I discovered Roupell Street, as I imagine many people do, entirely by accident. Walking to the station from a pub trip with a friend, I had a bit of time to kill and took a different route.
Stepping into Roupell Street and the surrounding conservation area felt like going through a time warp, and it wasn’t because of the IPA I’d been drinking.
Neat, compact rows of Georgian worker cottages, totally out of step with the newer developments all around them in that stretch of South London. I took a few photos, and resolved to do research the next day.
The story it unearthed was wilder than anything my beer-hazed mind could have predicted.
This blog is part of my Building of the Week series, where I explore a different story each week.
Origins: the Lambeth Marshland
For many centuries, London North of the Thames exploded, while South of the river simply had to sit and watch.
This was for a simple reason – bridges. London Bridge was the only crossing east of Kingston upon Thames. And the City of London Corporation, who owned it, had no interest in changing that. Nor did the watermen, who made their living rowing people back and forth over the Thames.
Attempts to build new bridges were blocked and blocked again, and so the only part of London that developed south of the river was Southwark.
The rest of South London, including much of Lambeth and the area around Waterloo, stayed as nothing more than marshland.
That finally changed with Westminster Bridge in 1750, followed by Blackfriars Bridge (1769) and Waterloo Bridge (1817). Suddenly, much more of South London was in quick reach of the developed London on the north of the Thames. Developers swooped in.
Lambeth, particularly the area around Waterloo, was still one of the last places to be developed. Partly that was the marshland itself. But it was also because the area had become a destination in its own right: a stretch of countryside within easy reach of London, close to the famous Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens, and something of a fun day out.
Activities and entertainment were held in the fields, including, most notably, Philip Astley, founder of the modern circus, who staged some of his earliest performances on what would become Roupell Street.
The Marsh gets bought… and nothing happens
What would become the gorgeous Roupell Street and surrounding area started proper in 1792, when a new owner stepped in: John Roupell, a Londoner who’d made his money in metal.
Coming from a family that had come over from Germany, in the guard of William of Orange in the Glorious Revolution, he was an ambitious, hardworking and frugal man – wealthy, but not overly so.
Things began to change for him in 1781, when he married a woman named Catherine Brand. After her wealthy aunt died a decade later, she inherited her estate.
Just a year later they were able to purchase seven acres of land in the Lambeth Marsh area, setting them back £8,000.
It would take a long time for that land to become Roupell Street, though. John built industry on it instead, including a lead works so noxious that in 1819 he was hauled before a magistrate.
Most of the area stayed as it had always been. Marshland.
As the decades passed, more industry was moving to the area, and those workers needed housing. So eventually, in 1824, the streets were finally laid out.
John Roupell named them after himself and his family: John Street, Catherine Street (after his wife), and Richard Street (after his son).
But this didn’t last long. London already had streets going by those names, so all three were renamed within a few decades: John Street became Roupell Street, the only one to keep the family name. The other two became Theed Street and Whittlesey Street.
The houses themselves
Most old buildings in central London are a lot grander than Roupell Street, and that’s part of what makes it so special. It’s a rare piece of working-class architecture: a few streets of two-storey Georgian workers’ cottages, laid on cobbled streets.
The fact they were working-class cottages is reflected in their simple design. Small, packed in together, people would have lived in close quarters, up to 20 in each cottage.
Conditions weren’t luxury, but these weren’t slums either, this would have been home to people like artisans, carpenters, bakers and the like.
Remarkably, we also know that the wealthy John Roupell, who owned the entire area, also lived on the street himself. When he died, his registered address was Roupell Street, the very street he’d named after his own family.
Despite his wealth, he was a frugal man, one who didn’t like to spend money unnecessarily.
This all the more remarkable given what his family name would become best known for, just a few decades later.
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The scandal
To understand the wild story associated with Roupell Street, we first need a bit of family history. We already know – thanks to the street briefly named after him – that John and Catherine had a son named Richard.
As a young man, Richard fell in love with one Sarah Crane – the daughter of a carpenter, far below the Roupells burgeoning social status.
He knew that if his dad ever found out, there’d be hell to pay. Perhaps he’d even be locked out of the family fortune. So Richard and Sarah kept their relationship secret.
But this wasn’t just a case of a rich boy hiding a fling from his parents. They were together for years, and had four children together. John Roupell had four illegitimate grandchildren, and died in 1835 never knowing.
At this point, Richard and Sarah were still very much in love. With his disapproving father out of the way, they quickly married, and went on to have a fifth child – Richard Jr.
This created an unusual dynamic. Five children with the same parents but only one – the youngest – was legitimate, and therefore the heir to the family fortune.
