Battersea

Duelling ground, then a park built out of the Surrey Docks, with the dogs' home still in it.

Before 1846 this was Battersea Fields, open marshy ground with a reputation: it was where Londoners came to settle matters of honour, and the most famous of those was the Duke of Wellington meeting the Earl of Winchilsea here in 1829, neither of them hitting the other. An Act of that decade turned the fields into a park. James Pennethorne, who had already laid out Regent's Park, drew the plans, and the ground was raised with 750,000 tons of spoil dug out of the Surrey Docks across the river - so the lawns people walk on are the docks turned inside out. The boating lake, the subtropical garden and the riverside walk all date from that work. Mary Tealby's home for lost and starving dogs moved here from Holloway in 1871, after the neighbours complained about the noise, and has been on Battersea Park Road ever since. South of the park the streets fill in around Clapham Junction, which handles more trains than any other station in Britain, and the old town hall on Lavender Hill has been an arts centre since the 1970s. East of the park, Giles Gilbert Scott's power station went up in two halves, 1929-35 and 1944-55, burned coal until 1983 and then stood empty and roofless for thirty years. It opened again in 2022 as shops and flats, with a lift that runs up the inside of one of the four chimneys.

Photo by Gordon Joly, CC BY 2.5, via Wikimedia Commons