‘The particulars of a terrible murder’, wrote a Clapham historian, ‘serve to remind us that our borough has always been remarkably free, comparatively speaking, from crimes of a brutal description. Indeed, in a long record going back over two hundred years, this is the only really startling event which has ever occurred here.’

Thomas Parsons, a member of the Clapham Antiquarian Society whose reminiscences were published in 1929, was referring then to the murder of Mrs. Richards, who had been robbed and beaten to death in her house near the Common in 1823. And from the viewpoint of an antiquarian of the 1920’s Clapham’s past could be looked back on only with comfort, benevolence, and pride. It was thought that Caius Julius Caesar had probably traversed the Common in 54 B.C. before making his crossing of the Thames, particularly if he had used the ford at Batter sea. Almost certainly the Romans had at one time made a road across it, since it lay on the direct line of one of the six roads they were known to have made which converged on London.

By the end of the seventeenth century the Common was a thickly wooded, gorse-covered, and partially boggy morass. In its depths lived foxes and polecats, and the few roads crossing it were usually impassable. But houses were being built round its edges, and the neighbourhood was becoming popular as a residential one for merchants and professional men from the City. Living there at one time were five Governors of the Bank of England and the retired Admiralty official and diarist Samuel Pepys, who died in 1703 at his home on North Side. A stage-coach service was established and ran daily to and from Gracechurch Street. The accessibility which this gave the area increased its popularity with the moneyed classes.

The last highwayman made his last hold-up near the Common in 1801. By then the population of Clapham was almost 4,000 and large houses were standing in wide gardens all round the Common. A Mrs. Fenning kept a school on North Side for young lady boarders: two of them were visited regularly by their brother Percy Bysshe Shelley, who fell in love with one of their fellow-scholars, the sixteen-year-old Harriet Westbrook. He wrote to his friend James Hogg: ‘Harriet is gone to her prison house. She is quite well in health; at least she says so, though she looks very much otherwise. I saw her yesterday with her sister and we walked about Clapham Common together for two hours.’ Six months later Shelley and Harriet eloped.

The Common on which they had walked was a place of great rural beauty, with waving poplars and towering elms and limes. In the middle of it was a drinking fountain, and nearby an acacia tree, with benches to sit on underneath.

By the middle of the nineteenth century the population was just over 8,500. Like so many of the smaller places which once surrounded London, Clapham was being slowly absorbed, as methods of public transport developed and increased, into the metropolis itself. But the Common still remained open land, fresh and refreshing to those who came to it. William Makepeace Thackeray wrote: ‘Of all the pretty suburbs that adorn our capital, there are few that exceed in charm Clapham Common.’

For the local historians looking back from the 1920’s it was a rich, leisured, and a pride-inspiring scene. But modern change irrevocably came quickly. Before the 1914–18 war private developers had built extensively over Wandsworth and its sub-district of Clapham; soon after the end of it the population of Clapham alone had reached 50,000 and the Borough and London County Councils were exercising determined controls to keep building development in their own hands. The population increase was halted: it stood at about 60,000 at the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939, when Clapham was immediately designated an evacuation area. A large part of the Common was requisitioned by the military authorities as an anti-aircraft gun site, and other parts were used as a tip for the soil excavated during the construction of deep air-raid shelters. During the war a total of 42,000 missiles fell in the borough: over 1,300 people were killed and a further 6,000 injured. There was one period of ninety-five consecutive days and nights during which there was at least one air-raid alert every twelve hours.

At the end of the war there was again an enormous demand for housing from a population which had risen two years later to nearly 90,000. The great and almost insuperable problem facing the local authorities was that nearly all available land had long since been built-over. Some attempts to solve it on a short-term basis were made by the rapid erection of temporary prefabricated houses, large numbers of which were built on the Common; and on a more permanent basis by an extensive programme of council housing-estate development and the construction of large new blocks of flats.

The first post-war Clapham Guide, issued in 1948, noted the planning but seemed hardly to comprehend its implications. The Guide was intended, wrote the editor in his foreword, ‘to be a Handbook which will be worthy of a district so rich in historical and residential interest, and to uphold and maintain the glorious traditions of Clapham’. It gave details of the History Circle, of ‘Music in Clapham’, the golf Club, the Camera Club, the Society for the Relief of the homeless Poor, and the local branch of The British Women’s Total Abstinence Union. Among the described ‘Facilities on Clapham Common’ were two cricket pitches, nine football pitches, four netball courts, two bowling greens, six hard tennis courts, an eighteen-hole putting green, and a boating and paddling pool for children.

There was no mention of youth clubs. Of the new human element which post-war housing had already brought, of young people growing up with time on their hands, and nothing to interest them in what to their eyes could only be a very dull area, there was no awareness at all. Yet unknown to most of its long-established residents the old Clapham had gone for ever and would never exist again, except in the desperately fostered nostalgia of its increasingly outnumbered and, it must have seemed to them at times, increasingly beleaguered middle class.

A new class had arisen in importance, and for the first time in its long history of struggle against poverty and privilege it had money. Not the inherited capital of forefathers, and never in very large sums, but a regular income from full employment. Work paid this week’s rent, and this week’s food and clothing; next week the necessities of life would be paid for, and the week after, and all the weeks after that. Parents whose own childhoods had periods of suffering resulting from their fathers’ unemployment began to feel not only that they wanted their children to have a better time than they had had, but that it was within their power to give it to them. And if the children got into mischief occasionally sometimes it meant involvement with the police and sometimes it did not. It was a risk, a hazard of the occupation of childhood only, but not much more.

But to the young themselves, many of whom still lived in dreary ‘buildings’ seriously short of living-space, the financially secure parental background which they accepted as normal, because they had no experience of anything else, provided them only with a home to spend as little time in as possible. Except for the fortunate few who had individual hobbies, the outlets for the cure of spare-time boredom were chiefly limited to the cinema, the dance-hall, and the amusement arcade, where the most important thing in life was to have friends—of one’s own age, who lived in the same secret country of adolescence, and not in the foreign one of adults.

They grouped together in the arcades and dance-halls and cinemas, living their private in-group lives, at times vicariously in the spurious world of films to such an extent that the violence spilled out in the cinemas. Tough ushers had to be employed; some made themselves so unpopular they were attacked in the street.

At the beginning of the 1950’s the young appeared to many to be a new kind of race who were invading the country. There was little sign of any desire either to help or understand them, and the only result of publicity was to convince adolescents that everything they did was important. It separated them even more sharply from adults, from ‘them’.

Employers were reluctant to take on boys who were going to be called up in a year or two; the future for a young man could not begin until after he had done his national service. In the period between school-leaving and call-up he was living in a kind of vacuum in which his only sense of belonging came when he was with his friends.

In such groups the best-liked and most influential were often those who symbolised the group’s attitudes and feelings, who clearly demonstrated their separation from outside values and influences; by coming into open conflict with adult society, by appearing in court and being admonished or punished. Far from deterring them or lessening their influence, it gave them new status; just as to undergraduates in Trafalgar Square on Guy Fawkes’ night it used to be a special mark of distinction to be one of those arrested, so to them being in the hands of the police was a stage in graduation. Actually to have been to borstal or prison was almost the equivalent of having a degree.

Ostracised and feared by many, the young men spurned the many and tried to give them reason to be afraid. They fought, they swaggered, and they wore defiantly the clothes that were their uniform; they struggled amongst themselves and...