If you look at a railway map of South London, you will see a station called Loughborough Junction, on
the line going south from Blackfriars.
Loughborough Junction was originally called Loughborough Road, and between there and Brixton
was another station called Loughborough Park (later renamed East Brixton and now closed).
As well as those stations, and the thoroughfares of Loughborough Road and Loughborough Park, a row of early nineteenth century houses in Brixton Road called Loughborough Place, a block of flats called Loughborough Mansions, a row of shops called Loughborough Parade, Loughborough Park Congregational Church and the Loughborough Park Tavern, in Coldharbour Lane, all provide evidence of a link between seventeenth-century Leicestershire and an area that was once part of Surrey but is now in the London Borough of Lambeth.
That link was provided by Henry Hastings, first Baron Loughborough (c.1609-1667), to whom the manor of
Lambeth Wick, of which this land once formed part, was leased.
The younger son of the fifth Earl of Huntingdon, he was born at the Manor House on Sparrow Hill, Loughborough. During the Civil War, as Colonel Hastings, he was an important Royalist commander and led troops at Edgehill in 1642, was involved in the relief of Newark in 1644, became governor of Leicester in 1645 and held Ashby Castle till 1646. In 1649 he escaped to Holland, but returned to England in 1660 and was appointed Lord Lieutenant of Leicestershire the following year.
In 1664 he was living at the manor house of Lambeth Wick, which became known as Loughborough House,
and in that year obtained an Act of Parliament to make the river Effra navigable from Brixton Causeway to the Thames, but died before his project could be implemented.
By the beginning of the 18th century, the Hastings family were no longer lessees of the manor of Lambeth
Wick. Loughborough House became ‘a superior academy for young gentlemen’; a collection of elocution
lessons published in 1787 was dedicated ‘To the Young Noblemen and Gentlemen receiving their education at
Loughborough House School’.
A drawing in Lambeth Archives of c.1825 shows it as a three-storey house of ten bays, which had clearly been rebuilt, or at least refronted, since Henry Hastings’ time. It still had 30 resident pupils at the time of the 1841 census.
Piecemeal development of Lambeth Wick had started in 1820, and the laying out of roads like Loughborough
Park from 1844 onwards, the demolition of Loughborough House in 1854, and the opening of the lines to Central London in the 1860s and early 1870s, coupled with the availability of cheap, early morning
workmen’s fares, accelerated the transformation of the area into a railway suburb.
The manor of Loughborough remained in the possession of the Hastings family until 1810, though the building on Sparrow Hill which is still known as the Manor House was sold by them in 1654. After many owners and changes of use, it has been restored and is now a hotel and restaurant
http://www.le.ac.uk/lahs/downloads/lh2004.pdf
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Originally Posted by Dan U
