As the summer solstice rolls round (tonight, 9.50pm) I've been to London's sole summery suburb.
Summerstown is a semi-indeterminate neighbourhood straddling the boundaries of Wandsworth and Merton on the eastern banks of the Wandle. If you know Garratt Lane it's quite a long way down, about halfway between Earlsfield and Tooting. Nobody's quite sure how Summerstown got its name, but a reasonable assumption would be that the river tended to flood in the winter so early residents were seasonal. In Tudor times the only house in the area was called The Garratt, this giving its name to the lane and also to the hamlet of 50 houses that followed in the 18th century. Today the area is mixed-use residential-industrial and the Summerstown identity is somewhat muted, but the name must exist because Wandsworth put it on their boundary signs.
The area's infamy peaked in the 18th century when landowners tried to encroach on Tooting Common and locals rallied to stop them by forming a protest group. The annual election of a leader became somewhat of a beanfeast, attracting increasingly flamboyant candidates and an equally boisterous electorate for whom the event was more important than the outcome. Local pubs jumped on the bandwagon and soon London's lower classes were trooping out to Garratt Lane every May for a bawdy day out.
"On several occasions a hundred thousand persons, half of them in carts, in hackney-coaches, and on horse and ass-back, covered the various roads from London, and choked up all the approaches to the place of election. At the two last elections I was told that the road within a mile of Wandsworth was so blocked up by vehicles that none could move backward or forward during many hours, and that the candidates, dressed like chimney-sweepers on a May-day, or in the mock fashion of the period, were brought to the hustings in the carriages of peers drawn by six horses!"
The Garratt Elections ceased in 1797 when the incumbent suffocated after excessive drinking and the beer money stopped flowing. A few of the pubs from those days survive, the closest being the Leather Bottle, although it's maybe a tad too far north to be in Summerstown proper. Professional buffoons, of course, continue to stand for election and sometimes find themselves swept to power.
The most-indisputable part of Summerstown is a short road called Summerstown which bears off Garratt Lane near the Esso garage and curls down to Plough Lane. Only two of the cottages that once lined it remain, the other throwback being a 200 year-old pub called The Corner Pin which thinks it offers The Best Steak Roll This Side of London. The eastern side was replaced by Scandi-style prefabs after the war - the Sun Cottages - and is now covered by a stripe of metal units shielding minor businesses like car repairs, flooring merchants and a taproom. The western side meanwhile is a wall of flats, recent brick-faced boxes erected as part of the deal that enabled the construction of Wimbledon FC's new stadium. Very little about Summerstown is especially attractive.
But the street had one world famous resident, the teenage Mark Feld whose family moved here from Stoke Newington in 1961. They lived in one of the Sun Cottage prefabs where Mark shared a small bedroom with his brother, read a lot and stashed his growing wardrobe of Mod clothes. He also had a guitar which he used when busking outside the Prince of Wales pub, before forming a school band, performing at wedding receptions and eventually signing to Decca Records. In 1965 he changed his name to Marc Bolan and the rest was musical history, peaking at the start of the 70s with T. Rex's slew of groundbreaking glam rock hits. They couldn't put Marc's blue plaque on a defunct prefab so instead they stuck it on the side of the Prince of Wales, now a Tesco Express, along with dates that remind passers-by of his shockingly premature death.
You'll struggle to find the Summerstown name elsewhere except on the front of two churches. The Baptist hall is a repurposed Victorian mission while St Mary's is the Edwardian replacement for a parish church which proved too small as the neighbouring streets expanded. Today these smart terraces sell for comfortably over three quarters of a million, such is the cachet of SW17, whereas the flats erected on Hazelhurst Road after the V2 hit go for rather less. The most prestigious addresses hereabouts are probably 1848's St Clements Danes almshouses which form a quaint half-quadrangle facing Garratt Lane, although you have to be willing to cope with just one bedroom if you take one of those.
And then there's the industrial estate, a substantial clump of metal sheds and reversing lorries located on the floodplain closer to the river. You'll know it if you've walked the Wandle Trail and wondered when the wall of substations, grey windows and council gritting lorries will ever end. Wimbledon FC's new stadium looks very similar, just much much bigger, a chunky corrugated fortress designed to reveal nothing of the pitch within. I walked along its blandest flank to the Womble bench on Plough Lane only to find it was occupied by someone eating their lunch. Also I found out where The Plough pub (which the lane was named after) used to be, and its footprint is now occupied by a very modern Starbucks/Greggs combo.
There is, I'd say, very little reason to come to Summerstown unless it's for the football, and even that's just over the Merton side of the boundary so doesn't technically count. Best celebrate the solstice elsewhere, because it's all downhill from here.
