Pictures taken in February 2005 by Phil
The house is about a mile from Waterloo Station. Booth's Poverty Map of London (1898) shows that out of seven social groupings, Harleyford Road was in third position as "Fairly comfortable. Good ordinary earnings", with "Middle class, well-to-do" in second place & "Upper-middle and Upper classes. Wealthy", at the top. Tom and Ellen were among several lodgers.
This would have been a busy road to live on - there were shops on the corner and trams on their way to and from the West End. The Oval cricket ground is at one end of the street. Around the corner from no. 19, back-to-back housing had been built over the old Vauxhall Spring Gardens (famous pleasure gardens for a hundred years until the 1860s). Vauxhall railway station is only a few hundred yards away, and two near neighbours worked as ticket collectors. On the other side of the railway is the Thames, which in Tom’s time was lined with docks and industry on the Vauxhall side. The river was busy with barges and small boats. The Royal Doulton Pottery stood on the riverbank (its building is still there although manufacturing has moved). There were glassworks and gasworks and distilleries, and the original Vauxhall Motors company. The Gas Light and Coke Company had one of their big works by Vauxhall Bridge; there was a disastrous explosion there before the First World War.
