Early history The present day Clapham High Street is on the route of a
Roman road. The road is recorded on a Roman monumental stone found nearby. According to its inscription, the stone was erected by a man named Vitus Ticinius Ascanius. It is estimated to date from the 1st century AD. (The stone was discovered during building works at Clapham Common South Side in 1912. It is now placed by the entrance of the former Clapham Library, in the Old Town.) According to the history of the Clapham family, maintained by the
College of Heralds, in 965 King
Edgar of England gave a grant of land at Clapham to Jonas, son of the Duke of Lorraine, and Jonas was thenceforth known as Jonas "de [of] Clapham". The family remained in possession of the land until Jonas's great-great grandson Arthur sided against
William the Conqueror during the
Norman Conquest of 1066 and, losing the land, fled to the north (where the Clapham family remained thereafter, primarily in
Yorkshire). Clapham's name derives from
Old English, meaning 'homestead or enclosure near a hill', with the first recorded usage being
Cloppaham circa 880. Clapham appears in
Domesday Book as
Clopeham. It was held by Goisfrid (Geoffrey) de Mandeville, and its domesday assets were three
hides, six
ploughs, and of
meadow. It rendered £7 10s 0d, and was located in
Brixton hundred. The parish comprised . The benefice remains to this day a rectory, and in the 19th century was in the patronage of the
Atkins family: the tithes were commuted for £488 14s. in the early 19th century, and so the remaining
glebe comprised only as of 1848. The church, on the site of the current
St Paul's and belonging to
Merton Priory was, with the exception of the north aisle which was left standing for the performance of burials, taken down under an act of parliament in 1774. A new church,
Holy Trinity, was erected in the following year at an expense of £11,000 (), on the north side of the common.
Clapham in the 17th–19th centuries In the late 17th century, large
country houses began to be built there, and throughout the 18th and early 19th century it was favoured by the wealthier merchant classes of the
City of London, who built many large and gracious houses and villas around
Clapham Common and in the Old Town.
Samuel Pepys spent the last two years of his life in Clapham, living with his friend, protected at the Admiralty and former servant
William Hewer, until his death in 1703. Clapham was also home to
Elizabeth Cook, the widow of
Captain James Cook the explorer. She lived in a house at 136 Clapham High Street for many years following the death of her husband. Other notable residents of Clapham Common include
Palace of Westminster architect
Sir Charles Barry, Norwegian composer
Edvard Grieg and 20th century novelist
Graham Greene.
John Francis Bentley, architect of
Westminster Cathedral, lived in the adjacent Old Town. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the
Clapham Sect were a group of wealthy City merchants (mostly
evangelical Anglican) social
reformers who lived around the Common. They included
William Wilberforce,
Henry Thornton and
Zachary Macaulay, father of the historian
Thomas Macaulay, as well as
William Smith Member of Parliament (MP), the
Dissenter and
Unitarian. They were very prominent in campaigns for the
abolition of
slavery and
child labour, and for
prison reform. They also promoted
missionary activities in
Britain's colonies. The Society for Missions to Africa and the East (as the
Church Mission Society was first called) was founded on 12 April 1799 at a meeting of the
Eclectic Society, supported by members of the Clapham Sect, who met under the guidance of
John Venn, the Rector of Clapham. By contrast, an opponent of Wilberforce, merchant and slave-trader
George Hibbert also lived at Clapham Common, worshipping in the same church, Holy Trinity. In 1848, Clapham was described in the
Topographical Dictionary of England as a village which "has for many years, been one of the most respectable in the environs of the
metropolis".
Local government Clapham was an
ancient parish in the county of Surrey. For
poor law purposes the parish became part of the Wandsworth and Clapham Union in 1836. The parish was added to the
Registrar General London Metropolis area in 1844 and consequently it came within the area of responsibility of the
Metropolitan Board of Works in 1855. The population of 16,290 in 1851 was considered too small for the Clapham vestry to be a viable sanitary authority and the parish was grouped into the
Wandsworth District, electing 18 members to the Wandsworth District Board of Works. In 1889 the parish was transferred to the
County of London and in 1900 it became part of the new
Metropolitan Borough of Wandsworth. It was abolished as a civil parish in 1904, becoming part of the single Wandsworth Borough parish for poor law. The former Metropolitan Borough of Wandsworth was divided in 1965 and the area of the historic parish of Clapham was transferred to the
London Borough of Lambeth, along with
Streatham. Clapham
gave its name to a Parliamentary constituency between 1885 and 1974. Between 1974 and 2024 Clapham was divided between the constituencies of
Streatham and
Vauxhall. From the
2024 General Election Clapham's wards are reunited in the new constituency of
Clapham & Brixton. ==Geography==