Fulham

Fulham
Middlesex
Fulham Palace
Location
Grid reference:	TQ245765
Location:	51°28’36"N, 0°12’50"W
Data
Post town:	LONDON
Postcode:	SW6
Dialling code:	020
Local Government
Council:	Hammersmith and Fulham
Parliamentary constituency:	Chelsea and Fulham

Fulham is a town in Middlesex. It lies deep within the London metropolitan conurbation, bordered by Hammersmith and Kensington to the north, Chelsea to the east and the River Thames to the west, south and south-east; across which lie Barnes, Putney and Wandsworth in Surrey.

Once a working class area, today it is among the most affluent in the country.

Fulham has a history of industry and enterprise dating back to the 15th century, with pottery, tapestry-weaving, paper-making and brewing in the 17th and 18th centuries in present-day Fulham High Street, and later involvement in the automotive industry, early aviation, food production, and laundries. In the 19th-century there was glass-blowing and this resurged in the 21st century with the Aronson-Noon studio and the former Zest gallery in Rickett Street. Lillie Bridge Depot, a railway engineering depot opened in 1872, is associated with the building and extension of the London Underground, the electrification of Tube lines from the nearby Lots Road Power Station, and for well over a century has been the maintenance hub for rolling stock and track.

History

First recorded by name in 691, Fulham was a manor and ancient parish which originally included Hammersmith. The name 'Fulham' originates from Old English Fullan hamm meaning 'Fulla's river-meadow', after an otherwise unrecorded Anglo-Saxon landlord. It is spelled Fuleham in the Domesday Book of 1086.

In recent years there has been a great revival of interest in Fulham's earliest history, largely due to the Fulham Archaeological Rescue Group. This has carried out a number of digs, particularly in the vicinity of Fulham Palace, which show that approximately 5,000 years ago Neolithic people were living by the riverside and in other parts of the area. Excavations have also revealed Roman settlements during the third and fourth centuries AD.

Manor and Parish of Fulham

The manor (landholding) of Fulham was granted to Bishop Erkenwald about the year 691 for himself and his successors as Bishop of London. The manor house was Fulham Palace, for nine centuries the summer residence of the Bishops of London.

The first written record of a church in Fulham dates from 1154, with the first known parish priest of All Saints Church, Fulham appointed in 1242. All Saints Church was enlarged in 1881 by Sir Arthur Blomfield.

Hammersmith was part of the ancient parish of Fulham up until 1834. Prior to that time it had been a perpetual curacy under the parish of Fulham. By 1834 it had so many residents, a separate parish with a vicar (no longer a curate) and vestry for works was created.

Early History

In 879 Danish invaders, sailed up the Thames and wintered at Fulham and Hammersmith. Raphael Holinshed (died 1580) wrote that the Bishop of London was lodging in his manor place in 1141 when Geoffrey de Mandeville, riding out from the Tower of London, took him prisoner. During the Commonwealth the manor was temporarily out of the bishops' hands, having been sold to Colonel Edmund Harvey.

In 1642, Robert Devereux, 3rd Earl of Essex withdrawing from the Battle of Brentford (1642) ordered to be put a bridge of boats on the Thames to unite with his detachment in Kingston in pursuit of Charles I, who ordered Prince Rupert to retreat from Brentford back west. The King and Prince moved their troops from Reading to Oxford for the winter. This is thought to have been near the first bridge (which was made of wood). It was commonly named Fulham Bridge, built in 1729 and was replaced in 1886 with Putney Bridge.

Margravine Road recalls the existence of Brandenburg House, a riverside mansion built by Sir Nicholas Crispe in the time of Charles I, and used as the headquarters of General Fairfax in 1647 during the civil wars. In 1792 it was occupied by Charles Alexander, Margrave of Brandenburg-Ansbach and his wife, and in 1820 by Caroline, consort of King George IV. His non-political 'wife' was Maria Fitzherbert who lived in East End House in Parson's Green. They are reputed to have had several children.

