Venues in Wandsworth

Wandsworth grew where the River Wandle falls into the Thames, and the fall is the reason. It drove mills for grinding, dyeing and brewing from the Middle Ages, and the industries followed the water: Huguenot refugees settled here from the 1680s and brought hat-making and dyeing with them, and the parish took in enough of them to keep a French church. The result is a riverside town that became a London borough without ever quite becoming a suburb.

Brewing is the through-line. The Ram Brewery stood on the Wandle from at least 1533 until Young’s moved out in 2006, the longest continuously used brewing site in Britain; the Ram Quarter has been built on it, with a working microbrewery kept on the ground. The event character today is domestic rather than industrial, and it is a dining one: Bellevue Road, along the north edge of Wandsworth Common, is the street that matters, and Chez Bruce has held a Michelin star there since not long after it opened in 1995, on the site where Marco Pierre White ran Harveys before it.

Green space frames the district on three sides — Wandsworth Common, King George’s Park along the Wandle, and Wandsworth Park on the Thames, with the Thames Path running from Wandsworth Bridge to Putney. For access, Wandsworth Town and Wandsworth Common are on South Western Railway, Clapham Junction is five minutes away by train, and East Putney sits on the District line, so Waterloo is a quarter of an hour and Chelsea is over the bridge.