rich Jones occupied No. 19. Born in Blackfriars in 1817, he served as vicar of Bradford-on-Avon from 1851 to 1885 and published several antiquarian works.

Walcot Square was protected in 1968, one of the first such areas in Lambeth, with its boundary extended in 1980. In 1998 two small parcels of land passed instead to the neighbouring Lambeth Walk and China Walk Conservation Area, and the two areas remain contiguous, with the square's terraces offering early 19th-century views along nearby Walnut Tree Walk.

Several terraces are protected today, including Nos. 14–32, Nos. 52–56, the single-storey lodge-cottage at No. 25, Nos. 9–23 and Nos. 27–81. No. 14 is a postwar rebuild after bomb damage, included for its group value with its neighbours, and Nos. 34–42 are later postwar terraces built to match. The square remains on Lambeth's Local Heritage List as a 19th-century garden square — its triangular shape, and the name it never quite matched, still intact.