Portland Street

Portland Street runs through the heart of Walworth, a few steps from the noise and colour of East Street market. The street is residential, lined predominantly with post-war and early-21st-century social housing, and sits at the edge of what was one of the most ambitious and most troubled housing projects in British history. Until very recently, a concrete footbridge from the Aylesbury Estate crossed directly overhead. It is gone now, demolished around 2020 as the estate comes down block by block — but the street still carries the weight of everything that happened here.

Today Portland Street is rebuilding. New brick terraces are rising where the Aylesbury blocks once stood, and the street’s character is shifting from the shadow of failed modernism towards something older and more intimate. That name — Portland — predates all of it. It was here before the concrete and before the Victorian terraces that the concrete replaced. Where it came from is a question worth asking.

2011

Portland Street, SE17

Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 2.0

2013

140-164 Portland Street

Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 2.0

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Historical image not found

Today

Albany Road, Walworth

Geograph · CC BY-SA 2.0

The name Portland, in this part of south London, almost certainly echoes the Dukes of Portland — the Bentinck family, whose hereditary title became one of the most widely borrowed street names in Georgian and early Victorian London. Portland Place in Marylebone, the most famous example, was named after the Duke of Portland and laid out by the brothers Robert and James Adam in the 1770s. The fashion spread outwards: developers building new streets across London’s expanding fringes regularly reached for aristocratic titles to lend an air of respectability to rows of modest terraced houses. Walworth was being rapidly built up from fields during precisely this period.

The Bentinck family title derives from the Isle of Portland in Dorset — a rugged limestone peninsula whose stone built half of London. The second Earl of Oxford married Lady Henrietta Cavendish Holles, who carried the Portland property into the family; British History Online notes this as the origin of Portland Place and numerous related street names in the neighbourhood. In Walworth, the name appears on mid-19th-century maps, applied to a street that was part of the dense working-class development then covering the old fields east of Walworth Road. No documentary record specifically names the individual who chose the name for this street, so the origin remains probable rather than definitively verified.

Maps of the 1780s depict Walworth as a pleasant country neighbourhood with a few newly-formed roads stretching across the gardens and fields. Portland Street did not yet exist. Walworth was long a rural area producing fruit and vegetables in abundance. The land where the street now stands was part of the agricultural commons and market gardens that fed Georgian London from just beyond the city’s edge. St Peter’s Church in Liverpool Grove was built to a design by Sir John Soane in 1825 to serve the rapidly growing community; over the course of the 19th century, Walworth’s population increased eightfold, reaching 122,200 in 1901.

After World War II the area underwent a radical transformation. Many Victorian homes were replaced with very large housing estates in modernist style, such as the Brandon, the Heygate and, biggest of all, the Aylesbury. Portland Street lost its Victorian terraced frontage entirely. For decades it existed primarily as a boundary — the northern edge of one of the largest post-war estates in Europe — rather than a street in its own right. The history documented by British History Online through the Survey of London volumes charts this trajectory across Walworth’s parishes: from productive rural land to dense Victorian working-class housing to post-war concrete, each phase erasing the last.

After many setbacks and delays, the Notting Hill Genesis housing association was appointed as the council’s development partner in 2014 and construction of new homes under this partnership began in 2018. The estate’s entire regeneration project is expected to finish in 2036, by which time 4,200 new homes will have been built. Portland Street sits within this regeneration arc — its eastern side is already flanked by new brick-built homes where the Aylesbury blocks once cast their shadow.

East Street Market — known locally as “the Lane” — is Portland Street’s immediate neighbour and has been trading continuously since the 19th century. It is one of the last surviving open-air street markets in inner south London. Portland Street residents have shopped there for five generations; the market’s presence shaped the street’s working-class character as powerfully as any housing development. The footfall from the Lane gave Portland Street its purpose long before the Aylesbury Estate arrived.

The wider Walworth neighbourhood carries a rich cultural weight. The district of Walworth features in Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations, where Mr Wemmick resides here. Dickens also mentioned Walworth in “Sketches by Boz, The Black Veil”. Archaeology in the area — documented by MOLA (Museum of London Archaeology), whose excavations across SE17 have revealed Roman-era and medieval finds beneath Walworth’s Victorian street grid — confirms that this patch of south London has been continuously inhabited since long before the ducal street names arrived.

No verified individual of public record has been traced to Portland Street specifically, but the street sat within a neighbourhood that produced and shaped remarkable people. The mathematician and astronomer Charles Babbage — inventor of a forerunner of the computer — was born in Crosby Row (now Larcom Street) in 1791. He grew up in a Walworth of market gardens and country lanes, the same landscape that would shortly be covered by Portland Street and its neighbours. Michael Faraday, the great experimental scientist, is commemorated by the primary school that stands steps away from Portland Street today — his name embedded in the ward, the school, and the policing neighbourhood alike.

More recently, the street has been documented by Walworth chronicler Darren Lock, who was born in Lambeth Hospital in 1972 and spent his first four years living in Portland Street, just off East Street Market. His family then moved on to the Aylesbury Estate. Lock went on to co-author a series of books on Walworth’s history and founded the “Now and Then Walworth” Facebook group, which has gathered tens of thousands of members swapping photographs and memories of these streets. The street’s past is, in part, preserved in his work.

The demolition of the Aylesbury Estate’s link bridge over Portland Street around 2020 was not just a structural event — it was the physical end of a relationship between the street and the estate that had lasted six decades. The first development site includes all the Bradenham, Arklow, Chartridge and Chiltern blocks between Bradenham Close and Portland Street. New homes are replacing them, built by Vistry under a 100% affordable housing brief for Southwark Council. The street’s character is shifting from estate boundary to neighbourhood thoroughfare.

Coverage of the regeneration process — including resident perspectives on displacement and the pace of change — has been documented by SE1 Direct, whose reporting on Southwark’s housing landscape tracks the human dimension of what the planning documents describe in block numbers and delivery phases. The headquarters of the British Labour Party was in Walworth from 1981 to 1997 — a reminder that Portland Street and its surroundings sat at the centre of British political life during the same decades the Aylesbury Estate was becoming a national symbol of urban failure.

Portland Street is a quiet residential street in the middle of one of London’s biggest regeneration projects. The eastern side is still under development; the western side is mixed housing. Michael Faraday Primary School anchors the northern end; the sounds of East Street Market carry on market days. The street itself is unremarkable to look at — which makes the layers beneath it all the more striking. A name borrowed from a Georgian duke, laid over a field, built up by Victorian speculators, flattened by post-war planners, and now being rebuilt again. Historic England’s records for the wider Walworth area document what little survives of the Victorian fabric nearby, including the Grade II listed Manor Place Baths just to the north.

The nearest green space — and a significant one — is Burgess Park, a ten-minute walk south. The 140-acre Burgess Park is Southwark Council’s largest park and underwent an £8 million redevelopment in 2012 to provide residents with a leisurely retreat. It was itself carved out of Victorian streets cleared after the war — another layer of the same story Portland Street tells.