The development of Southfields dates from 1889, when the railway came to the area.
The statue of the Victorian horticulturalist Fanny Wilkinson in Coronation Gardens, Southfields © Photographer Neil Robson
Prior to that moment, Southfields was mainly open fields with few inhabitants, though one notable resident was the novelist, George Eliot, who lived on Wimbledon Park Road for a few unhappy months from 1859.
But the railway had an enormous impact, and within twenty years much of the surrounding area was covered with houses. Light industry provided two distinctive buildings still visible today, the eye-catching Frame Food factory in Standen Road in 1904, and the cream-tiled OK Sauce factory on Merton Road in 1928. In October 1926 London’s first mosque was inaugurated in Gressenhall Road.
The intense demand for housing after the Second World War resulted in the construction of large municipal housing schemes in the area surrounding Beaumont Road. Southfields is entirely residential nowadays, with a lively centre of shops and restaurants around Replingham Road.
