Wandsworth’s Victorian masterpiece

28 May

With so many London walks trailing in the footsteps of Charles Dickens or making sense of the baffling Jack the Ripper murders, Wandsworth does not spring to mind when searching for Victoriana masterpieces. Yet I’m blessed with one of the areas most astounding living room views of the Royal Victoria Patriotic Building, completed in 1859 in a remarkable 18 months.

Tucked behind the tree line, most drivers travelling down the A214 (Trinity Rd ) don’t notice it, yet when first completed it would have been an imposing structure towering over the rural fields and pastures surrounding the tranquil village of Wandsworth. It would have also been within eyesight of another stark if not intimidating Victorian building: Wandsworth Prison, which 170 years on, still serves its original purpose.

The Royal Victoria Patriotic Asylum, as it was originally named, was inaugurated in the reign of Queen Victoria with the aim of providing education and training to 300 girls who’s fathers had perished in the Crimean War in Russia.

Like most Victorian architecture it is a composite of styles, part Scottish Baronial (a Neo-Gothic style that wouldn’t look at out place in Edinburgh), part French Châteauesque, innovatively featuring off-site pre-fabricated metal and stone work and built with London’s ubiquitous material of choice, namely clay bricks.

The building’s name reveals the period’s promotion and celebration of Britain’s Empire, financed by the Royal Patriotic Fund, a charity overseen by the indefatigable Prince Albert.

During First World War the building was used as a hospital for the treatment and recovery of injured troops and during the next cataclysmic conflict in the Second World War the asylum’s girls were relocated to Wales. The site then served as an interrogation centre for aliens and spies, known as the London Reception Centre.

By the 1960s the building was in a state of disrepair and at one point it was considered for demolition, a consequence of the aversity felt towards Victorian aesthetic values of the post-Empire era by the London County Council.

Bought by a private property developer, the Royal Victoria Patriotic Building has been a success story of late. It is now the centrepiece of a private housing estate and the building houses private tenants, workshops and its own restaurant and pub, which organises twice a year a Beer Festival in one of the buildings yards.