OUR STORY
Earlsfield (formerly Garratt Green) – is an inner south-London suburb in the London Borough of Wandsworth. It is dissected by the River Wandle, a tributary of the River Thames. In past times the area was open farmland with no settlements other than the hamlet of Garratt Green, home to a large water mill. Garratt Lane, running parallel with the Wandle for some distance, is the main thoroughfare of Earlsfield; its name keeps alive a memory of former times.
With the coming of the railways in the 1880s the construction of a railway station required the purchase and demolition of a large house called Earlsfield. One of the conditions of its sale was that the station should be named after the house, and so the area has been known ever since.
Earlsfield Station
The Garratt election of 1761, from a drawing by Valentine Green (1739–1813)
From the mid eighteenth century until the 1820s Garratt Green was widely known for the rumbustious carnival atmosphere that accompanied the election of a ‘mayor’ to oversee the management of the common land. These elections were timed to coincide with national elections, but outgrew their original purpose to become something of rallying point for the un-enfranchised classes to have a day out and mock the political system that denied them a vote. Reports talk of tens of thousands attending.
The scene of the election was the Leather Bottle pub, which still stands on Garratt Lane. The elections were immortalised in a popular drama called ‘The Mayor of Garratt’ (1763), written by the actor-dramatist and impresario Samuel Foote (1720-77) who had witnessed the 1761 election.
The church of St John the Divine on Garratt Lane was established in 1903 as the Bendon Valley Mission Church, a mission church of St Andrew’s, Garratt Lane.
Bendon Valley Mission Church, Earlsfield, c.1915
Unbuilt design (1920) for St John the Divine Earlsfield
In the 1920s plans were drawn up to replace the mission building with something altogether more grand, designed by F H. Greenaway and J.E. Newberry, and dedicated to St John the Divine, ‘on a corner site at the junction of Garratt Lane and Bendon Valley’ (The Building News, 29 October 1920), but these plans were never carried out.
Instead we have the modest but attractive building that dates from 1925 by the architect Arthur Young (1853-1924), supervised after his death by his business partner Allan Douglas Reid, (1898-1977).
St John the Divine, Earlsfield, the west end, c.2015
The font and organ