The extract below of John Rocque's Map of London, 1746 shows the Parish of Fulham in the loop of the Thames, with the boundary with Chelsea, Counter's Creek, narrow and dark, flowing east into the river. The recently built, wooden, first Fulham/Putney bridge is shown and two Fulham village clusters, one central, one south-west.

19th century transport and power plays

The 19th century roused Walham Green village, and the surrounding hamlets that made up the parish of Fulham, from their rural slumber and market gardens with the advent first of power production and then more hesitant transport development. This was accompanied by accelerating urbanisation, as in other centres in the county of Middlesex, which encouraged trade skills among the growing population.

In 1824 the Imperial Gas Light and Coke Company, the first public utility company in the world, bought the Sandford estate in Sands End to produce gas for lighting — and in the case of the Hurlingham Club, for ballooning. Its ornately decorated number 2 gasholder is Georgian, completed in 1830 and reputed to be the oldest gasholder in the World. In connection with gas property portfolios, in 1843 the newly formed Westminster Cemetery Company had trouble persuading the Equitable Gas people (a future Imperial take-over) to sell them a small portion of land to gain southern access, onto the Fulham Road, from their recently laid out Brompton Cemetery, over the parish border in Chelsea. The sale was finally achieved through the intervention of cemetery shareholder and Fulham resident, John Gunter.

Meanwhile, another group of local landowners, led by Lord Kensington with Sir John Scott Lillie and others had conceived, in 1822, the idea of exploiting the water course up-river from Chelsea Creek on their land by turning it into a two-mile canal. It was to have a basin, a lock and wharves, to be known as the Kensington Canal, and link the Grand Union Canal with the Thames. In reality, however, the project was over budget and delayed by contractor bankruptcies and only opened in 1828, when railways were already gaining traction. The short-lived canal concept did however leave a legacy: the creation on Lillie's land of a brewery and residential development, 'Rosa', and 'Hermitage Cottages', and several roads, notably, the Lillie Road connecting the canal bridge, (Lillie Bridge) at West Brompton with North End Lane and the eventual creation of two railway lines, the West London Line and the District line connecting South London with the rest of the capital. This was done with the input of two noted consulting engineers, Robert Stephenson in 1840 and from 1860, Sir John Fowler, 1st Baronet|Sir John Fowler.

Empress Hall with Lillie Bridge Depot

This meant that the area around Lillie Bridge was to make a lasting, if largely unsung, contribution for well over a century to the development and maintenance of public transport in London and beyond. Next to the Lillie Bridge engineering Depot, the Midland Railway established its own coal and goods yard.

In 1907 the engineering HQ of the Piccadilly Line in Richmond Place (16-18 Empress Place) oversaw the westward expansion of the line into the suburbs. At the turn of the century, the London Omnibus Co in Seagrave Road oversaw the transition of horse-drawn to motor buses, which were eventually integrated into London Transport and London Buses. This attracted a host of other automotive enterprises to move into the area.

With the growth of 19th-century transport links into East Fulham and its sporting venues by 'Lillie Bridge', along with the immediately neighbouring 24-acre Earl's Court exhibition grounds, and the vast the Empress Hall. During the First World War it would become accommodation for Belgian refugees. Meanwhile, the historic hamlet of North End was massively redeveloped in the 1880s by Messrs Gibbs & Flew, who built 1,200 houses on the fields. They had trouble disposing of the properties, so for public relations purposes, they renamed the area 'West Kensington', to refer to the more prosperous neighbourhood over the parish boundary.

The last farm to function in Fulham was Crabtree Farm, which closed at the beginning of the 20th century. A principal recorder of all these changes was a local man, Charles James Féret (1854-1921), who conducted research over a period of decades before publishing his three volume history of Fulham in 1900.

Outside links

("Wikimedia Commons" has material about Fulham)