Totally off subject - London districts question.

Devon is a county of England of which Exeter (I think) is the county town and it's about 195 miles from London to Exeter. Surrey is a county of England which has changed shape and size significantly since 1871. Lambeth used to be in Surrey but is now a suburb of London (and very close to the centre of London given the current size of London although south of "the river". Vauxhall is adjacent to Lambeth (some would argue it's in Lambeth) and Battersea is only a mile or two west. There may well be (or have been) a Church Row in that vicinity. Off hand I can't think of a link between Devon and the other places.

Chiswick is about 10 miles west of London and is considered a suburb of London these days. It is north of the river although the river tends to a north/south heading at that point! When I was growing up in the borough of Brentford and Chiswick Brentford was in the county of Middlesex (completely gone now for local government purposes) and Chiswick was in the London Postal area. I never really understood that.

Battersea is in the London borough of Wandsworth, on the border with the borough of Lambeth. Vauxhall is in the borough of Lambeth, on the border with Wandsworth. Neither Battersea nor Vauxhall have any "official" existence aside from in the names of local council wards which no-one knows or cares about, so the precise location of the border and where people say they are is somewhat fuzzy. Both Wandsworth and Lambeth used to be part of the county of Surrey. So the confusion there is entirely reasonable.

The only Church Row I can find in London is nowhere near there, but it's conceivable that it got knocked down and had something else built over it (there was a *lot* of development in that area in the 19th and early

20th centuries, much of it railway-related to get us back on topic), or I'm just failing at looking it up.

There is no Battersea in Devon that I can find.

Chiswick is an area of west London, although back then it may have been a village on the outskirts of London. The City of London is the very small part of London which made up the core of the Medieval city. The Battersea/Vauxhall area is t'other side of the river from them both, somewhat closer to the City than to Chiswick.

Hie ye to maps.google.co.uk and ask it for a route from one place to another, to get an idea of how far apart they are. For more detailed maps, use streetmap.co.uk. Some older maps (but only back to the

1940s/50s) can be found at npemap.org.uk. No idea where you can easily find older maps.

Are you referring to Church Row, NW3?

What about Church Row, Wandsworth Plain? see

but

Thanks to you, Graham and Jane for your responses! I live rurally in NZ where internet service is only just faster than snail-mail so googling something I don't know about can waste hours (3-4 minutes per screen on a good day) My Atlas is of course NZ-centric so London is just a blob on the map of GB :-(

Regards, Greg.P.

Try this for Church Row in 1814 More Kennington than Vauxhall but they are very close together.

Laurie

You may well be right. There's an earlier version of the same map at

which has a slightly different selection of street names. On both the general area where Church R is seen is called Newington Butts which these days is the name of the road where Church R is on the old maps Linking Walworth and Newington is try a search for "Walworth Parish" for more.

You could do worse than the imaginatively named

:-)

Thanks for sharing that link, it's very interesting to see how my town has grown. Even looking at the 1938 map, half of it is missing.