Herne Hill History in Brief
What is the origin of the name? No one really knows.
John Speed’s c.1610 map showed the area as King’s Hill. Over 100 years later John Rocque's 1746 map [An Exact Survey of the Citys of London, Westminster, ye Borough of Southwark, and the Country near Ten Miles round] shows the area as Island Green and Dulwich Hill. 
And Bennost’s 1758 map shows the area as Dulwich Hill. 
It may be that the river Effra - now sadly almost all underground - attracted large numbers of herons. So that a hillock by the river came to be known as Heron Hill. Another interpretation of the name is ‘hill by a nook of land' deriving from the Old English hyrne (corner, angle) hyll. The first reference to Herne seems to be in 1798, possibly alluding to le Herne, a field in Brixton.
Beginnings
For centuries there has been a road from Camberwell over the hill to the Herne Hill valley. At the northern foot of the hill was Camberwell Lane (now Coldharbour Lane) and on its crest, Ashpole Lane, now Red Post Hill. In the valley, there were roads that led to Dulwich and Norwood. Another road from Stockwell brought pilgrims, who followed the River Effra along Croxted Lane towards the Pilgrims’ Way and Canterbury.
Herne Hill was well covered with trees; but after the Civil War ended in 1651, many were cut down for ship building and domestic use. Afterwards the land gradually passed to a mixture of farms, small holdings and woods. As late as the 1760s the area was still very rural with only a small population.
The bridges over the Thames at Westminster (1750) and Blackfriars (1769) enabled London to expand south. Houses, shops and businesses grew up along new roads built through open country to villages such as South Lambeth, Stockwell, Walworth and Camberwell. However, for those who lived in Herne Hill but worked in the City, the only means of transport was by horse and carriage. Hence, only the wealthy came to live there.
Local land owners resisted over-development to the area. 
They included the Dulwich College Estate, who owned the Camberwell side of Herne Hill and Denmark Hill, and Samuel Sanders, a wealthy timber merchant. In the 1780s, Sanders bought part of the ‘Milkwell’ Manor estate, land fronting onto the Brixton side of Denmark Hill. The Dulwich College Estate and Sanders’ descendants prevented the extensive and crowded housing developments characteristic of the neighbouring areas to the north. They did, however, grant leases to wealthy people, such as city merchants and bankers, who built some large and very fine houses on Denmark Hill and Herne Hill. Denmark Hill became known as “the Belgravia of South London.”
View a larger section of Rocque's map of 1746 jpg file, 644KB
View a larger section of Bennost's map of 1758 jpg file, 495KB
The Nineteenth Century
A further significant land purchase was in 1809 by the glass maker John Blades of Ludgate Hill. He bought the estate that occupied land which was eventually to form the basis of Brockwell Park. Blades demolished a house located near what is now the Norwood Road park boundary and built Brockwell Hall, a mansion at the top of the hill. Perhaps the original building’s proximity to a tributary of the River Effra made it too damp. In the 1820s, the Regent Road estate was built to house labourers and gardeners employed locally. However, apart from these, Herne Hill remained an affluent rural district of large mansions and gardens.
Herne Hill’s rural tranquillity changed with the arrival of the railway. In 1862, Herne Hill station appeared in a field at the bottom of the hill. 
At first Herne Hill was the terminus; but a year later the London, Chatham and Dover Railway opened the line south to Beckenham. The railway encouraged smaller houses for clerks, artisans, craftsmen and their families, the workers taking advantage of cheap fares for commuting to London.
In 1868 development of Railton, Poplar, Milkwood, Lowden and Heron Roads began. As a result of this expansion, the local population increased by some 3,000, with schools and churches following to meet their needs. John Ruskin, a famous local resident, deplored the area’s decline and the expansion of cheap housing. However, in 1885 he was still able to describe Herne Hill as “a rustic eminence four miles south of the Standard in Cornhill” of which “the leafy seclusion remains unchanged to this day.”
Towards the end of the 19th century the Dulwich House Estate was developed, with roads laid out in one coherent plan (from Danecroft Road to Ruskin Walk and Ardbeg Road).
