Deptford New Town: A 19th century working class estate

Development 1810 - 1840

The earliest developments, in the period before 1810, were random and haphazard. There were three: a terrace of 10 small houses on the present Albyn Road, the terrace on the south end of the east side of Friendly Street and a group of six large semi-detached houses on Lewisham Way.

The terrace on Albyn Road, which was built in 1795, was called Ormead Row and stood on the south side of the road at the junction with Friendly Street. It is now demolished and their site is part of Friendly Gardens. So the oldest surviving terrace is the one on Friendly Street, which dates from 1806.

The development on Lewisham Way was of a quite different order. It too dates from 1806 and was originally called Brunswick Place. It was three pairs of semi-detached houses with long sloping roofs. They were unsympathetically modified in the 1880s by the addition of red brick shop fronts that utterly destroy their character and obscure them.

The first phase in the systematic development of New Town was in 1805 - 1815 when northern and western portions were rapidly built. By 1815 many roads, such as King Street (now Harton Street), Nile Street (now Vanguard Street) and Spring and Summer Streets off Tanner’s Hill, all to the north and east of Albyn Road and Friendly Street were built. In the 1840s streets of smaller houses were built along and near the southern end of Tanner’s Hill.