Clapham Junction is several neighbourhoods with one station. Wandsworth's Clapham Junction conservation area takes its character from the Victorian and Edwardian terraces of shops on St John's Road, St John's Hill and Lavender Hill, mostly three to four storeys on narrow plots and predominantly of red brick.
East of the station, the Shaftesbury Park Estate was built by the Artisans, Labourers and General Dwellings Company and completed between 1873 and 1877: about 1,200 mainly two-storey terraced houses in wide tree-lined streets, with Gothic porches, canopies and door arches, most of them now managed by the Peabody Trust.
St John's Hill Grove holds early to late Victorian villas, terraces, shops, a church and a school in stock brick, stucco and slate, and south of the town centre the Bolingbroke Grove part of the Wandsworth Common conservation area is a grid of Victorian terraces that open on to the common, with larger houses at the end of each block.
The controls differ with them. Shaftesbury Park has had an Article 4 direction covering all its houses since 14 February 1990, reaching extensions, windows, doors, roofs and painted brick, and the appraisals point out that maisonettes, flat blocks and converted houses have no permitted development rights at all.
Several of the town centre's buildings are listed, the former Arding & Hobbs department store among them, so a flat in a listed building needs listed building consent wherever the work would affect its special interest, as well as the landlord's permission where the lease requires it.
Gardens matter here. Shaftesbury Park's continuous low, capped brick garden walls originally carried cast iron railings, and St John's Hill Grove's appraisal calls front and back gardens extremely important and says the council will resist development on them.
Some shop flats are older than the shops beneath them: the appraisal records that nos. 18–22 St John's Road are early nineteenth-century houses whose shopfronts were built out as single-storey projections in their front gardens.
Shaftesbury Park has its own landmarks: two opposing terraces in Elsley Road are listed Grade II, and on the east side of Grayshott Road larger houses of two storeys with basements and entrance steps keep some of their original railings.
The common's edge is a separate story again: Bolingbroke Grove's streets were built over a relatively short time as the common lands were enclosed, so their Victorian terraces share a cohesion of style that runs from street to street.
Wandsworth Common shapes the streets beside it. In Bolingbroke Grove the roads run on a north-south and east-west grid towards the common, and the appraisal notes that they were built over a relatively short time as the common lands were enclosed, which gives the terraces their cohesion.
Sources: Wandsworth: Clapham Junction conservation area appraisal and management strategy; Wandsworth: Shaftesbury Park Estate conservation area appraisal and management strategy; Wandsworth: St John's Hill Grove conservation area appraisal and management strategy; Wandsworth: Wandsworth Common conservation area appraisal, sub area J: Bolingbroke Grove; GOV.UK - Leasehold property.
