Model Forum / General / Railroads / February 2010

Devon is a county of England of which Exeter (I think) is the county town
and it's about 195 miles from London to Exeter.
Surrey is a county of England which has changed shape and size significantly
since 1871.   Lambeth used to be in Surrey but is now a suburb of London
(and very close to the centre of London given the current size of London
although south of "the river".   Vauxhall is adjacent to Lambeth (some would
argue it's in Lambeth) and Battersea is only a mile or two west.   There may
well be (or have been) a Church Row in that vicinity.
Off hand I can't think of a link between Devon and the other places.

Chiswick is about 10 miles west of London and is considered a suburb of
London these days.   It is north of the river although the river tends to a
north/south heading at that point!   When I was growing up in the borough of
Brentford and Chiswick Brentford was in the county of Middlesex (completely
gone now for local government purposes) and Chiswick was in the London
Postal area.   I never really understood that.

Battersea is in the London borough of Wandsworth, on the border with the
borough of Lambeth.  Vauxhall is in the borough of Lambeth, on the
border with Wandsworth.  Neither Battersea nor Vauxhall have any
"official" existence aside from in the names of local council wards
which no-one knows or cares about, so the precise location of the border
and where people say they are is somewhat fuzzy.  Both Wandsworth and
Lambeth used to be part of the county of Surrey.  So the confusion there
is entirely reasonable.

The only Church Row I can find in London is nowhere near there, but it's
conceivable that it got knocked down and had something else built over
it (there was a *lot* of development in that area in the 19th and early
20th centuries, much of it railway-related to get us back on topic), or
I'm just failing at looking it up.

There is no Battersea in Devon that I can find.

Chiswick is an area of west London, although back then it may have been
a village on the outskirts of London.  The City of London is the very
small part of London which made up the core of the Medieval city.  The
Battersea/Vauxhall area is t'other side of the river from them both,
somewhat closer to the City than to Chiswick.

Hie ye to maps.google.co.uk and ask it for a route from one place to
another, to get an idea of how far apart they are.  For more detailed
maps, use streetmap.co.uk.  Some older maps (but only back to the
1940s/50s) can be found at npemap.org.uk.  No idea where you can easily
find older maps.

Try this for Church Row in 1814
More Kennington than Vauxhall but they are very close together.

http://archivemaps.com/mapco/darton1814/darton29.htm

Laurie