Place Name
Daniel Ponton (died 1777) was an influential merchant of Lambeth and Battersea, whose interests included starch manufacturing and a tidal mill close to this street, which he was recorded as owning from around 1760. From around the 1730s he began to acquire a large landholding south of Nine Elms Lane adding to land that his predecessors had already bought or leased from the lord of the manor, which was the Archbishop of Canterbury. Daniels’s son Thomas Ponton (1749 – 1821), a barrister of Lincoln’s Inn, took over his father’s interests and began to develop the area with an up and coming architect John Nash. By 1839, Daniel’s grandson also called Thomas Ponton was recorded as being the second largest landowner around Battersea with 100 acres of prime building land – although by around 1863 much had been sold to the London & Southampton Railway company, whose original London terminus was at Nine Elms. This decision meant the Ponton Estate, as it was known, was virtually cut off from the rest of Battersea by railways, as well as other infrastructure projects such as gas and water works. The estate became a classic slum by virtue of its isolation. By 1890 it was notably poor, full of gas stokers, costermongers and labourers, many of them Irish. Nash’s houses were later demolished.
