Time Walk
A Doctor's Name on a Builder's Street
This street carries the name of a doctor who bought the land more than half a century before anyone built on it. Walking it today, you pass a spired Victorian church at one corner and a pair of ornately arched former dispensary buildings further along.
Beneath the terraces lies an older pattern: a block of copyhold land parcelled out and built over only in the 1840s and 1850s. The street's name is the oldest thing about it.
Name Origin
John Wilkinson's Fourteen Acres
Wilkinson Street is named after John Wilkinson of Woodford, Doctor of Physic, who purchased land in the area in 1793. He is not recorded as having built or lived on the street itself; the name simply fixed his ownership of the ground to the road that was later cut across it.
That road came decades later. The street was built on the fourteen acres of former copyhold land in the late 1840s and early 1850s. The copyhold estate it sat within ran between Meadow Road, Fentiman Road, Clapham Road and Wilkinson Street itself.
History
A Church, a Dispensary, and the Shape of the Estate
The street filled in gradually across the mid-nineteenth century. At its corner with St Stephen's Terrace stands St Stephen Church, with a chancel holding a small recessed sanctuary with a rose window, and a tower rising to a tall octagonal spire. The church became its own parish, carved out of St Michael, Stockwell, in 1861.
The former dispensary at Nos. 44 & 46 Wilkinson Street is built in the Venetian Gothic style, with its arched windows picked out in polychrome brick and a porch carried on elaborate Composite columns.
On the Map
Wilkinson Street Then & Now
Frequently Asked Questions
Why is it called Wilkinson Street?
It is named after John Wilkinson of Woodford, a Doctor of Physic who purchased land in the area in 1793, decades before the street itself was built.
What is Wilkinson Street known for?
Its Victorian St Stephen Church, with its octagonal spire, and a Venetian Gothic former dispensary of 1866 at Nos. 44 & 46.
When was Wilkinson Street built?
It was developed across former copyhold land in the late 1840s and early 1850s.