Qualla: Streatham

Streatham: Introduction

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Stacey Harris, CC BY-SA 2.0. Streatham means the hamlet on the street. The street in question is a Roman road that ran from Londinium to the south coast, possibly to a Roman port now lost beneath the sea near modern Brighton. The road passed through a Saxon settlement at Streatham, was used as a coaching road in the seventeenth century, became the London-Brighton turnpike in 1780, and is the modern A23. Every shape of Streatham comes from that road - the long narrow high street, the linear pattern of development, the traffic, the recovery from the traffic. Vincent van Gogh drew Streatham Common in 1875 and described it in a letter to his brother Theo as a large, grass-covered area with oak trees and broom, soggy here and there from the night's rain.

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Image: Stacey Harris | CC BY-SA 2.0

Streatham: The Wells

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Danny Robinson, CC BY-SA 2.0. The eighteenth century changed everything. Mineral springs were discovered along the southern side of Streatham Common, and the village became a spa - a place where City merchants and the London gentry built their country residences to take the waters. One of those merchants was ...

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Image: Danny Robinson | CC BY-SA 2.0

Streatham: Sir Henry Tate's Hill

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Praefectus fabrum, CC0. Park Hill, on the north side of the common, was rebuilt in the early nineteenth century for a silk merchant named William Leaf, who hired the architect John Buonarroti Papworth. Later it passed to Sir Henry Tate, the sugar refiner who made his fortune from cube sugar and who beca...

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Image: Praefectus fabrum | CC0

Streatham: The West End of South London

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Reading Tom from Reading, UK, CC BY 2.0. After the First World War, Streatham reinvented itself as a place of entertainment. The Streatham Hill Theatre opened. Three cinemas opened. The Locarno ballroom drew young dancers from across south London, and Streatham Ice Rink became one of the great venues of the interwar dec...

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Image: Reading Tom from Reading, UK | CC BY 2.0

Streatham: Decline and Repair

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Matt Brown from London, England, CC BY 2.0. By the 1980s the high road had declined. Through-traffic on the A23 strangled the shops; out-of-town shopping centres pulled away the customers; the closure in 1990 of Pratts, the John Lewis department store, coincided with the opening of a Sainsbury's superstore half a mile sout...

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Image: Matt Brown from London, England | CC BY 2.0

Streatham: 2 February 2020

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Noel Foster, CC BY-SA 2.0. On the afternoon of Sunday 2 February 2020, two people were walking along Streatham High Road when a young man named Sudesh Amman attacked them with a knife. Amman was 20, recently released from prison after serving half of a sentence for terrorism offences, and under armed polic...

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Image: Noel Foster | CC BY-SA 2.0

Streatham: Common Ground

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Philip Talmage, CC BY-SA 2.0. Streatham Common remains the heart of the district, sixty-six acres of grass and woodland sloping up from the high road to the Rookery garden at the top of the hill. The lower half is mown grass for kicking footballs and walking dogs; the upper half is the local nature reserve, w...

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Image: Philip Talmage | CC BY-SA 2.0