In 1892 Brockwell Park was established as a Metropolitan Open Space, on part of the original Brockwell Hall estate. The only sad aspect of this event was the sudden death at the opening ceremony of Thomas Bristowe, the MP for Norwood. It was through his efforts that the plan to establish the park had been achieved. Two later land purchases brought the park to its present size.
Towards Modern Times
Regular horse-tram services had arrived in Herne Hill in 1884. From Loughborough Junction, trams passed under the railway bridge at Hinton Road and along the length of Milkwood Road. Electrification and double-decker trams came in the early 1900s when the London County Council took over the service. The bridge over Hinton Road was too low; and part of Milkwood Road was too narrow to take two tram lines. The route one way was changed to Herne Hill Road, Wanless, Poplar and Lowden Roads, then taking the old route via Milkwood Road to Herne Hill station and Norwood. The trams were phased out in the 1930s in favour of buses.
In 1904 the part of Denmark Hill on the north side belonging to the Sanders Estate came onto the market. Thanks to the efforts of Frank Trier, a Champion Hill resident, the land was saved from planned housing development, and was opened to the public in 1907 as Ruskin Park. Three years later another 12 acres were added to enlarge the Park more or less to its present size.
In 1906, Herne Hill’s own fire station opened next to the Postmen’s Office. It remained operational until 1920, when services were taken over by a new fire station in West Norwood. Also in 1906 the Carnegie Public Library opened, on a site in Herne Hill Road; it was listed Grade II in 1981. Despite many threats to its existence, the Library remains open and its future now seems assured.
World War I brought many changes to Herne Hill. At the beginning of the war, the newly opened King’s College Hospital, which had moved to Denmark Hill from its original Aldwych site in 1913 to become London’s first teaching hospital, was taken over by the War Office. 
It was known as the 4th London General Hospital, but it continued also to care for the civilian population. A foot-bridge was built over the railway from the hospital; and Ruskin Park became an annexe of King’s, with huts for convalescent soldiers. St Saviour’s Church in Herne Hill Road formed a club for soldiers’ and sailors’ wives, and gave concerts to the wounded troops from King’s.
The Wellcome Physiological Research Laboratories, which since the end of the 19th century had occupied one of the houses - now disappeared - in Brockwell Park, worked overtime on antitoxins for diphtheria, typhoid, typhus and anti-gas serums during WWI.
There was no efficient food rationing system and many shortages occurred. A lot of people dug up their flower beds and lawns to plant vegetables. In Brockwell Park grazed a large flock of sheep. Of course, many local young men and women did not return from the war. 
Some of their names are recorded on a screen in St Paul’s Church, Herne Hill. Another war memorial is in the Postal Sorting Office, with the names of five employees of that office killed in the 1914-18 war. Two others are in the former St John’s church, Lowden Road; and in the Peabody Estate, off Rosendale Road, a memorial in the form of a lynch gate was erected by the estate tenants to the 35 men from the estate who lost their lives in WWI.
Among the greatest post-war changes was in the role of women in society. Those over the age of 30 received the vote; King’s College Hospital Medical School admitted women students for the first time, and three out of the ten senior staff at the Wellcome Laboratory in Brockwell Park were women - and all three were Fellows of the Royal Society.
The inter-war period also saw significant housing developments in Herne Hill. The former estate of Casino House was bought by the then Metropolitan Borough of Camberwell, and the Sunray Estate built there in response to the cry for “homes fit for heroes”. 
Fortunately the south eastern part of the Casino estate, with its small lake, was not developed but was used to form the very attractive Sunray Gardens. The large Grade II listed Dorchester Court estate was built in 1936 on Herne Hill, on the site formerly occupied by large 19th century villas.
The Second World War saw much damage to Herne Hill, particularly during the 1940/41 Blitz. Few streets escaped at least some damage; and there were nearly 100 civilian deaths between September 1940 and February 1945 as a result of enemy action.
After 1945, priority was given to repairing damaged properties. However, ‘pre-fabs’ were also put up; and later, new houses were built on vacant bomb-sites. These contrasted significantly with their neighbouring late Victorian and Edwardian properties. Many large houses were demolished or converted into flats. Some new small blocks of flats were built and later, larger local authority estates of flats and houses, including tower blocks, such as in Dulwich Road.
