Thurlestone Road is one of a number of local roads whose names were approved in 1880 when a substantial area of land to the west of Knights Hill, branded as ‘St Julian’s Park Estate’, was laid out and sold as building plots for development by their purchasers. More about the background to this process can be seen in the street history of Casewick Road.  https://norwoodstreethistories.org.uk/street/casewick-road/

This 1894-vintage Ordnance Survey map shows Thurlestone Road as it was before residential development was fully completed.

 

• 1880 – Thurlestone Road approved as the street name.
• 5 July 1881 – Auction at the Norwood Hotel (now Great North Wood) offered for sale 80 plots of building land with frontages to Thurlestone and Wolfington Roads. The terms allowed payment to be made by instalments spread over nine years with 5% interest on the balance. [South London Press, 11 June 1881]
• 26 November 1885 – Auction at the Norwood Hotel offered the houses that are now known as 45, 47, 48 & 50 Thurlestone Road held on lease with 96 years unexpired at a ground rent of £7 per annum each. [South London Press, 21 November 1885]
• December 1886 – Lambeth Vestry received a report about the extent to which the roads on the ‘St Julian’s Estate’ had been developed. 1,133 feet of the frontage of Thurlestone Road had not been built and 1,100 feet had been built. It agreed to pave the parts of the roads where the most buildings had been erected including all of Thurlestone Road. This was then done at the owners’ expense.
• 30 April 1890 – Auction at The Mart, Tokenhouse Yard offered the freehold houses now known as 15, 21, 23, 29 Thurlestone Road “all let to good tenants, producing £112 per annum”. [South London Press, 19 April 1890]

Thurlestone Road was developed over a considerable number of years and there appears never to have been a strategic plan for the design or appearance of the houses. The earliest ones tended to be on the western side (which now has the odd postal numbers) with commanding, if temporary, views from their fronts. Construction took place in a piecemeal fashion and the street was not paved until about 1887, so the locality must have been quite shabby initially with many vacant overgrown portions of land. The available evidence for the earliest reference to each individual house is set out below

 

The buildings in Thurlestone Road are generally unremarkable; none appear on the National Heritage List for England. Most houses only have 20-foot frontages and were originally built as pairs of semi-detached dwellings. Because of the modest width of each frontage, the layouts tended to be similar with front and middle rooms extending across much of the plot, a narrower back addition and also upper floors that provide a further one or two levels of accommodation above all the ground floor rooms.

A minority of houses have been converted into two or three self-contained flats.

The front gardens are very shallow, so none are used for parking vehicles.

Alterations made to original houses, particularly since about 2000, have included wrap-around extensions to back additions, the amalgamation of other ground floor rooms and/or the conversion of loft space into habitable rooms.

The five houses now standing at the north end of the road were built around 1960, the two of these on the east (even numbered) side of the road being part of a self-build development that extends round into Canterbury Grove.

 

Census returns indicate that initially, almost all the houses were each occupied by a single household, albeit sometimes accompanied by one or more lodgers or boarders. In 1891 and 1901, many households included at least one live-in servant but that proportion had shrunk considerably by 1911 and only three resident servants were to be found in the whole road in 1921. This change reflects the wider availability of jobs other than domestic service becoming open to women, not only as a result of labour shortages caused by the Great War but (at least in London) prior to 1914.

For reasons that are not clear, over 13% of the houses were vacant at the time of the 1911 census.

In contrast, the 1921 enumeration shows every house but one in the road as at least partly inhabited, in many cases by more than a single household (21 houses each had two households and one accommodated three).

Census

Census date	Inhabited houses (+ unoccupied)	Being built	Households	Total Residents	Servants
6 April 1891	55 (+3)	5	55	284	36
31 March 1901	81 (+5)	0	85	385	46
2 April 1911	75 (+12) (*)	0	81	308	15
19 June 1921	86 (+1)	0	110	388	3

(*) Only two rooms in number 85 were occupied in 1911 and it appears that numbers 56, 58 and 62 were probably also only partly occupied on that occasion.