Colombo Street

In the 18th century, the Survey of London records, the lane that became Colombo Street formed part of a continuous route called Green Walk, running from Hopton Street across to the road now known as Burrell Street. By 1823 the cottages standing here were addressed as Nos. 49–53 Collingwood Street West, and the numbering was altered twice more, to 1–5 in 1842 and to 80–72 in 1886, before the street finally took the name Colombo Street in 1937. The Survey of London gives no reason for that final choice of name — the pivot to "Colombo" appears in the record only as a date, not an explanation, leaving the origin of the current name genuinely unresolved.

The earliest firm date attached to the site is 1706, when Charles Hopton purchased the land forming the Brown Estate; Green Lane, the Survey of London notes, was already laid out by then, with a number of tenements on its south side probably including the cottages that would later become Nos. 72–80 Colombo Street. Those cottages were timber-framed and weatherboarded, and appear architecturally to date from the late 17th century. From 1823 they were occupied by small tradesmen and artisans, a use that seems to have continued for over a century. Locally the row was known as the Fishermen's Cottages, though the Survey of London is explicit that this name "seems to have been of recent application and not to have had any historical foundation." No. 80 was pulled down before 1939, and the remaining cottages were shattered by bomb blast and demolished in 1948 as irreparable — bringing to an end a building line that had stood, under successive names, for around two and a half centuries.

Beyond that debunked nickname, the pack offers little on cultural life along the street itself — no theatres, songs, or literary references survive in the record. What it does preserve is the physical character of the place: a row of late-17th-century timber cottages, weatherboarded and modest, standing in continuous use as small workshops and homes for well over a century before their destruction.

The record names only one individual connected to the site: Charles Hopton, who purchased the land forming the Brown Estate in 1706. By that date, the Survey of London notes, Green Lane was already laid out with tenements along its south side, probably including the buildings that would later be numbered as Nos. 72–80 Colombo Street. No other named residents, builders, or owners survive in the sources for this street, and the People section is correspondingly brief — the surviving record concerns the buildings far more than the people who lived and worked in them.

The street's most recent documented changes came in quick succession. It was renamed Colombo Street in 1937, and within little more than a decade its old building stock was gone: No. 80 was demolished before 1939, and the rest of the row, Nos. 72–80, was shattered by bomb blast and pulled down in 1948 as irreparable. The Survey of London's account effectively ends there, leaving no record of what replaced the cottages or how the street developed afterwards.

Nothing in the available sources describes Colombo Street as it stands today. The documented history stops with the 1948 demolition of its last historic cottages, and no later account of the street's redevelopment or current character has survived in the record consulted here. This page should be read as an account of what is known to have once stood on the street, not a description of the present-day thoroughfare.