Welcome to London x London’s Clapham Guide: your guide to the best bars, restaurants and things to do in this South London neighbourhood.
Clapham sits in the London Borough of Lambeth in south London, between Battersea to the west and Brixton to the east, with Clapham Common forming its green centre.
Clapham has given the English language one of its most useful phrases. The “man on the Clapham omnibus,” legal shorthand for the ordinary reasonable person, dates from a 1903 court case, when Clapham was the archetypal respectable commuter suburb. It has not been that for some time.
The Common at the heart of it all is 220 acres of South London breathing space, with three ponds, a Victorian bandstand that is the largest in London, and a history that includes Benjamin Franklin experimenting with oil on the surface of one of the ponds. Samuel Pepys died here in 1703. William Wilberforce and the Clapham Sect, the group of evangelical Christians who drove the abolition of the slave trade through Parliament in 1807, gathered around the Common at Holy Trinity Church. And in 1948, the deep air raid shelter tunnelled under Clapham South tube station became a temporary home for passengers who arrived on the Empire Windrush, one of the most significant moments in modern British history happening underground in SW4.
Clapham Junction, as any local will tell you within about thirty seconds of meeting you, is not in Clapham. It’s in Battersea. The railway company named it Clapham in 1863 because it sounded better. This has been annoying people ever since.
South London's most reliably good neighbourhood, whether you admit it or not
