London’s Alleys: St Stephens Passage, TW1

The origins of this narrow alley in Twickenham are exceptionally easy to guess when you look at its neighbour, St Stephen’s Church. This is the alley that separates the church from the houses.

Although the area was still fields in the 1740s, John Roque’s map already shows what would later become the local road layout. The area developed fast, though, following the arrival of the railway line in 1848.

The later arrival of the railway station at St Margarets in 1876 followed campaigning by local residents, including the local property developers, Henry Bevan and Jeramiah Little who would go on to develop the houses that surround this alley.

The Little family donated a triangle of land on the corner of his estate for the church, which is why the church faces North instead of East, as it couldn’t fit in otherwise. The church cost £7,000 to build and opened in 1876, although the tower wasn’t added until 1907.

It seems that the combination of building the houses and donating the corner of land for the church led to the alley being created to give a straight path to the church, as otherwise, there wouldn’t really be a need for it.

What we have is the church at one end, Beaufort Villas to the north and the south filled with a long row of grand semi-detached houses facing Cambridge Park Gardens.

The alley was initially called St Stephen’s Lane, with the apostrophe, which has scandalously been dropped from the road signs, and it was also longer than it is today.

The lost northern end runs behind the shops on Richmond Road, but it was blocked up in 1902 when the London United Tramways agreed to provide a better pavement on Richmond Road. If you look at a satellite view of the area, you can still see the fingerprint of the closed alley as a diagonal line behind the shops.

The closure of the northern quarter seems also to be when St. Stephen’s Lane became St. Stephen’s Passage.

The remainder of the alley is quite narrow and hemmed in by the tall brick walls on either side. The attentions of graffitti artists can be spied by the blotches of black paint applied to cover up their muses. It seems the black blotches are preferred to whatever was underneath.

Closer to the Richmond end of the alley, the planting from the houses on either side extends over the alley and, in places, meets up to form a short but fun foliage tunnel.

The alley is quite busy, probably because it is a more pleasant route between either end than the road on the other side of the houses. Unfortunately, how much busier it would be if the northern end hadn’t been cut off is lost to time.