Unearthing the lives of Brockley and neighbouring historic areas
In March 2025, Brockley Society put out a quiet call: Who lived in your house when it was first built? Since then, a group of neighbours across Brockley and St John’s have been meeting to research the hidden stories of our homes. Using historic census records, newspaper archives, old maps, and visits to the Lewisham archives in Catford, we’ve been uncovering who lived in our houses, and what their lives were like.
The project offers a rare glimpse into our neighbourhood from the late Victorian period to the start of the Second World War, when publicly available census records came to an end. As residents moved in and out, we see patterns of local migration, shifting social classes, and how Brockley gradually became a destination for upwardly mobile families leaving central Deptford or St John’s. At an Edwardian home in Ashmead Road, we discovered the Alwin family, long-term residents from 1914 until after WWII.
Alfred Alwin, a telegraph cable inspector, was at the centre of a poignant 1920 court case after a secret engagement ended abruptly. He sued for the return of a bangle, meant to be the engagement token. Local papers described it as a ‘domestic tragi-comedy’. The word ‘Fernleigh’ is etched in the home’s fanlight and appears in a 1909 advert for a cycling club run from the same address.
In another house in Brockley a family of three appears in both the 1911 and 1921 censuses. No servants or lodgers were named, whereas in the house next door, a family of five resided with a servant, who came from the same Essex town in which the ‘head of the family’ was born. What prompted her move from Essex to Brockley to start a life in service? The family of three in the first house could later be traced to St Leonards on Sea via the 1939 England and Wales Register, a pre-war mini-census ordered by Prime Minister Chamberlain. This was available to the public, unlike ordinary censuses which are closed for 100 years.
A death certificate shows the family was still in St Leonards later in the war. A 1920 newspaper clipping quotes the winner of the ‘extraordinarily popular’ Book Titles Competition as resident in Tyrwhitt Road, perhaps a lodger in the house. These clippings are on searchable digitised microfiches. Lewisham archive library has a broad source of information. The Find My Past and Ancestry websites are free from the library wifi network but can also be independently accessed for a fee.
A wide choice of documents spanning the first two decades of the 20th century have already been digitised and are easily searchable. Access to earlier documents is in the form of ledgers and microfiches, which require a bit more time, planning and some pot luck. The archivist at the library was extremely helpful and pointed out possible avenues of research for inexperienced researchers. With her help it is easy to spend a productive hour or more.
Through our research, we’ve uncovered how the local area has evolved in small but telling ways — for instance, Carlton Road in Brockley was later renamed Drake Road. In other cases, house numbers changed entirely as development continued: on Ashmead Road, the arrival of Edwardian red-brick homes in the early 1900s caused the renumbering of the original Victorian terraces, creating layers of address history that can easily trip up modern-day researchers.
To join this research group, in the first instance email chair@brockleysociety.org.uk