Inside 84 Lavender Sweep: An assassination plot, Punch magazine and a campaign to save Wandsworth Common

The attempted assassination of an American president, a leading satirical magazine and a campaign to save Wandsworth Common can all be linked to one building in Battersea.

On September 28, a Battersea Society blue plaque was unveiled outside 84 Lavender Sweep to mark its incredible history and former inhabitants.

Lavender Sweep is a terraced house, like many others just off Battersea Rise. But it has one defining feature: a classic arched window above the inner front door  – a tell-tale sign it has been recycled from a previous house on the very same site.

The original Lavender Sweep House was part of the first generation of developments in the area, which saw it change from open fields to a landscape dominated by big villas. 

There may be close to 100 terraced houses there now, but in the mid-1800s there were just four and this was the biggest of them all.

Between 1817 and 1880, the big house was home to Tom Taylor.

Born on October 19, 1817, in Durham, Mr Taylor was an English journalist and biographer and also one of the most popular dramatists of his time. 

He is perhaps best known as a long-time staff member and, from 1874, the editor of the magazine Punch.

Punch was a British weekly magazine, established in 1841 by Henry Mayhew and Ebenezer Landells, which helped to coin the term “cartoon” as a humorous illustration.

With its satire of the social, and political scene of the time, Punch became a household name in Victorian Britain. Sales of 40,000 copies a week by 1850 rose above 100,000 by 1910. 

After his first contribution to Punch on October 19, 1844, Mr Taylor began a thirty-six year association with the weekly humour and satire magazine, which ended only with his death in 1880. 

During the 1840s, he rose daily at five or six and wrote for three hours before taking an hour’s brisk walk from his house to his Fleet Street office.

He wrote on average three columns a month for Punch in the 1850s and 1860s his output doubled. 

Punch’s circulation peaked in the 1940s before it fell into a period of long decline, closing in 1992. It was revived in 1996, but closed again in 2002.

Mr Taylor also established himself as a playwright and produced around 100 plays throughout his lifetime including Plot and Passion (1853), Still Waters Run Deep (1855) and The Ticket-of-Leave Man, a melodrama produced in 1863.

Many of Mr Taylor’s plays survived into the 20th century but many have been largely forgotten today, apart from one – Our American Cousin.

The comedy production opened in London in 1858, before theatre manager Laura Keene took it to the United States for a hugely successful run in New York. 

The former American President, Abraham Lincoln, was assassinated while attending a performance at Ford’s Theatre in Washington, D.C, on April 14, 1865. The 16th president of the United States was shot in the head by Confederate sympathiser John Wilkes Booth, whilst watching the play, and died the next morning. 

As well as his national and international escapades, Mr Taylor also worked close to his home and was a notable supporter of the early campaign to save Wandsworth Common when it looked set to be overrun with new building projects.

And he was not the only notable resident at Lavender Sweep House, which was also home to his wife Laura Barker. 

She was already established as a musician and composer by the time she married Mr Taylor in June, 1855.

As a young girl, she performed with both Louis Spohr and Paganini, and began composing in the mid-1830s. 

From around 1843 until 1855, she taught music at York School for the Blind where some of her compositions – including a symphony in manuscript, on April 19, 1845 – were performed at York Choral Society concerts.

The couple held regular Sunday music concerts in their home and were noted for their hospitality. Lavender Sweep House became quite a well known place, described at the time as a ‘house of call for everyone of note’.

Mr Taylor died in 1880, with Laura living to 1905 – publishing several further compositions, including the “Songs of Youth”, which were published in 1884 by Stanley Lucas, Weber & Co. in London.

The landscape surrounding Lavender Hill saw huge changes in the late 1800s, as the railways arrived and brought with them an explosion of factories and dense city streets. 

Mrs Baker and Mr Taylor Tom would be Lavender Sweep House’s final owners.

Two blue plaques – unveiled by Lord Fred Ponsonby, actor Alun Armstrong and Mayor of Wandsworth Sana Jafri, now commemorate the lives of Mrs Baker and Mr Taylor.

Pictured top: Lavender Sweep House captured by a regular visitor – Lewis Carroll (Picture: Supplied by the Battersea Society)