One of those illegitimate children, William, was especially entwined with the business, helping to develop land like the Roupell Park estate, around Streatham Hill (now the Roupell Park housing estate). Over time, though, he began to grow resentful.
It was him, for many years, who’d supported his father to grow the business. Richard Jr was just a child, and yet he was set to inherit everything. And despite his work, his father gave him a measly allowance, just £1 a week.
On top of this, though his grandfather John had been known for his frugality, William was anything but. He spent more money than he had on trying to establish himself in fashionable society, quickly racking up debt.
So he set about taking what he thought was rightfully his.
Things get a bit out of hand
William started while his father was still alive. The method was simple: forge some paperwork, claiming that a piece of land had been legally handed to him. Use the fraudulent paperwork to mortgage plots of land to genuine buyers or lenders.
Overtime it built up. He took around £100,000 in this way – an astonishing amount in today’s money – and his family had no idea.
And when his father died, things escalated. William somehow gained access to the will, which favoured his younger brother Richard Jr. He destroyed it, and replaced it with a forged one naming his mother as heir. He used this to siphon off the money for himself.
Astonishingly, while he was doing all of this, and while deeply indebted, William managed to get elected to parliament, emphasising his connection to the working classes through his involvement in schemes like Roupell Street. Although even this victory, some claimed, was due to bribery.
Truth be told, he didn’t seem to take much interest in his role as an MP. A quick search on Hansard shows he only spoke up a dozen or so times over five years in parliament, once in relation to one of his own properties. Perhaps he liked the clout of being a politician, but found his forgeries a more lucrative path.
It all falls apart for William
Eventually, as it was always going to, William’s rather audacious scam caught up with him. Even with all that money, William was in debt. He burned through the cash quicker than he could defraud it, gambling and living in total extravagance. By 1862, once again, he was in debt.
Worse than this though, his younger brother Richard Jr was no longer a child. He was 21 now, and he’d started to notice something was amiss.
There was talk of starting legal proceedings. Those who’d bought land in good faith from William were beginning to find out property they’d paid for in good faith wasn’t truly theirs.
The walls were closing in. So William destroyed what papers he could, and fled to Spain. At this, his glittering parliamentary career was over.
Back in the UK, the first case was taking shape. Richard Jr was preparing to sue a Mr Waite, who’d bought a property in Norbiton from William in good faith. It was the opening shot in a long, complicated fight to claw back land that had been sold to genuine buyers by a fraudulent seller.
For some reason, William comes back
At this time, the UK had no extradition treaty with Spain. William could have lived out his days on the Costa del Sol, a free man.
For some reason, this didn’t happen. He would later claim to have ‘been awakened to the enormity of my sin’, though there are also possibilities of blackmail.
Either way, William came back. He was tried at the Old Bailey, where he admitted to everything. There was talk of penal transportation to Gibraltar – a nice crossover to last week’s post – but instead he spent several years in Portland Prison in Dorset.
Perhaps the most devastating irony of William’s life turns up in the published report of the trial. In his testimony, William admitted that if he’d simply let his father’s real will stand, he wouldn’t have been left with nothing at all.
While Richard Jr was set to inherit the majority of the properties, William himself would have been given Roupell Street, land whose value was only climbing with the arrival of the railway.
There could have been a happy ending for everyone.
But instead, Richard Jr spent the rest of his life trying to win back his properties, ultimately settling most out of court for far less than they’d originally been worth. He died aged just 42, and left William an annuity of £1 a week – exactly the amount that had led to resentment all those years ago.
After his release, there was a redemption arc of sorts for William. He lived with his mother and sister in the family house in Streatham, but outlived everyone. He became deeply involved in the local community, a regular churchgoer and even a co-founder of the Streatham and Brixton Horticultural Society.
He died in poverty, but seemingly spent his last years as a humble, honourable and deeply popular man. He was buried in West Norwood Cemetery in the family vault, along with the family he defrauded, the last of the Roupells. Hundreds came to pay their respect.
The name lives on in one of London’s most remarkable streets
The family name might have ended with William, but it lives on in the streets John Roupell, and later his son Richard, laid out.
More than 200 years on, they remain a time capsule: Lambeth Council itself describes the area as “a historic enclave in a district which has otherwise experienced large scale redevelopment,” hemmed in on all sides by the modern city, that giant IMAX on the roundabout, the Southbank complex, and Waterloo station.
Somehow it survived all of these things, and the Blitz. Now, you’ll see the streets popping up on TV every now and again – they’ve featured in Doctor Who, the Kray twins biopic Legend, and even gave Peggy Mitchell her final scene in EastEnders, to name just a few.
So next time you’re in Waterloo, take a detour. Step back in time and admire the remarkable survival of those Georgian cottages in the centre of London, and ponder the tragedy of the Roupell family who gave it to us.
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