Local History and Customs

If you are new to the UK you will want to read the New to the UK? page. It describes some historic English customs that you need to know about because they involve strangers knocking on your door!

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If you live in one of the houses 3 to 87 Marcia Road (and the 4 similar houses on Penry St), you may like to know that they have a 130+ years’ history before 1999 when the developers Galliard started to build them.

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Briefly, the houses are built on the ‘footprint’ of houses that comprised a street built in the 1880s. The modern houses preserve the proportions and window details of the originals with the exception of the chimneys and the place to store the rubbish bins. The long wall running down the north side of the Marcia Road gardens once separated it from large railway goods yards. Identical but original houses can be seen in Darwin Street, near the Old Kent Road flyover.

Since this page was started in 2008, it has grown so much that, for convenience, it has been divided up into three eras:

Please see the relevant pages, and do not miss the fascinating page about the Sanger family that lived in Number 58 Marcia Road around the time of the First World War.