Tooting residents. According to my 80 year old neighbour, when she was young this area used to be all grass and she and her friends would sit here gossiping and watching the world go by..

by ThorsBodyDouble

37 comments

  4. I dunno, I was there in the 80s and it was a side road leading to the market. Woolworths and M&S ring a bell

  8. Looking at some old maps with this site:

    https://www.oldmapsonline.org/

    At that location, on the 1865 map it looks like you’d be looking at grass / a country lane, beyond the buildings next to the main road. But by 1913 it was all built up just as much as it is now.

  10. oddly, she might be talking about the fact London was bombed to buggery & there were a helluva lot of derelict sites…I’m mean rolling green fields is a stretch, but she might be referring to a bombsite.

  12. Wow – people are mean. My guess is that she is slightly misremembering the area a bit further up by St Nicholas’ which looks like it was not paved till later. 

  13. Depends how old granny is. It was definitely all grass at some point.

  15. Not so hard to imagine that the *entire* area of Tooting wasn’t completely paved over, built up and bustling in her youth. Likely there were still quiet, suburb-like streets and some green areas.

  16. It use to take ages for the bus to drive across all that grass too. Sometimes you’d have to get out and push to make it up the hill.

  18. Can’t speak for the location it’s taken from but those houses at the end are at earliest, late 1920s and at latest, 1948.

  19. I think Granny was a resident at the mental asylum where the Heritage Park estate by Tooting Common is now.

  21. The Primark was constructed in the late 1960s (there or there abouts). The previous building on the site was the Wesleyan Methodist Central Hall, built in 1910 and demolished in 1967. It looks like the road has been there for a good amount of years, at least when Hall was still standing.

    The statue outside Tooting Broadway used to be on an island in the middle of the road surrounded by flowerbeds, the lamppost and public toilets (not sure what they are?) – perhaps she sat there once if it was grass? Or on the site of a building that was cleared for reconstruction or demolished as a result of war damage?

  22. Seeing my old hometown on here makes me nostalgic. Certainly has always been urban

  24. There used to be a bowling green behind the houses up on the right there. Probably the closest you are going to get to “all grass”.

  25. Now apparently it’s inhabited by the living dead.

  27. Perhaps it was a bomb site with grass growing on it from WW2 when she was a girl.

  30. Now it’s full of buses that don’t switch their engines off even if there’s a no idling sign right next to them. So much for ULEZ

  31. In the early 80s I worked with an old guy in his 70s who said he recalled watching cows in the fields of Tooting on the train into town.

    I suppose that must’ve been 1920s or 30s

  32. She can’t remember what she’s remembering. Dementia, may be!?

  33. She is probably mixing it up with Tooting Bec, iirc up that road on the left some distance? Or going right off picture towards the Wandle Valley at Colliers Wood?

    If she is 80 now then she’d been a girl in the 1950s so I doubt she is remembering the city limits. These days you’d need to go all the way to Selsden beyond Croydon and Purley and right up near the M25!

    There is a large cemetery in the opposite direction and beyond Wandsworth Common, and no idea if allotments might feature in her memory…

    When you are a kid, a big park or big allotment maybe Tooting Station Figgs Marsh could have seemed like “it were all fields when I was a little lass, not like it is now!” Starring at Primark!

  37. I think the area down this street where the buses now turn around used to be a grass covered area like a roundabout? But my memory is hazy on this being fact or fiction.

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