Metropolitan Borough of Fulham

London - Pax Britannica

The Metropolitan Borough of Fulham was a Metropolitan borough in the County of London between 1900 and 1965, when it was merged with the Metropolitan Borough of Hammersmith to form the London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham. It was a riverside borough, and included the areas of Fulham, West Kensington, Walham Green, Parsons Green and Sands End. The SW6 postal district approximately follows the old Fulham parish.

Manors and Castles

• Fulham Palace -- Home to Bishops since the 11th century

History

The word Fulham originates from Old English, with Fulla being a personal name, and hamm being land hemmed in by water or marsh, or a river-meadow. So Fulla's hemmed-in land. It is spelled Fuleham in the 1066 Domesday Book.

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. The two areas did not come together again until the commencement of the London Government Act in 1965.

The parish boundary with Chelsea and Kensington was formed by the now culverted Counter's Creek river, the course of which is now occupied by the West London Line. This parish boundary has been inherited by the modern boroughs of Hammersmith & Fulham and Kensington & Chelsea.

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 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

Charles Booth 1889 map - detail showing Lillie Bridge, the two railway lines and Brompton Cemetery

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.[20] 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.

It 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 (see entertainment section below). 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.

Art and Craft

Ceramics and weaving in Fulham go back to at least the 17th century, most notably with the Fulham Pottery, followed by the establishment of tapestry and carpet production with a branch of the French 'Gobelins manufactory' and then the short-lived Parisot weaving school venture in the 1750s. William De Morgan, ceramicist and novelist, moved into Sands End with his painter wife, Evelyn De Morgan, where they lived and worked. Another artist couple, also members of the Arts and Crafts movement, lived at 'the Grange' in North End, Georgiana Burne-Jones and her husband, Edward Burne-Jones, both couples were friends of William Morris.

Other artists who settled along the Lillie Road, were Francesco Bartolozzi, a florentine engraver and Benjamin Rawlinson Faulkner, a society portrait painter. Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, the French expressionist painter and friend of Ezra Pound, lived in Walham Green till his early death in 1915. Glass production was, until recently, represented by the stained glass studio of the purpose-built and Grade II listed Glass House in Lettice Street and latterly, by the Aaronson Noon Studio, with the 'Zest' Gallery in Rickett Street, that was obliged to shut down in 2012, after 20 years by the developers of 'Lillie Square' and Earl's Court. Both glass businesses have now moved out of London.

The Art Bronze Foundry, founded by Charles Gaskin in 1922 still operates in Michael Road, off the New King's Road, a short distance from Eel Brook Common. It has produced works by Henry Moore, Elisabeth Frink, Barbara Hepworth and Jacob Epstein among others. Its work may be seen in public spaces all over the world.

20th century

In 1926, the Church of England established the office of Bishop of Fulham as a suffragan to the Bishop of London.

Fulham remained a predominantly working-class area for the first half of the 20th century, with genteel pockets at North End, along the top of Lillie and New King's roads, especially around Parsons Green, Eel Brook Common, South Park and the area surrounding the Hurlingham Club. Essentially, the area had attracted waves of immigrants from the countryside to service industrialization and the more privileged parts of the capital.

With rapid demographic changes there was poverty, as noted by Charles Dickens (1812-1870) and Charles Booth (1840-1916). Fulham had its poorhouses, and attracted several benefactors, including: the Samuel Lewis (financier) Housing Trust, the Peabody Trust and the Sir Oswald Stoll Foundation to provide low-cost housing.

The Metropolitan Asylums Board acquired in 1876 a 13-acre site at the bottom of Seagrave Road to build a fever hospital, The Western Hospital, that later became an NHS center of excellence for treating polio until its closure in 1979. Bar one ward block remaining in private occupation, it was replaced by a gated-flats development and a small public space, Brompton Park.

Aside from the centuries-old brewing industry, exemplified by the Swan Brewery on the Thames,[36] the main industrial activities involved motoring and early aviation — Rolls-Royce, Shell-Mex & BP, Rover, the London General Omnibus Company — and rail engineering (Lillie Bridge Depot), laundries — the Palace Laundry is still extant — and the building trades. Later there developed distilling, Sir Robert Burnett's White Satin Gin,[38] food processing, e.g. Telfer's Pies, Encafood and Spaghetti House, and Kodak's photographic processing. This encouraged the southern stretch of North End Road to become Fulham's unofficial "High street", almost a mile from the actual Fulham High Street, with its own department store, F.H. Barbers, along with Woolworth's, Marks & Spencer and Sainsbury's outlets, all long gone. The second ever Tesco shop opened in the North End Road. The UK's reputedly oldest independent health-food shop, opened in 1966 by the Aetherius Society, still trades on Fulham Road.

Allied to these developments, the postwar period saw the extensive demolition of Fulham's early 19th-century architectural stock, replaced by some Brutalist architecture — the current Ibis hotel — and the Empress State Building in Lillie Road that in 1962 replaced the declining Empress Hall. The London County Council and local council continued with much-needed council-housing development between World War II and up to the 1980s.

Fulham's traditional population of working people has been partially displaced by affluent newcomers since the turn of the century.

Piece of aviation history

Geoffrey de Havilland, aviation pioneer, built his first aeroplane at his workshop in Bothwell Street, Fulham in 1909. Later, during the First World War, Cannon's Brewery site at the corner of Lillie and North End Road was used for aircraft manufacture. The Darracq Motor Engineering Company of Townmead Road, became aircraft manufacturers in Fulham for the Airco company, producing De Havilland designs and components for the duration of the war.

Musical heritage

William Crathern, the composer, was organist at St Mary's Church, West Kensington, when it was still known as North End. Edward Elgar, the composer, lived at 51 Avonmore Road, W14, between 1890 and 1891. The notorious Italian tenor Giovanni Matteo Mario de Candia and his wife opera singer Giulia Grisi, made Fulham their home from 1852 until the 1900s at a lovely country-manor where their daughters and son were born, among them writer Cecilia Maria de Candia. Conductor and composer Hyam Greenbaum married the harpist Sidonie Goossens on 26 April 1924 at Kensington Registry Office and they set up home in a first floor flat on the Fulham Road, opposite Michelin House.