Place Name
Named after the Barker family, former market gardeners who developed a large swathe of the area in the mid-1920s. Charles Barker lived at Vine Road from before 1845 when he ran a successful market garden including orchards and some live stock – in 1864 he was charged with allowing his geese onto Barnes Common (a practise that had been banned by the dean and chapter of St Paul’s Cathedral from 1566). The family were originally from Guildford, in Surrey. Alexander and Walter Barker became tenants of farmland in Barnes in 1882 and continued to farm the local land for many years. Just a few years before development of these streets they were still employing up to 140 women to harvest, scrub and pack radishes from one of their fields.
