Place Name
It is the original route of the main highway to Portsmouth and the south-west England as it passed over Putney Heath. It is believed to have been the Procession Way of the 15thCentury which was used by the king and his court and was later the road taken by monarchs heading from London to Hampton Court. The A3 to the south, which now divides Putney Heath from Wimbledon Common, was constructed in the 1960s along a route in use from at least the early 19thCentury. L Collison Morley in Companion into Surrey: An historical and literary guide writes: “The Portsmouth Road, the road to the coast, is the one great road that runs through [Surrey], its direction being controlled by the gap in the chalk at Guildford. It leaves London at the Elephant and Castle, runs through Kennington, along Battersea Rise by Wandsworth to Putney, up Putney Hill to the Green Man, which is still there to refresh us, and on to Putney Heath, the first of the real Surrey heaths. This was a great place for duels – [William] Pitt [the Younger] with George Tierney and [Viscount] Castlereagh with [George] Canning, for instance-and also for highwaymen, of whom Jerry Abershawe was perhaps the most noted. He ended his days on Kennington Common, kicking off his shoes on the gallows to falsify his mother’s prophecy that he would die in them, at the age of twenty-two; but his body was hung in Putney Bottom, where it would be quite at home. From Putney Heath, where the Telegraph Arms marked one of the old semaphore stations, the road runs past Richmond Park and up Norbiton Hill to Kingston, where we shall rejoin it. Not till 1784, when mail coaches started, did the Portsmouth Road begin to emerge from the stage when the journey to Portsmouth took 14 hours, if the roads were good. At the end of the seventeenth century, ‘Ye Portsmouth Machine sets out from ye Elephant and Castell, and arrives presently, by ye Grace of God’, no time being specified. In the palmy days of coaches, in the 1820’s, the Rocket left the White Bear, Piccadilly, at 9, reaching Portsmouth at 5.30, the fastest time of any.”
