Editing Battersea (section)

===Railway age===
[[File:London V2 Frissell2.jpg|right|thumb|Aftermath of a [[V-2]] bombing at Battersea, 27 January 1945]]
Battersea was radically altered by the coming of railways. The [[London and Southampton Railway]] Company engineered their railway line from east to west through Battersea, in 1838, terminating at the original [[Nine Elms railway station]]<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://www.scienceandsociety.co.uk/results.asp?image=10301565&wwwflag=2&imagepos=4|title=Image of nine elms station, london, 1838-1848. by Science & Society Picture Library|website=www.scienceandsociety.co.uk}}</ref> at the north-east tip of the area. Over the next 22 years five other lines were built, which continue to carry all of the trains to and from London's [[London Waterloo station|Waterloo]] and [[London Victoria station|Victoria]] termini. An interchange station was built in 1863 towards the north-west of the area, at a junction of the railway. Taking the name of a fashionable village a mile and more away, the station was named '[[Clapham Junction railway station|Clapham Junction]]':<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://www.yourlocalguardian.co.uk/news/13780930.is-clapham-junction-in-clapham-or-battersea/|title=Why is Clapham Junction not in Clapham?|website=Your Local Guardian|date=24 September 2015 }}</ref> a campaign to rename it ''Battersea Junction'' fizzled out as late as the early twentieth century.

During the latter decades of the nineteenth century, Battersea had developed into a major town railway centre with two locomotive works at [[Nine Elms Locomotive Works|Nine Elms]] and [[Longhedge Railway Works (Battersea)|Longhedge]] and three important motive power depots (Nine Elms, Stewarts Lane and Battersea) all in an initial pocket of north Battersea. The effect was precipitate: a population of 6,000 people in 1840 was increased to 168,000 by 1910; and save for the green spaces of [[Battersea Park]], [[Clapham Common]], [[Wandsworth Common]] and some smaller isolated pockets, all other farmland was built over, with, from north to south, industrial buildings and vast railway sheds and sidings (much of which remain), slum housing for workers, especially north of the main east–west railway, and gradually more genteel residential terraced housing further south.

The railway station encouraged the government to site its buildings in the area surrounding [[Clapham Junction (area)|Clapham Junction]], where a cluster of new civic buildings including the town hall, library, police station, court and post office was developed along [[Lavender Hill]] in the 1880s and 1890s. The [[Arding & Hobbs]] department store, diagonally opposite the station, was the largest of its type at the time of its construction in 1885; and the streets near the station developed as a regional shopping district. The area was served by a vast music hall{{snd}}The Grand{{snd}}opposite the station (nowadays serving as a nightclub and venue for smaller bands) as well as a large theatre next to the town hall (the Shakespeare Theatre, later redeveloped following bomb damage). All this building around the station shifted the focus of the area southwards, and marginalised Battersea High Street (the main street of the original village) into no more than an extension of Falcon Road.{{citation needed|date=December 2023}}