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Tulse Hill is a district in the London Borough of Lambeth in South London that sits on Brockwell Park. It is approximately from Charing Cross and is bordered by Brixton, Dulwich, Herne Hill, Streatham and West Norwood.
The western part was left to "Mercy Cressingham, spinster" (now commemorated by the Cressingham Gardens estate in the area) and the eastern part -now mostly occupied by Brockwell Park - was left to Richard Ogbourne who promptly sold it on to John Blades.
In 1810 Tulse Hill Farm was the only building in the western part of the area. The enclosure of land in the parish of Lambeth in 1811 led to the construction of Effra Road in the area immediately to the north. Together with improvements to Brixton Road by the local turnpike trust this greatly improved road communications with central London, and the value of the local landholdings.
Mercy Cressingham eventually married Dr Thomas Edwards, who took the initiative in buying extra land to make an access from Brixton Hill in 1814 and laying out two new roads, Lower Tulse Hill Road (now known simply as Tulse Hill) and Upper Tulse Hill Road (now Upper Tulse Hill), by 1821. A plan of 1821 in the RIBA Library shows a proposed speculative development of both the Edwards estate and the adjacent Blades estate with large detached villas, although only the former actually came to fruition. The new roads were adopted by the parish in 1822.
An 1832 map shows that Tulse Hill still had only a few buildings on the new roads in contrast to nearby recently developed areas in Brixton and West Norwood and the longer established hamlet of Dulwich. Genealogy & Family History, London Ancestor website However, by 1843, there was a continuous line of houses, predominantly detached and usually with separate coach houses along the full length of Lower Tulse Hill Road from Brixton to the top of the hill.
Development of the area to the east of this road commenced in 1845 when Trinity Rise was built to connect Upper Tulse Hill with Norwood Road. Holy Trinity Church on Trinity Rise was built in 1855-6 and is now grade II listed.
Major development of the area further east did not come until the opening of the Herne Hill and Tulse Hill railway stations in the 1860s.
Most of the original villas with large gardens on the original Edwards-Cressingham landholding have been redeveloped at much higher densities for council housing since the 1930s.
The most prominent survival of 19th century Tulse Hill is Berry House, later called Silwood Hall, and now forming the front part of St Martin-In-The-Fields High School for Girls, a Church of England secondary school which outlasted the nearby 1950s schools before its closure in 2024.
The redevelopment of Tulse Hill after World War II by the London County Council had included the construction of two large secondary schools - Tulse Hill School and Dick Sheppard School (originally for girls only). Both schools have now closed, and their sites have been redeveloped for housing of very contrasting types. The Dick Sheppard School site was redeveloped as Brockwell Gate, a gated Regency style with houses and apartments overlooking Brockwell Park. The site of Tulse Hill school was redeveloped as affordable housing.
In March 2022 Lambeth Council initiated a consultation with residents as to renaming the area, to avoid a possible association with Henry Tulse who was once a board member of the Royal African Company, a slave-trading concern in the seventeenth century.
Nearby stations provide services to Victoria from Herne Hill and West Dulwich (via the Southeastern Metro Bromley South line) and from West Norwood (via the Southern Crystal Palace line).
The nearest London Underground station is Brixton on the Victoria line.
Noel Streatfeild's novel " Tennis Shoes" (1937) is written about a family who live in Tulse Hill. (2021). 9780141361147, National Geographic Books. ISBN 9780141361147
Samson Young, protagonist in Martin Amis's London Fields goes to Tulse Hill to buy drugs. (1989). 9780224026093, J. Cape. ISBN 9780224026093
Jason Strugnell, a fictional poet in Wendy Cope's Making Cocoa For Kingsley Amis, lives in Tulse Hill and mentions it a couple of times in "his" poems. (1986). 9780571137473, Faber. ISBN 9780571137473
Tulse Hill and its surrounding areas are locations in Mark Billingham's crime novel " In The Dark".Little, Brown & Company, 2008,
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