‘For the most part of the last thousand years, Clapham was a small, very ordinary Surrey village on the periphery of London.’ Fortunate Clapham, then, to have inspired one resident, our Fellow Michael Green, to become its chronicler ‘from the Palaeolithic period to the Age of Enlightenment in the eighteenth century’. This he does with the aid of numerous maps and illustrations – a considerable number in colour – many from the hand of the author, for ‘H J M Green’, as a glance at our Fellows’ List reveals, is none other than Michael himself. I particularly liked the picture of his model of the Neanderthal encampment in Hackney.

The work itself starts with a discussion of geology and the way it conditioned land use (Chapters 1 and 2). Indeed land use, with its changes over time, is something of a leitmotif in the work as a whole. These are followed by chapters on the Roman period – where the precise course of Stane Street and the evidence for road-side settlement is examined (3); the late ninth-century estates of Ealdorman Alfred (4); more on estate boundaries based on Anglo-Saxon charters – some forged – and mentioning, inter alia for Beowulf fans, ‘Grendel’s Bog’ on the southern tip of Clapham Common, the destination of the later ‘Dragon’s Mire Lane’ – the present Cavendish Road (pp 78–9) (5); changes of land use from the Domesday Survey of 1086 to the first half of the fourteenth century (6); the Priory of Merton and the advowson of the church of Holy Trinity, and the church itself (7); Clapham in the Middle Ages (8), and, in particular, the evidence of the manorial customal of 1326 through which ‘a vivid window [is] briefly opened revealing peasant life in Clapham’ (p 132). This key document is also discussed in Chapters 2, 4 and 6 and its absence from the index is a pity. Chapter 8 also deals with the physical appearance of the manor in the early medieval period and its subsequent development, as well as the dwellings of the villagers. Here Green reinterprets features discovered in excavations by Densem and Seeley at the Rectory Grove Clapham in 1980–1 as part of a long house (p 149 and figs 86–7). His interpretation is intriguing and consistent with the features uncovered, but unprovable.

The last three chapters (9–11), a fifth of the book, deal with the mystery surrounding a substantial late seventeenth-century house, Clapham Place, and is a marvellous piece of topographical, documentary and archaeological detective work. The house is of interest not least because visited by such luminaries as Aubrey, Evelyn and Pepys, who indeed spent the last three years of his life as the guest of the then owner. Green’s suggested location for the house was dramatically confirmed by the discovery of the west face of the west wing in a rear extension to No. 13 on the west side of a modern street, The Chase. The entire eastern wall of the house, surviving as ‘seven courses of English bond handmade brick’, was subsequently located in a service trench running along its eastern side (for both, see fig 98). But there is much more fascinating material on the building, both on its plan – perhaps originally designed by the gifted amateur architect Sir Roger Pratt – and its probable appearance. The last may be the subject of an unidentified house attributed to Robert Streeter (fig 99a–b) upon which the watercolour painting by the author reproduced as the cover of the book is based.

In conclusion, this is a remarkable work – a real labour of love – and essential reading for all interested in the history of Clapham, its buildings, its fields, its woodland and its people, from the Lords of the Manor and owners of Clapham Place to the ordinary folk who worked the land or pollarded its coppices.